2013-05-23T13:23:47-04:00 Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=greg-jenner Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Greg Jenner Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2415735 2013-01-06T19:00:00-05:00 2013-03-08T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
Michael Gove, the education secretary, has thought long and hard about this, and he has come up with a radical solution - time travel! Yes, if it's good enough for Dr Who, then why can't the government drag us all back to the halcyon days of yesteryear?

For Gove, at least according to a leaked report, it seems the answers to historical erudition lie in the traditional values of the 19th century, when men were men and women were corseted waifs struggling to breathe. The education secretary, who has apparently enlisted the help of the eminent professor Simon Schama for advice, seems to yearn for the glory days of empire, when history was taught not just to understand the past, but to mould the colonial administrators of the future.

Back then, a child's history curriculum was a conveyer belt of greatness - famous kings, heroic deeds, victorious battles, landmark events. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, as Americans will point out. Indeed, viewers of Horrible Histories will know that we have our fair share of sketches about 'important' stuff, like the Industrial Revolution or Magna Carta. Furthermore, I also equally welcome more emphasis on historical linear narrative in teaching. I know many well-educated adults who would blink in terror if I asked them to place the Vikings on a timeline of world history, and it would be no bad thing for their kids to be able to correct them when they finally shrug their shoulders and guess that it's in the middle of the 14th century.

However, my concern is with the elevation of a white-washed, patrician, whiggish history of Progress with a capital P. Symbolic of this revolution in nationalised education is Gove's intention to not include Mary Seacole, the celebrated Jamaican who won acclaim in the Crimean War, in favour of Tory poster-boys like Lord Nelson and Winston Churchill. This worries, and confuses, me in equal measure.

Seacole's relatively recent rise to public notoriety has been crudely mocked by some right-wingers as political correctness at work in the classroom, and their case is bolstered by an unfortunate mythologizing of her scant medical accomplishments. Yet, here was a strong and independent woman of mixed-race, proud of her Scottish father, who spent years tending to the needs of the British regiments stationed in the West Indies. Furthermore, when Seacole heard of the suffering in the Crimea, she volunteered to travel thousands of miles to cater to those same troops she had formerly known. Having been denied the opportunity to nurse by government recruiters, and once more by a public charity, she then resolved to make the journey with her own capital. She sold up in Jamaica, went into business with a family friend, and built a wooden shack only a couple of miles from the blood-stained battlefield, from which she ran a canteen, supply store and improvised rehabilitation centre for unwell troops.

Here at her optimistically-titled British Hotel, she won the support and admiration of the soldiers, the locals, the top brass and William Russell, the world's first war correspondent, who wrote about her in gushing prose. Her aim was to provide comfort and care to the officers and men, and she would sometimes assist the injured on the battlefield itself, though she was not a trained nurse like the pioneering Florence Nightingale. When the war ended unexpectedly, Mary was left bankrupt - having naively invested in expensive stock - and took months to return to London, penniless. Yet, was she forgotten and neglected? Not in the least. An enormous benefit was thrown in her honour, attended by the highest echelons of royalty, and her memoirs went on to sell like hot cakes. She died in comfort, as a warmly-welcomed member of Britain's far-flung empire.

So, as well as being clearly not being a 'token black' for the political correctness brigade, I'd like to ask another question - at what point was Mary Seacole NOT an astonishingly courageous and compassionate exemplar of the Big Society? If this Coalition government really is trying to instil more civic pride and individual responsibility in the public, then there are few more compelling icons of altruistic endeavour than a woman who traipsed half-way around the world to support those fighting in her name. Was she a saint? Not at all, and she herself struggled at times to deflect racial taunts by trying to distance herself from those with darker skin, so she might better fit in. Her achievements as a medical practitioner have also been unjustifiably overstated; but her contribution to the Crimean campaign, and British history, were celebrated in her own lifetime by those who witnessed her in action, and should not be ignored in favour of the more traditional military feats of Lord Nelson.

Not every child can grow up to be a talismanic military commander, valiantly defending Britain's independence from a foreign invasion fleet; but informing kids that there were women - women of colour, no less - who were valued for their efforts and compassion is perhaps a more nurturing and progressive way to teach history to the majority of children, many of whom are increasingly of varied ethnic heritage, and half of whom are female. It is for these reasons that I also lament the proposed non-inclusion of Olaudah Equiano, the black slave who became a tireless campaigner for abolition. Our nation's history was not solely made by white people. Contrary to popular belief, there were blacks in Tudor England and Scotland, and by the 18th century they numbered more than 40,000. Many, such as Equiano, served bravely in the Royal Navy - home of Gove's preferred champion, Lord Nelson - and to forget their contribution would be a travesty of factual accuracy, as well as depriving generations of Black children of crucial positive role models from history. Social mobility, and multi-cultural inclusivity, begins with education - it would be dangerous to skew history in schools towards a legacy of uniform whiteness.

The Olympics may have revealed that modern Britain is a multi-cultural success story, but historians have long since said the same thing about our past. Michael Gove has my support if he wants to instil more narrative structure in historical education, but I'll fight him tooth and nail if he thinks neglecting to include black icons is anything other than a terrible idea.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2302898 2012-12-20T19:00:00-05:00 2013-02-19T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/ Parts One and Two, and you're back for more, then you're clearly very strange. If you haven't read them, now might be a good time to do so. Or not. It doesn't really make much of a difference.

So, in this blog post let's ignore the 'why' of Christmas, and let's look at the 'how'. Customs have changed a great deal over the centuries, and while some may seem familiar, some will sound plain bonkers. As ever, the further back in history we go, the more doubtful our evidence is. We've already mentioned in Part One the Viking tradition of gutting a live animal and flinging its blood over the guests sat around the meal table, so that's a pretty weird place to start. The Saxons, it seems, were slightly less inclined to spray each other with guts, though they did enjoy a juicy dead animal for Christmas, most commonly a roasted boar.

Our sources on medieval feasting are often filled with rambunctious anecdotes of epic meals and world class standards of boozing, though the food itself was not quite as unusual as the behaviour away from the table. Wassailing - the practise of door-to-door singing - was a Saxon concept linked to an old form of feudalism. The wealthy lords of the manor were expected to reward their gathered peasants with gifts at Christmas; rather than a tin of Quality Streets, this often took the form of animal manure. Strangely, your boss handing you a steaming pile of shit was a good thing, as manure was a handy thing to have around the house back then, mostly because your walls were made of it - the modern equivalent would be getting a tub of Polyfilla in the office Secret Santa pool.

In any case, wassailing was pretty rowdy, and in the Middle Ages it was associated with carolling, which was actually a form of circular dance. This got so raucous that carols (as they were known) were banned from churches, so you instead went carolling door to door. If carol singers turn up on porch this Christmas, give them a turd and tell them it's tradition...

Today, we think of Christmas as a festival for kids. However, medieval Christmas was a mixed bag for children; on the one hand you had a chance of being elected a 'boy bishop' in your local cathedral, briefly handing you the power to boss around the local priests and dispense sweets to the other kids in your area (also, if you died while 'in office', then you were buried with full episcopal honours - Result!) That said, this was a pretty rare opportunity for boys only, whereas all children had to endure the horrors of Childermass on 28 December, when they were soundly beaten to remind them of King Herod executing all the first born kids. Social services were presumably rushed off their feet on that particular day...

Children aside, Christmas was usually more auspicious for monarchs, though William the Conqueror got his slightly wrong in 1066. Electing to hold his coronation at Westminster Abbey on December 25th, his knights were perplexed by the unintelligible cheers of the local English, and decided to interpret them as evidence of riotous mutiny. William's lovely festive shindig ended with the church catching fire, and the occupants of London being stabbed in the streets by vicious knights - so, not quite "good will to all men".

Thankfully, King Henry II knew how to put the cheer back into Crimbo. He famously hired a jester to perform just once a year, on Christmas Day, and the famous act for which this jester was amply rewarded with huge tracts of land was nothing more than "one jump, one whistle, and one fart". It fills my heart with unbridled joy that the Latin word for a fart is "bumbulum." Just say it out loud to yourself a few times, I promise you'll smile...

The Tudors were also big fans of Christmas, and really pushed the boat out with the dinner options. After a month of fasting through December, the 12 days of Christmas were pretty debauched. While out of the reach of most, turkeys were recent discoveries from the New World, and Henry VIII was the first Englishman to eat one for Christmas, though it would have been part of a much larger feast involving all sorts of other animals. Later on, the famous Christmas Pie was invented, featuring turkey stuffed with goose, stuffed with chicken, stuffed with pigeon, stuffed with partridge - basically a Russian doll of dead birds, served in a crust.

Alternatively, one could have Umbles Pie, which consisted of deer lungs, spleen, heart, guts, liver and kidneys. As you've probably guessed, even Christmas pudding involved a liberal splattering of meat, blended with spices, which was cooked inside pig intestines to ensure it kept its shape... and that was the vegetarian option!

Tudor Christmas banquets often involved the Lord of Misrule, whose job it was to spread cheerful chaos, and invert the social order of the day. Dressing up, theatrical plays and pretending to ride wooden horses seems to have been part of the fun, and even Henry VIII enjoyed pretending to be King Arthur, though he was less than pleased when his fifth wife went all method actor, and allegedly 'did a Guinevere' with some other bloke - understandably, the axe was swiftly deployed on young Catherine Howard.

Like the Romans and Vikings, gifts were also exchanged, though this time on New Year's Day. During her reign, Elizabeth I received silk stockings and Europe's first wristwatch for Christmas - decent pressies, I think you'll agree - but it was customary for monarchs to give something more expensive back in return; a bit like when you give your dad socks, and he gets you an Xbox. That said, both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I occasionally refused to accept a gift if someone had pissed them off; so, for Henry that might be because he was bored of having sex with them, and for Elizabeth it was usually because she was furious that they were shagging someone else instead of her...

In the 17th Century, the Christmas Mince Pies (yes, more meat...) were famous for having a little baby Jesus on the crust, which sounds rather nice, but was a horrifying act of blasphemous cannibalism in the eyes of Oliver Cromwell. It should be said, Olly was not a miserabilist most of the time, but he did feel Christmas was meant to be a period of holy reverence. Accordingly, he did away with it all, and even ordered the confiscation of Christmas dinners from people's tables. Strangely, attending church was also prohibited on Jesus' birthday, which seems a bit weird, even by his standards. Thankfully, Cromwell copped it in 1658, and Charles II was back in power by 1660. This opened the floodgates to more Christmas excess, and by the 18th Century one enterprising aristocrat had commissioned a mince pie weighing 75kg! Alas, his name was not Mr Kipling.

The Victorians took Christmas very seriously, thanks hugely to Charles Dickens' famous novel, and the middle classes rushed to embrace traditions old and new. Special Christmas magazines, cookery books, decorations, and foods were all available for the house-proud lady to chuck in the direction of her servants, while she drank tea and fainted a lot, as was the custom for women at this time. Children also became the central focus of the celebrations, with Christmas crackers invented in 1840 by Thomas Smith to ensure that even puny kids and meek ladies could beat the master of the house in a tug of war. The increasingly cosy relationship between father, mother and children was best encapsulated by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert setting the familial standard in a famous illustration from 1848, showing them gathered around the Christmas tree in a rare moment of royal informality.

Trees were a new thing to the British masses, but not elsewhere in Europe. It is said that Martin Luther, the German founder of Protestantism, first decorated a Christmas tree in the 1520s, and it was another German, Queen Charlotte, who first brought a tree to Britain to amuse her husband, King George III. No-one's quite sure why dragging a tree indoors seemed like a good idea - you wouldn't bung a hedge in your lounge, would you? - but some have suggested it was decorated to resemble the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, while others argue, as was the case with holly, ivy and mistletoe, that surrounding yourself with the natural world was an homage to pagan times of yore. Personally, I think it has a lot more to do with the Industrial Revolution making everyone feel rather cooped up in grey, urban sprawl, and longing for a bit of greenery, even if it was dead greenery, slowly rotting on your mantelpiece...

The other great invention of the Victorian age was the Christmas card, first designed in 1843 by Henry Cole. The concept actually originated as Valentine cards, which is why if you ever study them en masse (which I had to do for a year) you'll notice they're often covered in flowers and springtime imagery. This may have been because Christmas was a good time of year for a spot of wooing under the mistletoe, and the language of flowers, called floriography, was a useful secret messaging service between young lovers. Oddly, some Christmas cards were rather surreal - examples have been found of cards stapled with actual slices of bacon, or a dead dormouse. Some depicted children being attacked by giant wasps, or clowns attacking policemen. In any case, more than 11million were sent by 1880, and they helped unite the disparate members of far-flung families, wrenched apart by the huge sprawl of the British Empire.

Much like the Roman aristocracy - and as with Scrooge's conversion to altruistic niceness after years of being a total dick - Christmas Day was supposed to be a time of charity. Even the horrendously abused prisoners in the barbarous Victorian jails were served special Christmas lunches by their guards, while the wealthy squires of the countryside were expected to donate winter fuel to their villagers. More famously, on 26 December, money donated to church boxes was distributed to the poor, or to servicemen in the army and navy, and this may be the origins of Boxing Day.

However, before we get all sentimental and go and watch A Muppet Christmas Carol, it's worth remembering that the Victorian Christmas was an enormous commercial hype machine, motivated by capitalism and stretching out for weeks. Don't believe anyone who tells you our modern festival has lost its sacred values... nothing could be further from the truth. And if I hear one more idiotic thing about the supposed 'War on Christmas', I swear I'll scream.

So, there we have it. Merry Christmas! Now, go overindulge until you're sick. You have to... it's tradition.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2302854 2012-12-18T19:00:00-05:00 2013-02-17T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
So, let's embark upon our quest to discover the origins of Father Christmas, a man whose past is more mysterious than that of Kaiser Soze's from The Usual Suspects, though there's no evidence Santa would sooner kill Mrs Claus and all the Elves than be bullied by a drug kingpin. As you're probably realising, the roots of the modern bearded fella are often said to be a combination of two utterly distinct characters, one pagan and one Christian, but even this is more complex than it sounds.

Allegedly, way back in the Dark Ages, the Saxons once revered a chap named Old Father Time/King Frost/Winter King, and welcomed him as the bearded deity who visited at Yuletide (or 'Geol', in their language) with benevolent loveliness. However, the evidence for this is more dubious than a skyscraper made of biscuits - it all sounds a bit like 19th Century whimsy, a time when Britain was majorly crushing on Germany and its sexy Teutonic heritage. So, the Saxons aren't very reliable witnesses. Thankfully, instead we have Norse sources describing how the Viking god of wisdom, Odin, was said to wear a blue cloak, and travel around the world on his flying, eight-legged horse, delivering gifts of bread to those in need. These are great stories, and plausible origins for the whole Santa and the flying reindeer shebang, but once again, these come from a later period in medieval history, so take them with a truckload of salt.

Meanwhile, the Christian Church had acquired the miraculous services of St Nicholas of Myra, a charming 4th Century bishop from modern Turkey. St Nick was said to secretly give gifts of cash to those in need, thereby making him the Patron Saint of children, sailors and prostitutes... which is a slightly worrying combination that would no doubt have caused a lot of finger-pointing in the ancient offices of BBC Newsnight.

Over time, St Nick became venerated throughout Europe, and was increasingly popular in Germany and the Netherlands, where he was dubbed Sinterklaas. Here, he was known to kindly reward the well-behaved, and brutally thwack naughty children with a birch rod, which today would probably get him on the sex offenders register, and make him the subject of an ITV documentary (while the BBC would instead broadcast a glowing tribute to his charity work...) In any case, when the Dutch emigrated to America, Sinter Klaas went with them...

Back in Blighty, however, the Pagan chap allegedly called Old Father Time/King Frost had gradually become 'Sir Christmas' by the Middle Ages; and briefly during the Tudor era he was the fabulously-monikered 'Captain Christmas' (this surely needs to be a Hollywood movie), charged with ensuring the fun and frolics at posh feasts for the wealthy. In the 17th Century, he grew in popularity and descriptions of his character appeared in poems and plays, always with a long white beard and a fur-lined hood, so it seems the Odin thing might not be entirely bollocks.

Ironically, one person who wasn't a fan of Captain Christmas was Oliver Cromwell, whose attempts to stymie the Christmas festivities during the interregnum only served to make people want it more. As soon as Charles II was back in the hot seat, the ever-reliable 'Old Christmas' - clearly the Captain had retired from active service in the myth military - was back to reassure people that some traditions were here to stay. True to form, for the next 150 years, he mostly made hilarious cameos in pantomimes, like a bearded Christopher Biggins, though without the homoerotic innuendo.

However, by the 19th Century the Dutch 'Sinterklass' had evolved in America into 'Santa Claus', and the classic poem 'A Visit From St Nicholas' by Clement Clarke Moore pushed him profoundly to the centre of popular imagination.

Instead of being the bawdy sponsor of drunken piss-ups like Old Father Christmas, the American Santa Claus was derived much more closely from the Christian tradition of charity.

However, as Britain went through its own religious reawakening in the 19th Century, propelled by the rise of Methodism, Quakerism and Irish immigration, our own Father Christmas also began to morph into a much more moralising force; he was no longer a fool for adult entertainment, but a divinely-endorsed instructor for children - how else was there to convince children that good deeds are rewarded in Heaven, than by physically rewarding good behaviour on Earth?

Accordingly, by the 20th Century, Father Christmas began turning up in department stores, schools, and public gatherings, promoting a Christian system of virtuous reward. He also became the public face of Coca Cola, with his traditional cloak of varying colours (including red) now being fixed as red through the unstoppable power of capitalism.

However, despite his rehabilitation into Christian usefulness, he still was liable to accusations of paganism. In 1951, a young priest in Dijon, France decided to burn an effigy of Le Pere Noel in front of 2,000 children, claiming he was doing God's work. In brilliantly French style, locals responded by hoisting a man in a Santa suit onto the roof of the cathedral to taunt the priest, while a second Santa mounted a scooter and veered around the town square, harassing anyone who agreed with the priest. It's this brilliantly unnecessary extremism from both sides that makes me proud to be half-French.

So, in a nutshell, that's a broad sweep of some of the confusion. Stay tuned for Part Three, when I'll be waffling on about the weird and wonderful ways British people chose to celebrate Christmas over the centuries. And yes, before you ask, there will be a farting jester...]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2302751 2012-12-16T19:00:00-05:00 2013-02-15T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/ Shrek 2 for the hundredth time, while you binge on leftover turkey sandwiches.

All things considered, the modern Christmas is pretty bizarre. However, this is entirely in keeping with tradition - as far as we can tell, Yuletide has always been a curious head-scratcher. For the historian like me, teasing out what Christmas used to be like, and why it even exists, is a blooming nightmare. So much has been written, and so little of it is supported by evidence, that you end up with a jumbled mash of wishy-washy blather. So, this blog will attempt (and inevitably fail) to point out what we know, and what we don't know, about the earliest origins of Christmas. It will then demean the whole thing with some poorly-executed jokes.

Right, then. Let's start with some easy ones first - the obvious clangers you'll have probably encountered at school nativity plays. According to the Bible...

i) Jesus was NOT born in a stable; it was more likely a family friend's guest room, though some have suggested a cave was possible. It definitely wasn't a Travelodge.
ii) Mary and Joseph did NOT travel on a donkey.
iii) There's NO suggestion Mary gave birth immediately after arriving in Bethlehem.
iv) There was NO innkeeper.
v) There were NO Three Kings of the orient. The 'Magi', or wise men, are mentioned in the plural but we don't know how many there were.
vi) There were NO animals present at the birth (see i) - this was a charming medieval invention by St Francis of Assisi.
vii) The wise men arrive to see NOT a "baby" but a "child" - so it may have taken them more than a year to come say hi.
viii) The Baby Jesus may have cried, he may not have cried. We don't know.
ix) Jesus' birthday is NOT mentioned, but it's unlikely to be 25th December, seeing as the shepherds are in the fields with their flock. Many scholars argue for September, some others for March.
x) Oddly, Jesus was likely born BEFORE 4BC (when King Herod the Great died)... or in 6AD, when there is evidence of a Roman census, and Herod's son, also called Herod, was ruling. Either way, this makes something of a mockery of the concept of BC.

So, if it's not in the Bible, why do we hold Christmas celebrations on December 25th? These days, you're likely to hear a lot of authoritative-sounding rhetoric arguing that December 25th was the winter solstice in the old Julian calendar, and that consequently this witnessed the Roman festival celebrating the sun god, Sol Invictus. This much is true. However, before you start thinking the Christian Church cynically replaced a god's' birthday with Jesus' birthday, we have a hurdle to clamber over. While Easter and Halloween do appear to have been deliberately plonked on top of pre-existing pagan holy days, this Roman festival was only established in 274 AD, many years after a Christian theologian, Hippolytus of Rome, had already claimed Jesus was born on December 25th.

Hippolytus was following a commonly-established Jewish tradition for prophets, who seem to have possessed a divinely-installed self-destruct button that ensured they handily dropped down dead on their birthday, or on the anniversary of their conception. Frankly, I wish my expensive Sennheiser headphones were Jewish, as they have literally just crapped out a week after their warranty expired... but I digress. Seeing as Jesus was crucified on 25 March, that must also have been the date of his immaculate conception - so, a nine month gestation would have seen him pop out on... yes, you guessed it, December 25th. So, even though it's factually wrong, there's a theological logic, of sorts, at work here.

However, while the dating of the Nativity is probably nothing to do with Sol Invictus, the customs of Christmas seem irrefutably influenced by another Roman festival, Saturnalia. The god Saturn was a pretty big deal to the Romans, and, despite initially beginning with only one day to his name, by the 1st Century AD he had managed to wangle himself a week-long celebration in his honour, lasting from 17 December until (possibly) the 25th. Saturnalia was famous for copious feasting, excessive boozing, light-hearted pranks, big gatherings of family and friends, and the exchange of gifts. These pressies could be lavish, like a particularly buxom slave girl, or they could be intentionally crap. As a joke, the poet Catullus received a compendium of shit poetry from his mate Gaius Licinius Calvus - the ancient equivalent of buying someone a Jeremy Clarkson book.

Saturnalia also witnessed the collapse of traditional social order, with slaves and the poor suddenly elevated to befit the company of their masters. These unfree chattel might swap clothes with their owners, drink their wine, and share their food (though they'd still have to cook it, first!) Meanwhile, the wealthy were expected to offer financial support to the poor, and abandon all work-related business, in a Scrooge-like abandonment of their normal values.

It's pretty obvious that much of what we think of as a Christmas custom was already being practised two thousand years ago, before the Church had even established itself as a dominant force in Roman society. How cultural elements of Saturnalia might have snuck into the Christian celebration is unsure - it's worth noting that for much of the 4th Century AD, Christians and Pagans lived next door to each other in a bustling, multicultural city; they probably shared in each other's lives much more than we imagine. As history makes so abundantly clear, Christianity's lone God soon-after vanquished Rome's over-stuffed pantheon of of deities, and the first official Roman Christmas was recorded in 354 AD. Yet, in 449AD a Christian calendar writer called Polemius Silvus was still including Saturnalia in his writings, noticing it was formerly associated with Saturn, but this was no longer the case. Does this imply the festival had evolved into a secular knees up, held alongside Christmas? It's hard to know what to believe, but the bad news is that as we enter the Middle Ages, things get murkier than a swimming pool filled with gravy...

While Christians were happily establishing their new calendar, based on complex calculations and a lot of date fudging, meanwhile another sort of Paganism was still cheerfully bumbling along in Northern Europe. The Saxons appear to have referred to the end of the year, spanning November to January, as 'Giuli'. On the day of the winter solstice - December 25th - it appears they held a feast called 'Modranecht', or 'Geol', which venerated Mother Nature's fertility. That said, our evidence for this comes from the Venerable Bede, who was a Christian monk writing in a time when Paganism was already more unpopular than an album of Megadeath songs covered by Cliff Richard. So, can we really trust him? Dunno.

Similarly, our knowledge of Viking custom is more detailed, but equally problematic. Sources, such as the Saga of Haakon the Good, reveal that a 'Jul' (Yule) feast on the solstice involved the sacrifice of animals, and the sprinkling of warm animal blood on all the guests' faces - frankly, I'd much rather see that in a John Lewis Christmas advert instead of a sentimental Snowman going shopping . While we're on the subject of pressies, other Norse writings suggest that the Vikings were also into gift-giving at 'Jultid' (Yuletide), though these poems were written a couple of hundred years after Paganism died out, so they might be as historically accurate as Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' portrayal of Henry VIII in The Tudors.

So, to sum up, then. Christmas is a Christian festival, held coincidentally on the same day as a Roman pagan one, and - seemingly sporting ancient Roman customs from a separate pagan festival - it takes place during another Germanically-inflected festival called Yuletide. All of these myriad influences seem to have jumbled together in the Middle Ages, and gradually evolved into what we now think of as Christmas. You can read about the weird British Xmas customs of the past in Part 3 of this blog; but first - if your head doesn't hurt already - why not check out Part II, where I'll be trying to untangle the relationship between Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Odin and Jesus. Oh, and some amazing dude called Captain Christmas, who sounds awesome!]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2206959 2012-11-28T19:00:00-05:00 2013-01-28T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
But let's be sensible for a second; is access to booze a human right? One town in Australia, Halls Creek, tried in 2009 to claim as much when the State government banned the sale of full strength alcohol. A legal professor was quick to point out they had very little chance of winning that class action lawsuit, disappointingly failing to mention that getting the judge hammered on pina coladas was probably their only hope. Can a government legitimately prohibit the sale of certain drugs like that? Well, yes - of course they can. When was the last time you successfully bought heroin over the counter? If you're younger than 100, that's meant to be a rhetorical question - please don't feel the need to respond in the comments section. If you are older than 100, well done you on making it this far!

As we all know, some drugs are legal, some are regulated, and some are completely illegal. The specific decisions are made by governments based on history, scientific evidence, and moral considerations. There is no denying that, if it were invented today, alcohol would be bunged on the naughty list. A study published in 2010 by the UK Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, co-authored by Professor David Nutt, revealed that alcohol is more damaging to society than any other drug, including heroin, crack cocaine and crystal meth. (You can read the abstract for the paper here. However, alcohol is so ancient, and so entrenched in human history, that its place in our lives is almost unchallengeable.

Humans have been getting pissed for thousands of years, probably at least since the last Ice Age (the era, not the movie with the hilarious sabre-toothed squirrel creature). The accidental fermentation of berries and natural sugars no doubt delighted our cave-dwelling ancestors as much as it delights modern animals, who have been recorded getting plastered off rotting fruit, then wobbling sideways into hedges. Humans began deliberately brewing beer millennia before they invented the wheel - meaning they were falling off the wagon long before they even knew what a wagon was - and there is strong evidence to suggest it was used as a staple food in the absence of bread, which sounds a bit stupid until you realise one ounce of pure ethanol contains 274 calories.

Booze is even in the Bible - the first thing Noah does after the Great Flood is plant a vineyard, drink the wine, and then get his todger out in a drunken stupor, only to be discovered sleeping naked by his son. It's reassuring to know that even God's chosen zoo curator would probably have plonked a traffic cone on his head and run naked down the high street, if he'd had the opportunity to join a university rugby club. As it is, it sounds like he just stumbled naked around his tent, while God rolled his eyes in despair.

While Noah is the first viticulturist in the Bible, it was the god Osiris who had the honours in Egyptian mythology. This is unsurprising; beer and wine had religious connotations in much of the ancient world. It was mind-altering, a relaxant, and seemed to heighten the spiritual potency of communing with the gods. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans all saw alcohol as both nutritional beverage, and powerful symbol of religious ritual. It seems hardly a coincidence that the blood of Christ is symbolised through wine, presumably because Ribena was yet to be invented.

Similarly, the Ancient Chinese believed alcohol produced a meditative state, and that moderate consumption was mandated from Heaven. That said, there were 41 different attempts to outlaw wine-making in China between 1100 BC and 1400 AD, and every single one was repealed. In a splendidly far-seeing bit of analysis, an official wrote in 650 BC that: "People will not do without beer. To prohibit it and secure total abstinence from it is beyond the power even of sages. Hence, therefore, we have warnings on the abuse of it." We'll come to the most famous example of Prohibition shortly...

In the Middle Ages, beer and honey mead was often safer to drink than water, and was even brewed by monasteries for general consumption. The Vikings and Saxons were particularly fond of their drinking, and gathered en masse in Mead Halls for epic lock-ins that would make George Best look like a tea-drinking pansy. Some archaeologists believe Viking drinking horns were deliberately curved so you couldn't put them down - you always had a drink in your hand, or you downed it in one. It's no surprise that Viking Valhalla (Heaven for those killed in battle) was basically just a massive Mead Hall made of golden spears and shields, with a never-ending vat of booze from which to drink. So, a bit like a Wetherspoons decorated by Donald Trump, then.

Perhaps the most famous alcoholic era in history was the Gin Craze of the early 18th Century, which afflicted London in particular. Here, due to the low cost of its production, gin was represented in the contemporary media as an inescapable evil of epidemic proportions. William Hogarth, the great artist, started churning out powerful images of drunken women feeding their babies gin, or dropping kids on their head because they were too sozzled to notice. The Gin Craze was a major problem for about four decades, and it's believed Londoners were drinking more than a pint a week each of the stuff, but much of the moral outrage came at the foreign origins of gin - it seems the authorities were less worried about alcohol abuse, and more about the patriotic concerns of British people drinking a French tipple!

Emerging blearily from the hedonistic excesses of the 18th Century, the Victorian era instead witnessed a powerful campaign by religious progressives towards temperance. The new religions of Quakerism, Methodism and such others placed much more stock in promoting moral causes, and great patriarchs of the industrial revolution, like Sir Titus Salt, took it upon themselves to build new towns for their workers that did away with pubs in favour of schools and libraries. Ironically, there is now a pub in Saltaire (founded by Sir Titus) named in his honour, just as there is a pub in Soho named after the famous Cholera-detective, John Snow, who was also a tee-totaller. Temperance never quite gained enough traction in Britain, where boozing levels were equally high as they are today, but across the pond the American government was more than happy to ignore the lessons of history.

The 13-year Prohibition policy, enacted by the US government between 1920-33, was done so with the best of intentions, but as any ancient Chinese official will tell you, total prohibition doesn't work. Americans reacted to this emphatic curbing of their drinking rights by getting smashed on dangerous homemade methyl alcohol instead - the kind that can make you blind, paralysed or dead. Those that didn't have strokes, or keel over into ditches, lurched around with debilitating hangovers, showed up late for work, and smashed their cars into stationary objects. What the government had not foreseen was that people like to drink, no matter whether it's legal or not.

Perhaps it's a cultural thing specific to alcohol's place in history, or maybe booze is just the easiest mood-altering drug out there, but Americans simply refused to be denied their fix. Ironically, this had enormous repercussions for society, far greater than the pre-existing problems that Prohibition was meant to eradicate. With hangovers that could literally kill a man, the ordinary citizenry were suddenly a lot less useful to the American economy, and worse than that, they were essentially crowd-funding an enormous criminal syndicate which had become rich by mass-producing the dangerous 'gut-rot', or by smuggling traditional alcohol in high-powered cars (which was the origins of stock car racing). Massive investment in police resources failed to stem the tide, and in the end the only sensible decision was to reverse the policy entirely, leaving speakeasies to become ironic bars for future hipsters, and stock car racing to become the literal definition of drinking and driving.

So, Prohibition doesn't work for practical reasons, and scientific research shows widespread alcohol consumption is far deadlier than many of us like to imagine. There are strong philosophical reasons to allow people to continue drinking, most famously the notion of J.S. Mill's famous 'Harm Principle' which says we should be allowed to do what we like to our own bodies provided it doesn't harm anyone else. But, with a centralised healthcare system currently on its knees due to the spiralling cost of treating chronic illnesses, the Harm Principle starts to look a little less clean-cut as an argument.

Long-term alcohol consumption increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, cancer, organ failure, and obesity. These things affect the individual, of course, but they also have knock-on effects for the rest of society, which has to shoulder the financial burden. Hospital admissions in England, related to alcohol, have rocketed 40% in a decade to 1.2million per year, despite overall trends of alcohol consumption declining in all demographics. The cost to the NHS is already a few billion quid, and that is money that could be spent elsewhere. There is also a secondary argument that excessive alcohol consumption exacerbates crime to the sum tune of £21billion per year to the taxpayer. To be clear, I'm not saying us being out of pocket is the problem, per se, because that is not a legitimate defence against the Harm Principle. Instead, we should consider the strain on resources in hospitals and police stations that places other citizens at increased risk of harm, because doctors, nurses and police officers are over-worked with the alcohol-related backlog, thereby reducing the quality and standards of what they can offer to others in need of help.

We thirsty few currently spend £42billion on booze in England and Wales, and a study by the NHS has revealed that the affordability of alcohol is still at an exceptionally high level, showing only a small dip since the historical peak of 2007, just before we discovered that a credit crunch wasn't a type of biscuit.

In reaction to this over-abundance of supermarket multi-deals, the Coalition government has announced its intention to introduce a minimum price of 45p per unit of alcohol in England. This is lower than the 50p tariff recommended by medical campaigners, but it will bung an extra £3 on a bottle of vodka, and another quid on a cheap bottle of plonk, so it may have some small but useful impact. Those who argue this is punitive to the lower income populous don't have much of a case - no-one is denying access to alcohol, it is just making it that little bit less tempting to overindulge. As we have established already, booze isn't a human right, just as Lamborghinis aren't a human right (thank goodness, as both are probably equally deadly) - things have a market value, and artificially aggressive supermarket competition has pushed alcohol's price down a little too much.

However, whether this minimum price policy will work is entirely unknown. Prohibition should have worked in theory, yet was the biggest failure in recent history (until that crap John Carter movie...) The statistical modelling that predicts how many lives will be saved (around 700), how many fewer hospital admissions there will be (nearly 25,000) and how many crimes won't subsequently be committed (around 5,000) is being questioned by some who think it's a bit optimistic. As Nate Silver proved in the recent US election, stats are iron-clad if you get the right data, but this alcohol policy is something of an experiment and the predictions may, in truth, be way off. Worryingly, I even heard a bloke on Radio 1 suggesting he was going to brew his own hooch to avoid the price rise, so there may be a small increase in black-market smuggling and DIY moonshine production. However, this policy is hardly draconian, and it seems a fair attempt to gently reduce the over-consumption of alcohol amongst a broad swathe of society. You can't really legislate for the determined boozers who will always find a way to pickle themselves.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out I am a tee-totaller, but mostly for boring reasons - I have no intention of ruining the fun for everyone else, and am often very happy in a pub with my outrageously expensive lemonade, giggling as everyone else starts to slur into their pint. Booze will always be part of our culture, and I'm totally fine with that, but I also want to live in a society where going a bit wild on a night out is the enjoyable exception, not the rule. Drink! Be merry! But if you're puking on your shoes more than five times per year, that's your body probably saying it's time to slow down a tad.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2086915 2012-11-07T03:43:31-05:00 2013-01-06T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
Having recently spent a shedload of cash on lawyers, the BBC lacked the same budget, but their long-suffering CGI wrangler, Jeremy Vine, nevertheless found himself being menaced by a huge floating pie chart, while standing in what appeared to be the gladiatorial backdrop to Mortal Kombat. One gets the feeling Vine spends his days in the Tron mainframe, desperately trying to do his radio show while batting off an army of digital gladiators. Meanwhile, ITV's Romilly Weeks revealed herself to possess astoundingly vertiginous cheekbones, the kind you might like to ski down if you were a middle class beetle, and Sky News elected to broadcast from a clearly chilly Chicago, where the ghost of every spoken syllable lingered coolly in the air around mouths and noses.

As a chronic insomniac used to staying up for days at a time, my fatigue levels are normally unproblematic, but frankly I feel like I've spent the past bajillion years watching Obama and Romney slug it out in an interminably overblown grudge match. Why did I sit through it all? I'm not entirely sure - sometimes it's quite tempting to imagine yourself watching a Manichean duel to the death between celestial opposites; a struggle between good and evil for control of the universe, with you as the gift-wrapped trophy, tied to a stake, waiting to see who will possess your soul. In this case, the rhetoric from both sides alluded to pretty much that. If you believed the extremists, Mitt Romney was out to destroy women, and Barack Obama was the Muslim lovechild of Stalin and Hitler - if only they could have run a small B&B together, it's got all the hallmarks of a brilliant sitcom...

Of course, this is inherently ridiculous. But, then again, so was an electoral season that cost $6 billion in total, (actually a mere $2.5 billion for the Presidential race) and allowed anonymous Super PAC investors to launch their own proxy wars with billboards and TV adverts, promoting the candidate they wanted to win. Indeed, per capita, the average American voter had 23 times as much money spent on them as in the UK, where total election costs barely scrape over £30 million - that's not even enough to buy a headless Fernando Torres, which ironically is exactly what Chelsea managed to do.

In American politics, more so than ever, the size of your friends' wallets determines how much of an influence you can have over voters. If you want to be the Leader of the Free World, nothing comes for free. This is effectively hawking democracy to the highest bidder, which is pretty cynical, but it also allows a rather curious thing to happen - non-American corporations and donors can also help shape the outcome of an election because, under the current rules, the money doesn't have to come from within the 50 states. Indeed, of the top 50 foreign PACs who chucked money at their preferred candidate, 14 were based in the UK.

So, this Presidential result was in small part funded by non-Americans who used their financial clout to push their agenda upon the American people. But before you Mitt Romney fans burn down the headquarters of GlaxoSmithKline in outrage, let me ask a redundant, but nevertheless intriguing, question - is outside influence on American elections something to be encouraged?

After all, if the President really is the leader of the free WORLD, then surely we, the world, are owed some sort of say? American rhetoric has often flaunted its position as a global police force, but that in itself implies an implicit understanding of consent by the World to being policed. Victory for President Obama does not just simply shape the future of US domestic policy, but will also affect the precariously-balanced Middle-East and the gravity of silent aggression from Putin's Russia. So - yes, I'm tired, but go with me on this - what would the result have been if a theoretical 51st state, populated solely by emissaries from the 190-odd countries of the world, had been allowed to vote?

In a poll released last week by YouGov, 91% of Brits would have cast their vote for Barack Obama, and indeed the majority of the world would have opted for Obama if they'd had the chance. This may seem pretty emphatic... and actually it really is - but a Gallup poll of global leadership, drawn from 130 sample countries, only polled a 49% approval rating for the USA - the world may admire the man, but they demand a lot better from the nation. Perhaps if we'd had our own satellite state, floating just off the coast of Florida, we might have been able to explain why we're not that impressed? (That said, it's also probably we might have bunked off and gone to Disneyworld instead... we hypothetical members of the 51st state are fickle children at heart.)

In fairness, this 49% approval rating was an impressive 15% higher than it had been under President George W Bush, but it had stalled since 2010. Obama may have rehabilitated the USA's image overseas, but as comebacks go it was hardly the national equivalent of Robert Downey Jnr metamorphosing from incarcerated drug addict to heroic leading man. Indeed, the world currently looks at America the same way America is currently looking at Kristen Stewart - they sort of liked her in that thing she did with the vampires and whatnot, but they also think she's a tool for cheating on RPatz. Of course, there was one country in particular which would have voted for Romney if given the chance - Pakistan.

It's easy to be stupid and facetious about these sorts of things... so I will! In 1776, America was founded as a republic upon the popular mantra 'no taxation without representation.' Well, Pakistan might have argued 'no predator drone strikes without representation'. I am, of course, wearing my ill-fitting satirist's hat here, but it's genuinely vital to consider the impact that this American election will have upon lives around the globe. In 2008, President Obama was given a mandate by his people to defend their interests; via legal loopholes, he interpreted that as launching missiles into built-up areas whenever he saw fit. The Pakistani government had almost no choice in the matter, yet oddly these were not considered acts of war. Pakistan was a sovereign punch-bag unable to do anything except clear away the rubble and bury the dead.

Fighting terrorism is a worthy goal, and one day Obama's policy may prove wise in retrospect, but here is a clear example of how the American electorate affect global politics with their choices - Obama will likely continue his targeted-killing of terrorists for another 4 years. Ironically, the third Presidential debate revealed Romney to also be a card-carrying members of the drone club, so Pakistan probably should have been blowing up its own towns for the past month, just to get the inevitable over with on their own terms...

Despite the fact my house wasn't under threat from airborne explosives (mostly because I can't afford a house - thanks Sub-Prime, you loser!), I was still lured into the election coverage by the very real sense that I had something personal at stake. I'm fascinated by the concept of America; I love its history and its republican ideals - so it's been hugely disappointing watching the Founding Fathers' progressive experiment being visibly torn down the middle, with one side wanting to continue that progression, and the other trying to do a Marty McFly and jump back several decades in time. I am no fan of supply-side economics, but I understand there are sound reasons for tackling the debt crisis. However, rhetoric about legislating for women's bodies and attempting to drift towards a constitutional theocracy made me howl in furious disbelief. You're meant to be better than the rest of us, America... you're meant to be a "more perfect union".

Thankfully, it seems last night's electoral shenanigans have dragged America back towards the light side of the Force, with it confidently shouting "talk to the hand" to two 'legitimate rape' blunderers, and electing its first publicly gay senator. Sarah Palin, the increasingly cartoonish Tea Party doyenne, called the Republican performance "a disappointment", and that's just wonderful music to my exhausted ears. However, the temporary jubilation at seeing President Obama retain his position still does little to temper my genuine outrage at the depths to which this election cycle sunk.

What really frustrated me - more than the absurdity of campaign finances, or the spiteful aggression from both sides in attack ads - was the unprecedented war on facts. If you're going to be nasty, at least get your story right. Though the Democrats were no saints, the Republicans in particular seemed hell-bent on distorting the truth at almost every turn, as if they had come home to catch their wives cavorting in bed with the abstract concept of accuracy. We had idiotic statements about sexual assault (women don't get pregnant from rape, because vaginas are magical), incessant 'birther' allegations by Donald 'punchline' Trump, and Mitt Romney's impressively impressionistic definition of economic 'facts'. These I prefer to call 'ficts', as they were assertions that sounded convincing but, like Schrodinger's Cat, immediately withered and died upon the slightest observation. Perhaps his most audacious fib was to state: "The president's put it in place almost as much public debt as all prior presidents combined." The speediest of Google searches revealed George W. Bush alone racked up about $4.9 trillion, which was hardly dwarfed by Obama's $5 trillion. How did he get away with this stuff?!

Depressingly, the American media allowed it to happen. When the fate of the global economy, women's reproductive rights, global warming, the lives of Pakistani children, and the Syrian revolution were at stake, it was science, reason, data and subtly that were chucked out of the window, to be replaced by gut instincts, common sense truthiness, ideological propaganda, and a glistening line-up of bellowing fools. Sadly, journalists were slow at times to fact-check mistruths, often preferring to analyse performance and tone over the meaning of the rhetoric being vomited in their direction. Meanwhile, cable channels abandoned objectivity entirely, with Fox News embarking on an absurd quest to embody the right-wing version of Pravda. As things became desperate, and Romney clawed his way back into the race, both sides began to spew forth a torrent of bullshit, desperate to woo the independent voters and the swing states to their side. Never had the words of Thomas Jefferson gone so unheeded:

"The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom."

Though it made me spasmodically flail around in feral outrage at the undignified crassness of it all, none of this was surprising. US politics is built on passionate debate - the Founding Fathers argued like bickering siblings about basically everything, and half the policy debates we heard in 2012 were just continuations of an ideological bun-fight between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton that happened when people thought powdered wigs were cool, and Napoleon Bonaparte was an up-and-coming scamp. But the fervent debate wasn't the problem - ideological war between rival parties is a good thing, provided the ammunition is genuine. What upset me was that both sides were happy to lie to the electorate, as if it was an ok thing to do. It wasn't... and now the fate of America, and maybe the world, has been decided upon these wobbly fictions. Even if you're glad of the end result (which I most definitely am), that's still no way to run a democracy. Lessons must be learned before 2016, but I'm willing to bet my vital organs that they aren't.

However, it's now 5am, and time to drag my sorry carcass to bed, before I pass out, face down on the floor. I apologise if this blog is an endless cavalcade of bullshit. I guess if you consume it for long enough, you start to excrete it yourself.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2043711 2012-10-30T19:00:00-04:00 2012-12-30T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/ That's the curious thing about history; even when it loses all its meaning, some traditions just cling on regardless, making us look a bit weird in the process.

Anthropologists sometimes call this teleological superfluity, when the original purpose of something is lost but it continues being used anyway, like wooden handles on steak knives. Modern product designers with exciting hairstyles, and tedious nerds with Scrabble dictionaries, instead refer to this as skeuomorphism - your digital camera making a reassuring shutter 'click' despite there being no mechanical mirror snapping; it's just a nice aesthetic vestige from an outdated technology. If you don't know what I mean, ask yourself this... last time you were on holiday, did you mime your signature to the waiter when you wanted the bill? If so, that's a skeuomorph. We're chippers and pinners, these days. Still don't believe me? Have a look at the Microsoft Word icon for 'Save As'... when was the last time you used a 3.5" floppy disk?

Halloween is a cultural skeuomorph (not to be confused with the xenomorph monsters from the Alien movies). Its complex history, probably originating from an ancient Celtic harvest festival known as Saimhain, has seen it go through various transitions over the centuries, beginning life as a celebration of the end of autumn, before taking on canonical connotations under the medieval Catholic church. Now, however, it is a wilfully camp celebration of macabre Gothicism and tacky horror that perpetuates much of the medium, but none of the message. And has it dwindled in popularity? Not a bit.

Many centuries ago, people's lives were dictated by the seasons in a much more profound way. The original festival, Samhain, fell just before the beginning of winter on 1 November, which probably also marked the boundary of the New Year. Samhain saw ritualised harvesting of the fields, the gathering of apples from the trees, and the sheltering of livestock against the incoming cruel frosts. These days in Britain, food is shipped to us from all over the world and dying of starvation is an almost impressive logistical achievement. Yet the Celts did not enjoy the merits of a 24-hour Tesco. Theirs was a world where food supply was a matter of life or death; a failed crop could be lethally catastrophic, so it is understandable that such significance was attributed to this last agricultural hurrah of the year.

However, the arrival of the Romans in 43AD, who were fond of their funerary festival of Feralia, may have influenced Samhain's other preoccupation - as far as we can tell, these Celtic peoples believed that for this brief window of no more than 48 hours, the dead could walk the Earth. Anxious about the consequences, they would wear animal masks to disguise themselves against vengeful spirits, presumably hoping that dead, angry Nigel wasn't all that smart. To stop their homes becoming haunted, hearths were extinguished, and large communal bonfires were built instead to ward off the unwelcome ancestors. While people nervously waited to see if rotting grandma lurched out of the ground, they distracted themselves by nibbling on nuts and apples, possibly in commemoration of the Roman goddess of orchards, Pomona, but more likely because there was nothing else to eat at this time of year.

In the very beginnings of the 7th Century, the Catholic Church decided to have a concerted crack at converting all these pagan types, many of whom were now of Germanic descent following the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Surprisingly, instead of tearing around the countryside, burning stuff down and outlawing things, Pope Gregory the Great instructed his missionaries to incorporate pagan shrines into Christian teaching, so sacred trees remained unfelled, and important days in the calendar went unchallenged. Consequently, Samhain survived, although it was rebranded as All Saints Day by a succession of medieval pontiffs, beginning with Gregory III in the 730s AD.

However, a change of name had little impact on the pagan pursuits, and, unable to vanquish the superstition, the Church was forced to accept the continuing belief in the zombie revenants roaming around every autumn, though it did manage to imply that those who came back were evil ne'er-do-wells from Purgatory and Hell who took the form of spirits, witches, ghouls and demons. It was no longer just the dead who came back - it was THE EVIL DEAD! Understandably, the burning of monstrous effigies became common at this time, presumably as ordinary people started to brick themselves in abject terror, and looked for more powerful ways to ward off the vengeful sinners.

So, for more than a thousand years, the Church and ordinary people continued a mutually muddled celebration of All Hallows Eve, with the popular and official celebrations looking decidedly dissimilar. That said, they did usually intersect at the front porch. In order to pray for those in purgatory - so they might ascend to Heaven and not flaunt their decaying flesh near the living - it became customary to see door-to-door collections of alms for the monks who performed this service, or for poor peasants to demand so-called 'soul cakes' in return for praying for their feudal lord's ancestors. Meanwhile, the more pagan-inflected festivities would also require donations of wood and food, and so villagers could expect a knock at their door from children wearing grotesque masks, and carrying a horse's skull, who were collecting for the bonfire.

However, by Shakespeare's time, Guy Fawkes and his Catholic buddies seem to have ruined the popularity of the recently-named 'Hallowe'en' festival in England. After having successfully not exploded - arguably one of his finest moments in governance - King James I made it legally obligated that his escape from the Gunpowder Plot be celebrated on 5 November, and so these bonfires began to take precedence over the ancient ones. Indeed, the post-Reformation suspicion of all things Pope-related (ie, Catholics, foreigners... and Catholic foreigners) saw the ancient festival's popularity dwindle considerably, surviving mostly in Ireland, America and Scotland (where Queen Victoria witnessed a traditional burning of a witch effigy while staying at Balmoral).

Intriguingly, by the late 18th Century, an unrelated festivity named Mischief Night was being celebrated on 4 November, and crucially this involved children deliberately misbehaving unless rewarded with small bribes. Some historians suspect this might be the possible origins of modern trick or treating, combining the costumed revelry of All Hallows Eve with the cheeky blackmail we now know and love so well. Sorry, did I say know and love? My mistake, I mean know and barely tolerate through gritted teeth...

Of course, you may live in an area where traditional All Hallows Eve bonfires, parades and apple-bobbing still happen. These are great fun, but reveal only a sort of mimetic appreciation for heritage - the potent, original meaning of Halloween has long since evaporated. Indeed, by the late 20th Century it had become an enormously lucrative commercial opportunity, taking its cultural cues less from ancient superstition and more from Hollywood projections of popular horror - namely, zombies, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, witches, mummies... and sexy nurses, for reasons that seem mostly to do with male fantasies, and not much to do with the undead.

Undoubtedly these are things that still scare us in profoundly instinctual ways (sexy nurses, in particular), but our rational society tends to dismiss talk of ghosts and ghouls as paranormal fluff. One could perhaps try to argue that such macabre celebration actually reveals our deep-rooted fear of death, but, while that may be true on a subconscious level, to those whom I quizzed at a recent Halloween party, it is just a joyfully anarchic knees up with a Tim Burton aesthetic, bearing almost no relation to Catholic saints or the climax of the agricultural year. Indeed, where once the 31st October was held in sombre reverence, now a Halloween party tends to be held on the nearest Saturday night, to allow time for inevitable hangovers to dissipate; it's a dishonour we wouldn't dare pin upon Christmas or New Year's Eve.

So, despite the fact that our desiccated ancestors are woefully rubbish at haunting us on 31 October, and that almost no-one expects the food to run out during winter, we all seem very eager to carry on with the meaningless charade. Much like the faux-leather grain on my plastic-coated sofa, Halloween really doesn't need to be there anymore... but we're glad to have it, all the same.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1934232 2012-10-04T19:00:00-04:00 2012-10-04T12:10:49-04:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
At 30 years old, I might be considered a little young to appreciate the full glory of the James Bond franchise, or the extraordinary musical canon of John, Paul, George and Ringo; except, my childhood was a little unusual. I didn't listen to contemporary pop music until I was 14 - watching Top Of The Pops 2 today is a fascinating insight into what I missed, and I can't say I'm particularly disappointed that Madonna's conical bras and George Michael's bland crooning passed me by. No, the soundtrack to my youth was The Beatles, a perpetually cheery entourage of mop-topped harmonisers joining me on every car journey. Their early hits were infectiously catchy, an irresistible assemblage of handclaps, tightly-wound riffs, and high-pitched 'woooooooooooos'. Their later material sprawled elegantly through vast soundscapes, surreal and woozy poetry, and artfully bombastic production. I knew instinctively, even aged 8, that they were bloody brilliant - and I didn't need a Paul Gambaccini documentary to tell me why.

Of course, I could enjoy the full catalogue of albums. My parents' generation had been there for real, watching The Beatles grow into themselves an album at a time. It's tempting to imagine the Liverpudlian minstrels emerged fully-formed - like Aztec gods bathed in shimmering sunlight - to their rightful place as kings of rock and roll; except, the 1960s music industry didn't have that sort of promotional machine. Unlike our modern world, where Justin Bieber and One Direction basked in pre-emptive adulation before they had even mimed a note, The Beatles had to earn their reputation through hard graft. They put in perhaps 10,000 hours practice, mostly in the sleazy clubs of Hamburg, to be as good as they were - yet it did not win them immediate glory. Love Me Do only charted at 17 in the hit parade, and their second single, Please, Please Me, took two months to crawl its way up the charts to number one. 'Beatlemania' arguably took another year, and the support of the BBC, to get going properly... though when it did, it was an unprecedented sensation that made Bieber Fever look as popular as an autograph session at the Slough under 14s Sock-darning championships.

Despite the less than meteoric start, the cultural impact crater produced by this unlikely foursome was ma-hoosive. It is easy to damn them with faint praise, and merely applaud their catchy songs or cheeky inventiveness in movie spin-offs. However, The Beatles changed the music industry in the most elemental of ways. Suffering with an amplification problem, meaning their songs were inaudible over the sound of hysterical screaming, they retreated instead to the studio, traditionally a place one might spend only a few days - indeed, their debut album was mostly recorded in just a single day - yet, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the product of 400 hours of intense experimentation, using the studio as instrument in its own right. Having abandoned touring completely, the band was free to create songs of dazzling complexity that could never be replicated live. Bouncing off the undisputed genius of The Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds', released a few months before, Sgt Pepper's emerged as a complete work of art - an album you played from start to finish, pausing only to flip the disc over. There were no singles, no touring, no appearances on TV shows. This was pop music's equivalent of the operatic magnum opus, and it was quite dazzling. I challenge you to listen to A Day In The Life, and not be stupefied by the chaotic brilliance on display - the jaunty piano ditty, in amidst the atonal orchestral cacophony, lyrically weaving an ordinary commuter routine, with the death of a celebrity and banal snippets from The Daily Mail, all mashed together in a mournful, hypnotically psychedelic tune. It's certainly not Call Me, Maybe...

The Beatles undeniably changed global music, and came to define a certain view of Britain. The recent Olympic opening ceremony just proves how talismanic their songs still are, while Hey Jude appears to have become some sort of secular national anthem, a communal nursery rhyme to unite the disparate masses under one cause... though with the number of times we've seen it recently, you get the impression Sir Paul McCartney would unexpectedly turn up and starting singing it at the opening of an ASDA in Hull, if given the chance. However, while The Beatles music peppered this unexpectedly glorious celebration of British heritage, there were only two individuals who were allocated a starring role in the flesh... and I'm not talking about Her Majesty, the parachuting Queen.

In my youth, the writing of Ian Fleming left me cold. I just couldn't relate to the man from MI6, who always saved the world and got the girl. Yet, I rarely meet anyone who dislikes James Bond's screen outings, and they certainly had a huge effect on me - the first film I remember seeing at the cinema was License To Kill, and the terrifying horror of the Great White Shark chewing on Felix Leiter like he was a squishy ragdoll. Over the years, I managed to watch the rest of the Bond canon, mostly because they seemed to be perennially looping on ITV. A Saturday could barely pass without accidentally stumbling across Roger Moore arching an eyebrow and delivering a one-liner to some foreign bloke in the midst of an ironic death. I watched each Bond adventure with fervent passion, trying to puzzle out the order in which the films were made by examining the modernity of the cars on show, proving that I was always destined to be a nerdy archaeologist. The fact that my French relatives were extras in the ludicrously exciting chase sequence in 'A View To A Kill', when Bond drives past the Eiffel Tower in only the front-end of a sawn-apart car, only further heightened my sense of personal identity with this franchise.

And then it got even better! In my teens, Goldeneye suddenly reinvigorated the flagging franchise, with one of cinema's greatest chase sequences - Pierce Brosnan thundering through St Petersburg in a hotwired tank - eliciting gleeful cheers from the cinema audience around me. Moby's version of the theme music was brilliant too, and filled me with such adolescent adrenaline, I'd frequently find myself trying to leap off walls, imagining I was descending gracefully in slow motion. Before there was parkour, there was just-falling-off-stuff-on-purpose - and Bond convinced me I was excellent at it, even though I had the grace and technique of a dead badger being tipped out of a shopping trolley. When I wasn't hurling myself down staircases, I was mostly eroding my thumbs playing the awesomely addictive Goldeneye video game on the N64. Alas, Goldeneye was Brosnan at his best, and he couldn't reach such dizzy heights again. Die Another Day was idiotically woeful, and signalled the temporary death knell of fantastical action movies. Instead, we were pummelled and bruised by Jason Bourne and Vin Diesel's XXX, until a psychologically damaged James Bond was rebooted and repackaged with Daniel Craig in those tiny trunks to lead us back into the 21st century.

My relationship with the films is highly personal, but there are people in their 70s, all the way down to current kids in school shorts, who have also experienced the allure of James Bond in their own unique ways. It's mad to think this one character has sustained 50 years, and entertained such vast hordes of people, but there seems no reason it won't sustain another half-century. From its very inception, Bond movies have stood out from the crowd. Dr No was ground-breaking in many ways, not just in the overt sexuality, but in its cinematic form. Hitchcock had been pumping out thrillers for years, but it was Sean Connery's opener that invented the classical action movie, replete with invulnerable hero immune to bullets, absurdly ostentatious villain, glamorous girl, and spectacular set-pieces.

Yet, the mythical man who has done so much to promote and define British heroism is an ever-mutating creature. From Connery's cocky chauvinism, to Moore's suave swagger, to Dalton's vengeful rage, to Craig's brittle loneliness - over 50 years, Bond has evolved to suit the cultural landscape, as have those wonderfully absurd baddies. Dr No was released in cinemas just a fortnight before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and subsequently all manner of Cold War politics would sneak in to later Bonds, from the SMERSH agents in From Russia With Love, to the dissident Russian General with the launch-codes in Goldeneye. Even Moonraker, with its eugenics-loving villain Drax, played into fears of the weaponisation of space, coming out just 4 years before Reagan's much-vilified 'Star Wars program'. Now that the Cold War is over, Marx-hugging commies have been substituted on the naughty step by hell-bent terrorists and greedy corporations. In the most recent outing, A Quantum of Solace, our Machiavellian baddie was a damp squib of an eco-capitalist, intent on doing something or other with the water supply - I was too bored to care, in truth - but hopefully Skyfall will feature something more befitting a super-villain... perhaps a bloke who's built a secret lair in Mount Everest, and is plotting to turn the Moon into a cheese mine? We can only hope.

It's curious, and reassuring, to see that both The Beatles and Bond movies are still relevant now, having emerged in such a distinctively specific era of cultural transition. Civil Rights, JFK, Mutually-Assured-Destruction were all on the verge of exploding into the public consciousness when these two displayed their wares in October 1962. It makes one wonder whether they were so potent because of the era in which they were forged, one of such febrile energy, or whether that makes no difference at all - perhaps good art is just good art, whenever it's made? In any case, I look forward to sharing my passion for all things Bond and Beatles with my future offspring, so here's to another 50 years of both.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1883579 2012-09-14T08:33:40-04:00 2012-09-14T10:39:55-04:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/ Sun, and now a French magazine has decided that blurry topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge are worth triumphantly smearing on their front page. There's two ways one can go with this as a blogger. I can either delve into an anthropological study of the royal body throughout history, and the ways in which it has been politically deployed, or I can have a rant about how everything's going to shit.

For once, I think I might plump with the ranting... just for a change.

There's been a lot of toing-and-froing recently with valiant defenders of 'the freedom of the press' arguing that whatever is visible on the internet should be fair game for newspaper journalism. This is an understandable argument when you're dealing with political leaks, uncovered super-injunctions, abuses of the tax system, etc etc etc. The people have a right to know, and journalists have a duty to report the most important stories. Fair enough. However, when the issue at stake is not immorally-accessed video footage of illegal drone strikes on civilians, but instead pictures of a famous person's floppy bits, then the philosophical momentum drains somewhat from the freedom of the press argument. Indeed, the word 'freedom' suggests the ability to choose - the right to abstain, as well as proceed - and in this case only a blathering idiot would actually think it morally justified to publish those errant testicles.

Well, step forward France's illustrious Closer magazine, which has boldly flung itself into the breach to fight for our civil liberties, and ensure that we see Kate Middleton's exposed breasts. Like a Gauloise-smoking, turtle-neck-wearing version of Sherlock Holmes, they quite brilliantly deduced that the Duchess of Cambridge, being a relatively typical human being, would probably not just get her tits out at the grand opening of a hospital, so instead they waited for her to assume she was in private, sharing some intimate time with her husband, before deploying the world's longest telephoto lens - the kind of thing that probably requires three tripods to support it, and a dedicated team of Himalayan sherpas to drag it around. And, boy, it's lucky they did, because how else were we going to see those perfectly ordinary mammaries? I can now sleep safe at night, knowing the Duchess is indeed a female human, and not an ostentatiously disguised penguin...

Let's be plain about this. Is this voyeurism? Yes. Is it necessary? No. Call me deranged, but I'm pretty sure it's bordering on illegality to take naked photos of someone when they're not aware of the camera, and you haven't asked for their consent in advance. When I film a TV documentary, I have to notify the (fully-clothed) public with clearly visible signs that they may be on camera, and they have a moral right to say "no, I don't want to be in your programme", in which case we have to cut them out, or pixelate their faces. Would it be moral, or even legal, to wander into a Marks and Spencers changing room and start filming random women trying on bras? I don't imagine so. What if those women are famous? Is it okay then? Well, clearly not, no. So, how is it moral to take photos of Kate Middleton from half a kilometre away, when she believes she is in private?

Now, various people in the press will say "well, it's those bloody French, isn't it? We'd never do that here in Britain." Hmmmm, I think Lord Justice Leveson may disagree. The thing is, we have a tradition of nudity in some of our more puerile newspapers. It's not something I get particularly angry about, because nudity doesn't cause civilisation to collapse in on itself in a vortex of pert boobs, despite America's infamous disgust at Janet Jackson's nipple. Every child has seen a breast at some point, probably because it sustained them in their infancy with naturally-produced milk, so let's just agree for now that consensual nudity in the Sun is not the issue here. What is the issue is the fact that British newspapers can somehow print material that was obtained in a disrespectful manner, and then claim the moral high ground for doing so.

Walking through the West End of London, as I occasionally do, I frequently come across paparazzi hunting in packs. They're job is to provide eye fodder - and it really is nothing more than that - for the sidebar of shame on the Daily Mail website, and various others. They're mission is to seek wandering nipples, momentary flashes of cotton gusset, incriminating sweaty pits, cellulite dimples, unflattering freeze-frames of beautiful women caught in between expressions, and anything else that titillates in the most boring of ways. These photographers are not bad people, they're just providing what this nation is, depressingly, ravenous for. The Ancient Romans loved watching defenceless humans being ravaged by feral animals; we prefer to gawp at imperfect bikini bodies and muffin tops. It's a sliding scale of cruelty, for sure, but let's not kid ourselves that we're not on it...

Furthermore, if models want to pose topless for Page Three, fine. If actresses are willing to do nude scenes in movies, good for them. However, these people should not then be subsequently papped on the beach, or in private, without prior consent. The argument that someone has done nudity before, so they're fair game, is intellectually barbarous. Just as with the definition of rape, there must be consent for each and every action, no matter how many times you've consented before. I have no right to demand to see Kate Moss topless if I bump into her in the street, just as I have no right to demand Gareth Bale comes down to my local pitch and whips in fizzing crosses for me to pathetically volley into the corner-flag.

As for the justifying defence that celebrities are in the public eye (and in France, Kate Middleton is merely that - a celebrity), at no point does anyone sign a waiver, upon becoming famous, to declare they happily surrender their rights as a private citizen in return for truckloads of gold and frequent dinners at The Ivy. Indeed, many people have fame, or infamy, thrust upon them involuntarily. When the status of 'celebrity' is externally defined by those who profit from doing so, that leaves the recipient at the mercy of predatory whims. Yes, the media may choose to be supportive and friendly, perhaps creating an artificially-constructed secular saint out of Cheryl Cole, but they may also choose to destroy someone, and the celebrity in question gets insufficient input into any of those decisions, no matter how hard they may try to 'play the fame game' by hiring a coterie of publicists and crisis managers.

I'm not trying to shut down the presses, here. Pippa Middleton's pal pointing a gun at a photographer? Stupid behaviour - publish 'til your heart's content. Senior Defence Minister having a torrid affair with a Russian spy? National security issue - no probs, there. But individuals behaving legally, in the expectation of privacy, with zero possibility of it damaging the public good? Leave it out, please.

As a republican, perhaps I'm odd in hoping that Kate Middleton and Prince Harry be treated with the dignity afforded to any other human being? Perhaps monarchists believe they should be treated differently, by virtue of their blue blood - that they should be protected from such scandal because they matter more than other people? I don't believe that's true. All the sane people in this world know that they're just ordinary people with posh hats and plummy accents; they're not Pharaohs, divinely appointed to cause the sun to rise each morning, or 17th Century Absolutist monarchs able to cure the ills of the afflicted with the power of miraculous touch. I don't want the Royal Family to get special treatment from the media; I want everyone in the country to get the same treatment - fair, sober, morally justifiable.

I don't care who you are; unless you have agreed to it, your dangly bits are not communal property.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1878677 2012-09-12T19:00:00-04:00 2012-11-12T05:12:01-05:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
A male skeleton, buried in the choir of the long-since demolished Franciscan church, has been found with sharp-force injuries to the rear of the skull, and an arrow head lodged in the upper back. This individual had a curved spine, was buried with dignity but little pomp, and almost certainly died in battle. While the panel of archaeologists, historians and civic dignitaries are trying their best to appear neutral in judgment, it is pretty obvious that they've spent the morning in a private room screaming 'IT'S THE SODDING KING!! WE'VE FOUND THE SODDING KING!!!'

Regardless of their hunch (sorry...), there are probably 12 weeks of DNA testing and scientific jiggery-pokery required before we can safely proclaim Richard as king for the second time. So, while the physical evidence is hugely promising, the party poppers will have to remain unpopped for the time being.

Yet, this dig reveals something much more immediately verifiable about ourselves. On the face of it, it's just a dead bloke beneath a drab civic car park; another individual who walked this planet along with 100 billion others. However, there is always an incalculable frisson of excitement when stories from our distant history are found to contain more than just a grain of truth. We grow up with so many myths, legends, half-truths, movies and TV shows that it is refreshingly reassuring to know that some things are real, and really did happen as we believed they did. As an historian, admittedly a rather dull one, some of the most thrilling moments of my life have been discoveries made in archives, when the penny drops that you are the only person in the world to know something. I've had this pleasure rather recently, while researching the life of an enigmatic figure from Regency London's history, and I could barely sleep. Of course, my earth-shattering discovery meant sod all to anyone else; so I found myself whispering it at the moon, like a demented scientist in a bad gothic novel.

Yet, the possible discovery of King Richard III is not some minor thing. Here is a man famous the world over, as Shakespeare's monstrous Machiavellian - the cruel and twisted usurper, a hunchback no less, who snatched the throne from his vulnerable younger nephews, whom he was supposed to protect. They ended up dead, in mysterious circumstances, and he ruled in their stead only to be brought down after only two years by a heroic Welshman called Henry Tudor. Huzzah for the Tudors! At least, that's the theatrical version - William Shakespeare had a habit of contorting history to please his royal patrons, and Queen Elizabeth I's granddaddy just happened to be a certain Henry Tudor.

The real Richard III was a much more complex man, a skilled warrior and a strong king, but who had the unfortunate lot of rising to power during the Wars of the Roses, a bloody civil war between the rival factions of York and Lancaster. The rest of the cream of England's nobility had already been slain in more than 25 years of brutal slaughter, and King Richard was not going to escape the trauma simply by virtue of having a shiny hat to wear. Being powerful in the Wars of the Roses was like playing musical chairs in the lions' cage at London zoo... chances are, you're going to be horribly killed whether you're sitting on a chair or not, even if that chair is a throne.

True to form, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard's allies switched sides at the crucial moment. Incensed at their villainous treachery, the King charged headlong at his adversary, hoping to take him on mano-a-mano in the kind of brilliant smackdown you get at the end of Bond movies. Unfortunately, our plucky James Bond wannabe got his caved in with a poleaxe, which is not the nicest way to go, and would be a major disappointment in Skyfall. His mangled head lost its crown, which was found in a nearby bush and placed on Henry Tudor's head, making him King Henry VII. Allegedly, Richard's bloodied corpse was stripped of its armour, publically displayed, and then buried under the choir at the nearby Greyfriars Franciscan church, never to be seen again...

...until now? DUN DUN DER!!!!

Well, maybe. So, should we care that he may have been found? What more does it tell us, other than he maybe had a curved spine but wasn't a hunchback? It's a story with innate glamour - the last king to die in battle, famous from Shakespeare, the final act of the Wars of the Roses, and we DO love the monarchy these days - but it actually adds very little to our understanding of the late 15th century. Much like the physicists at CERN, this discovery would merely confirm what we think we know already, rather than dumbfounding us with a revelatory surprise such as: "Wait, Richard III was actually just an extremely articulate bonobo ape?! Amazing!"

However, confirming what we know is what historians dream of at night; we couldn't give a hoot about Christian Grey and his erotic adventures. Our sexual fantasies involve freshly-discovered documents in archives that unambiguously verify our untestable theories. Oh, and Joan of Arc in a catsuit... phwoar!

So, while this this discovery will garner global headlines, and has already made me jump up and down like a hormonal teen at a Justin Bieber concert, it would not be on a par with finding Tutankhamun's tomb, and nor would it equal the shocking awe of the Ridgeway Viking Massacre site found recently in Dorset. In fact, it falls short of the discovery of Sutton Hoo or the Staffordshire Hoard, in terms of improving our understanding of the past. This would not be new contextual information, but rather fascinating and emotionally fulfilling verification.

They went looking for a dead body with a hole in its head, and they found one. It's not exactly Atlantis, is it? However, it could be a thing of tremendous potency; a reminder that historical and archaeological research does warrant all that effort and diligence. We can, if we're patient, gradually piece together the story of what went before us, and that is of limitless usefulness to us in the future. A society that doesn't know where it's been is a society as amnesiac, destined to get lost and wander round in circles. So here's hoping it really is King Dick III.

And here's hoping he's buried with a confession saying "It woz me what killed them Princes in the Tower, guv." That would save the rest of us a huge amount of futile argument in the future, time we could dedicate to arguing about whether Harold Godwinson was killed with an arrow in the eye, or not. Speaking of which, I'm off to Hastings with a shovel... can't hurt to try, can it?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1704728 2012-07-26T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-25T05:12:06-04:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
Much like the heroes in the recent Avengers Assemble movie, trying to convince the four Home Nations to join forces led to some pram-based toy flinging by the Scottish, Welsh and Irish Footballing Associations, all of whom were understandably concerned that they would henceforth forever be lumped together under the Union Jack in other international competitions. Thankfully, and presumably without the assistance of Scarlet Johansson in a cat-suit, the discussions were resolved peaceably, and on Thursday Team GB will play their first competitive match against Senegal.

The early indications are not entirely positive. Despite the home advantage, this team are less British bulldogs and more skittish underdogs; they were comprehensively humbled in Friday's friendly against a Brazilian side capable of much better, and at times looked like a team of virtual strangers... probably because they are a team of virtual strangers. All in all, Stuart Pearce has assembled a squad seemingly lacking in experience, technical proficiency and established patterns of communication. This would seem to be a recipe for disaster, yet history tells us otherwise, because these were the conditions that gave rise to Great Britain's most successful Olympic team, Sir Matt Busby's 1948 overachievers.

The comparisons between Pearce and Busby are perhaps unfair on the latter. Stuart Pearce has been working with England's young players for five years, gaining experience of international coaching and developing a strong working relationship with his charges. He was appointed the Team GB coach in October of last year, and has since had time to cast his eye over the options. Compared to Matt Busby, that has been a luxurious preparatory window. The Scotsman, conversely, had just won the FA Cup with Manchester United in April when he took up the coaching role with the British team. He almost quit on the spot when he discovered his squad had been picked for him. Regardless, Busby - who had organised footballing entertainment for the troops in WW2 - agreed to take on the challenge, despite having only two months to prepare.

He inherited a ragtag bunch of true amateurs; 11 Englishmen, 2 Welshmen, 2 Northern Irishmen and 7 Scots. Only the Scots had formerly met each other, having been recruited from the semi-professional Glasgow club Queen's Park, and immediately fractious hostility broke out amongst the various nationalities. This, however, was the least of the problems. While Stuart Pearce's side lack the chemistry a team generates over months of playing together, Busby's Brits were not even full-time footballers, and were still living on a rationed diet. Amidst the squad were Eric Lee, trying to train as a teacher; Denis Kelleher, a Northern Irish doctor and former escapee from a German POW camp; Angus Carmichael, a young veterinary student; Douglas McBain, a tax inspector; and Bill Amor, a policeman.

As Busby would later state in his autobiography: "In Britain, since Berlin, the policy has been to enter... [The Olympics], presumably on the assumption that it is better to have the Union Jack trampled into the turf than not to show the flag at all. I believe that is the only possible decision, even though every four years it exposes Britain footballer, clerks, footballer grocers and footballer pitmen to something akin to ridicule".

Busby turned to his Manchester United colleagues to knock this gaggle of also-rans into shape. The club's trainer, Tom Curry, began to put them through their paces, while even the FA Cup winning players agreed to surrender their holidays in order to help out. With the harsh economic realities of post-war Britain to contend with, many of the squad members had to sometimes vanish on the overnight train to return to their jobs and young families, with Douglas McBain a rare exception in opting to take six weeks unpaid leave from the Inland Revenue. The policeman, Bill Amor, was even badly bruised in the line of duty when he should have been doing keepy-uppies and squat thrusts. With technical progress slow, and team bonding divided between nationalities, Busby called an emergency session at a run-down hotel in Twyford, where they trained hard on a disused concrete tennis court.

Finally, it was time to pitch the players into battle against some sort of opposition. The Netherlands duly complied, and proceeded to kick the British amateurs up and down the pitch for 90 minutes. It was an inauspicious start, and there were murmurings of a tactical withdrawal from the competition, but Busby was cheered by the battling spirit on display. The players, meanwhile, had rather enjoyed their trip abroad, returning home to austerity Blighty with watches and luxuries smuggled in their pockets.

Once the Olympics finally arrived, in quintessentially austerity style, the players were housed in dilapidated RAF barracks at Uxbridge, where they whiled away the hours smoking ciggies provided by the Games' official sponsors, drinking Horlicks and mingling with foreign competitors, many of whom had been mortal adversaries just three years before. The Brits were used to rationing and were delighted when the American Olympic team brought steaks with them. The French, typically, were in a huff because their cases of wine had been impounded at customs.

This camaraderie clearly had a positive effect. With the home crowd cheering, and with a young Kenneth Wolstonholme's commentating on his first match for BBC TV, the team's first game delivered a stunning surprise in the shape of a 4-3 victory against those Dutchmen who had so unceremoniously floored them a fortnight before. This was followed by an even more unexpected result - Busby's boys managed to sneak a 1-0 win over the technically superior French. Alas, just as the public dared to dream, the luck of the draw pitted Team GB against Yugoslavia, a nation that had rather ingeniously recruited its international first team into the army, thus making them eligible as amateurs. These Balkan 'shamateurs' were far too gifted to be stopped, and Busby watched ruefully as his side went down to a courageous 3-1 defeat. As it was, the Yugoslavs would themselves be mugged in the Final by Sweden, who had done exactly the same thing.

This run of games left Busby's team in line for a third place play-off against Denmark. The prospect of an Olympic medal was surely tempting, but the steely-eyed Busby was proudly compliant when his captain, Bob Hardisty, stood up and revealed that the players had agreed that those who had yet to have a game would play, instead of the strongest team. It was a moment of pure sportsmanship, and Busby acceded. The result was perhaps inevitable. Britain were beaten 5-3, but had done the nation proud in overwhelmingly difficult circumstances. Sir Matt Busby later wrote in his autobiography "I did a job which I shall always regard as one of my best. Steering Manchester United to the championship of the First Division was child's play besides the problems of sorting out the winning team from spare-time footballers drawn from four different countries."

To this day, no fully British team has done better in the Olympics (Great Britain won in 1908 and 1912 with only English players). Given the quality on display in the Brazilian and Spanish teams, and the lack of preparation time afforded to him, Stuart Pearce may feel he is now reliving Busby's seemingly impossible challenge. While the cynics may write off his young team, the story of the Busby Brits may yet suggest an upset could be on the cards.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1639946 2012-07-02T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-01T05:12:12-04:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
While the world has advanced greatly in those years, there are plenty of absurd things to marvel at this time around - the rather conspicuous surface-to-air missiles jauntily pointed at passing aircraft; the merciless litigiousness sprayed like machine gun fire at any local café owners hoping to use the Olympic logo; the inherently ridiculous choice of corporate sponsors at a sporting event (McDonalds?!); and, chief of all, the brilliantly demented official theme song by Muse - a piece of music more suited to being the national anthem for a post-Apocalyptic Soviet USSR, plagued by radioactive zombies with a thirst for human blood.

Yes - though I'm rather looking forward to the sporting spectacle - London 2012 is destined to be quite memorable, if only for its oddity. However, to boring old historians like me, oddity is rather reassuring. The Olympics has a lengthy track-record (if you'll pardon the pun) of providing eyebrow-raising moments, so let's have a quick recap, shall we?

According to legend, the first Greek Olympiad was in 776BC, and the last was in 393AD, when it was finally closed down by the Christianized Romans. During that generous six century window, there were plenty of thrills, spills and WTF moments. For starters, all the athletes competed in the nude, with the exception of the Hoplomachi foot race, where the sprinters donned a bronze helmet and shin guards, and pegged it a couple of hundred yards while clutching a large round shield. Before you ask, yes their dangly bits were still on show... There were also exciting events like Pankration, which was an extreme form of wrestling where only biting and eye gouging were forbidden. One famous bout ended up with the victor, Damoxenos, being disqualified and the loser, Creugas, being crowned instead. This was mildly problematic, seeing as Creugas was dead - Damoxenos, apparently, had eviscerated his opponent's entrails with his sharpened finger nails. Ouch.

The Greek Olympics were intended to be solely reserved for Greek men (women were not allowed to even watch, let alone compete - mostly on account of all those flopping penises), but once the mighty Roman Empire had swallowed Greece whole, no-one was brave or stupid enough to tell that to Emperor Nero, who in 67AD travelled to Olympus to enter himself as a competitor. If it wasn't rude enough to delay the games two years just so he could be involved, Nero then proceeded to change all the events to stuff he was good at. The famous physical events became music and poetry competitions, and though he decided to keep the chariot race, he still felt compelled to enter a team of ten horses in the Four Horse race. Rather brilliantly, Nero declared himself the victor of the chariot race, despite falling out of his chariot. His logic was impeccable - he would have won, if he hadn't crashed. This is now known as Newt Gingrichism. (Incidentally, a chariot crash was called a shipwreck - a linguistic non sequitur we still continue when we talk about cargo, which doesn't travel by car).

Clearly a man who demanded praise, even when he knew it wasn't genuine, the vainglorious Emperor bussed in 5000 Romans and paid them to applaud during his poetical and musical recitals - It seems, however, that even the allure of free money wasn't enough compensation for the trauma of witnessing his questionable talents. Some sources suggest a few crowd members actually feigned their own death, just so they could be carried out of his unbearably bad performances. When I tell you that Nero is famous as one of the world's earliest bagpipers, I suspect you'll understand why. Not satiated by his Herculean efforts at the Olympics, Nero travelled around Greece and entered the other pan-Hellenic Games too. Finally, he returned victorious to Rome with a haul of 1800 medals... eat your heart out, Steve Redgrave.

Of course, Nero was an awful cheat, and the Greeks usually had a punishment for being caught breaking the rules - the naughty athlete was forced to pay towards a statue of Zeus to adorn the route into the stadium. There were, by all accounts, an absolute shitload of these statues, called Zanes. We'll come to more modern cheating later on...

So, the Olympics vanished in the late 4th century, until Baron de Coubertin brought them back? Nope - not exactly. Strangely enough, in 1612 a man named Robert Dover tried to reintroduce a vaguely similar idea with his Cotswold Olympick Games. These were local games, involving organised fighting, running, and whatnot - after the Restoration of Charles II, the games got even odder with the introduction of Olympick Shin-Kicking. Why this is not a proper event at London 2012 is beyond me.

So, now do we meet Baron de Coubertin? Well, not quite... He, in fact, was influenced by an English acquaintance called Dr William Penny Brookes, who introduced his own version of the Olympics to the Shropshire village of Much Wenlock. Here the events included normal sports, like football and cricket, along with hilarious additions such as the 'Blindfolded Wheelbarrow Race' and everyone's favourite, 'The Old Women's Race For A Pound Of Tea'. This is where Baron de Coubertin, the French historian and moralist, got his inspiration to revive the Classical Olympics.

So, in 1896, De Coubertin had the ancient stadium restored, and threw his first Olympics Games in Athens. The events were very much for amateurs - the Irish politician John Pius Bolan was on holiday in Greece at the time, and unknown to him was entered into the Olympic tennis tournament by a friend. Despite zero training, Boland walked away with two gold trophies. In fairness, Usain Bolt could probably do the same for the 100 metres.

Four years later, in Paris, the 1900 Olympiad was held concurrently with the World Fair. This caused some confusion - official Olympic events were held alongside unofficial Olympic events, at the same place and time. The Official Olympics saw the first and only ever cricket event, when England played France and won. In fairness, England was going to win either way, as the French team comprised English ex-pats. Other high-octane events included croquet and beach lifeguarding. Meanwhile, the unofficial events were much more fun. These included fire-fighting, cannon-shooting, hot-air ballooning, and three classes of motor-racing: car, truck, and delivery-van. Someone also decided it would be a great spectator sport to introduce poodle-clipping (yes, competitive trimming of dog fur). Best of all, the pigeon racing event was held alongside the pigeon shooting event... now there's a joke that writes itself. Later Olympics would also include an artistic classification of events - Sculpture, Literature, Music, Painting and Architecture. This was equally part of Baron de Coubertin's ideals, and he was rewarded with an Olympic gold medal for Literature in 1912. Clever boy.

Of course, aside from bonkers events, there has also been a long history of hilarious cheats. The modern day drug-doping scandals are so very boring when you compare them to the enjoyably crap attempts at cheating in the past. In the first ever Marathon event at Athens in 1896, Spiridon Balokas was disqualified from his bronze trophy for having taken a carriage most of the way. The fact he didn't even finish first just illustrates the world-class amateurism of that bit of fraud. Jumping forward to the 1936 Olympics, where Hitler was hoping to showcase Aryan supremacy to the world, we can feast our eyes on the toned biceps of Germany's female high-jumper, Dora Ratjens. Dora was, in fact, a fella who had been raised as a girl, and had kept this secret from the athletic authorities and her team-mates. Despite her possible physical advantages, Dora could still only manage a disappointing fourth place.

Famously, the Berlin Olympics gave us two memorable things (aside from Dora's tightly-wrapped testicles) - the first was Jessie Owens winning four gold medals for the USA, and the second was the concept of the Olympic torch. The recent reverence by the British media for the torch procession around the country has more than a tinge of bitter irony, particularly when it is described as a "proud tradition".

Finally, the greatest shame fell on a nation, not an individual, when Spain was found to have entered a team of ringers in the 2000 Para-Olympics Men's Basketball. They decided that the sweet taste of victory was worth the astonishing fraud of entering players without disabilities in the "learning difficulties" category. This was later used as the basis of a South Park episode featuring the moral vacuum that is Cartman doing exactly the same. When you've stooped to the level of a fictional, satirical, sociopathic, anti-Semite then you know you've gone too far.

So, while the organisers of London 2012 will be praying to the heathen gods for no hint of national embarrassment, I'll be hoping for some good old traditional idiocy, because history shows that it's human stupidity, not a flaming torch, that best represents the Olympic ideal.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1536181 2012-05-23T19:00:00-04:00 2012-07-23T05:12:05-04:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
Though not an Arsenal fan, I'm starting to have equally confused feelings about the monarchy. I have been, for as long as I can remember, a staunch republican. I skipped the Royal Wedding and went on holiday to Florence, home of the Renaissance Republic, as it seemed the most delightfully pleasant form of protest. I think monarchy is an outdated and inherently absurd form of political power that contradicts every philosophical tenet in my heart - the idea that you can only be born into true royalty is at total odds with modern Britain's democratic principles and emphasis on meritocratic social mobility.

Yet, there is a whopping great problem with my frothy-mouthed rhetoric...

... I bloody love the Queen!

Much like the People's Front of Judea in Monty Python's Life of Brian, I have been desperately trying to blindly ignore the obvious. "What has the Queen ever done for us," I proclaim loudly, before rattling speedily through the list of caveats, "Apart from the lifetime of service, decades of political neutrality, a willingness to modernise while representing traditional values, faultlessly representing Britain abroad, promoting tourism, and reading out her speech to parliament without breaking into hysterical laughter and asking David Cameron if he's taking the piss... "

With the minor exception of misjudging the public mood around the death of Princess Diana, QE2 has got it spot on since 1952. The woman is a triumph. Consequently, as a mark of individual respect, I don't remotely begrudge her receiving a triumph to commemorate her Diamond Jubilee. Sixty years of public service totally warrants it, and I hope it's a splendid success.

Ironically, 2012 is the perfect time for a jubilee, at least in the Biblical sense of the word. Leviticus states a jubilee should fall after seven cycles of seven years, in keeping with Jewish agricultural tradition. Accordingly, the 50th year was supposed to be a time of liberation for slaves, remission of sinners, and, most importantly, forgiveness of debts... so it's excellent news for Greece and Spain. It seems all you need to fix the world's most appalling economic cataclysm is for a posh person to sit on a throne for a nice, round number of years. Who knew?! Alas, as an atheist, I'm not sure I can justify that on the grounds of ancient holy text. Ho hum.

So, Biblical jubilees aside, that just leaves us with royal ones. However, it is not as ancient a tradition as one might think. In fact, we've only been having them for about 800 years, and they were a bit crap to begin with too. The first British monarch to start totting up their reign as they went along was King Richard the Lionheart, whose legal documents include his regnal year as a way of dating them. This accountancy innovation, however, seems to have been the extent of the debauched partying, so it's a tad disappointing. If we measure that on the jubilee-a-tron, it barely makes an audible beep. Boringly, in 1266 AD King Henry III managed to clock up a half-century on the king-o-meter, but didn't even bother with a Golden Jubilee party as he was busy fighting a civil war at the time. In fact, the first proper party had to wait until the arrival of Mr Chivalry himself, King Edward III, who finally did the decent thing when he reached 50 years in power. He was rowed up the Thames on a royal barge, and after flicking hastily through Leviticus decided to release some prisoners. A splendid time was had by all, and Edward promptly snuffed it a few months later, presumably deciding to end on a high. The jubilee-a-tron says BEEP!

Our current Queen's namesake, Elizabeth I, broke with tradition considerably when she celebrated her first jubilee just 12 years after having come to power. Such premature public pageantry was less to do with her inability to count properly, and more to do with treacherous Catholics trying to bump her off so they could install Mary Queen of Scots on the throne instead. From 1570 onwards, 17 November officially became Queen's Day and as the threat from the sinister, moustache-twirling Spanish got worse, the festivities got bigger and bigger. By the 1580s, she was hosting jousting tournaments at Whitehall Palace, and the Church of England was involved in making it an legitimate Feast Day. Poor Lizzie never made it to 50 years, so the massive Golden Jubilee never happened, but she had managed to wangle 32 years' worth of annual jubilees, so could hardly complain. The jubilee-a-tron is reporting mild, prolonged activity in the X axis.

Asides from our current Queen, the two other longest-serving monarchs were King George III and Queen Victoria. George was not always in the best mental health, but in 1809 he managed to celebrate his Golden Jubilee with fireworks and a procession past St Paul's. The poor chap fell short of a Diamond Jubilee by just a few months - he died in 1820, having ruled for 59 and a half years. A decent BEEP! The undisputed champion, of course, was Victoria. She racked up a Golden and Diamond Jubilee, the latter including crowds lining the streets for six miles... an impressive feat considering she was as widely unpopular as she was widely-proportioned. The jubilee-a-tron is reporting an exceptionally high BEEEEEEEEP.

So, judging from the hype, QE2's June regatta on the Thames should beat all historical precedents hands down, and may well fry the electrical circuits in my measuring device. In many regards, however, it is something of a farewell. Though in excellent health, she may yet choose to abdicate before her age prevents her from meaningfully carrying out her public duties, so it seems possible she may not reach the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. Of course, with such an extended reign, the Queen may well count herself lucky - the Ancient Egyptians would have stuck a wolf's tail on her rear end, and had her jog around the palace to prove her fitness to rule.

This Heb Sed Festival, in which the ruler personified the lupine god Wepwawet, occurred every three years once a Pharaoh had ticked off three decades on their work calendar. The magical ritual was supposed to imbue the divine leader with the strength to carry on ruling... yet the evidence suggests (in the early years of Egyptian history) the consequences for not completing the course involved ritualised sacrifice. Now, there's an incentive to pick up the pace! Rather brilliantly, King Pepi II - famous to Horrible Histories fans as the man who invented the slave-dipped-in-honey-fly-deterrent-system - was believed to have ruled 94 years, from the age of six until he was 100. This would have meant that the unfortunate Pharaoh would have completed the high-pressure mini-marathon 24 times in his long reign, with his last being when he was 99 years old! And you thought Ryan Giggs was old...

If the Queen does choose to abdicate, a decision that thankfully will not involve being ritually disembowelled by the Archbishop of Canterbury, it still gives her no say in the choice of heir. This is where I start panicking. The Act of Settlement, passed into law in 1701, declares that the crown will pass unopposed to the eldest male heir. Though primogeniture laws are on the way out, this still will not stop Prince Charles from becoming King George VII (as is currently believed). This, I suspect, will be a disastrous move and will certainly make my republicanism stiffen again, like monarchical Viagra.

I don't care about Camilla, or the adultery, or Diana, or any of that. What worries me is Prince Charles' lengthy track-record of meddling in stuff that he is not supposed to be involved in. He has been caught 'advising' on controversial property developments, flogging dubious biscuits, promoting pseudoscience, speaking out against genetically modified crops, and has tiresome opinions on public architecture. At least when Prince Phillip is outspoken, his outlandish casual racism and sexism is gag-worthy. Prince Charles has no right under constitutional law to air any of these opinions, and when he does, they are simply dreary.

Under normal circumstances, I would be advocating the abolition of the monarchy once the Queen finishes her reign. However, there are some niggling doubts in my mind, and it may be that the most pragmatic solution is already with us. The biggest flaw in constitutional republicanism is the notion of an elected president, who can be either highly politically ideological (Sarkozy) or a sex-obsessed omni-douche (Berlusconi). The one benefit of having the Windsors is that they are, in theory, apolitical and require no incentive to do their job. They are never chasing electoral sympathies, or flip-flopping in pursuit of votes. Theirs is a duty to serve, and they step up admirably. In fact, our royal family are not politicians but, in many regards, state-sponsored celebrity endorsees. They are the public face of Britain, in the same way Martine McCutcheon is the face of yoghurt. Their job is to smile, shout "I love yoghurt/Come to Britain, it's perfectly adequate" and do nothing to embarrass the people they represent. Prince Charles did not get that memo.

So, if we the monarchy has evolved into a celebrity franchise, then surely we need the A-List celebs? In which case, we've already got some. William and Harry have transcended their awkward teens and become splendidly anodyne public-greeting machines. William has even managed to snare Kate Middleton, who seems to have been specifically hand-reared to look vaguely attractive in a dress and smile at strangers in sports halls and car parks. Between the three of them, Britain is comfortably in possession of some top notch bland, brand representatives. Unfortunately, we are hamstrung by idiotic tradition. If only we could vote for our next monarch... but I suppose that would be a very perverse fusion of two oppositional systems.

Sigh. So, for the time being, I'll be content in knowing that Queen Lizzie is doing the business, day in, day out. God Save The Queen! By which I of course mean, the NHS. Here's to 60 years of New Elizabethanism.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1434520 2012-04-19T06:51:24-04:00 2012-06-19T05:12:01-04:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
Hi, my name's Greg, and I'm embarrassed to be English...

Now, before you say anything, it's not just because of Piers Morgan. I know that is a very common reason, but my reservations lie elsewhere. Indeed, despite having lived in England my whole life, I vehemently self-identify as being half-British and half-French. Why British? Well, I know it's not very cool to admit this, but I admire the values Britain tries to embody - tolerance, mutual co-operation, multiculturalism, and the constitutional right to insult our leaders to their face. I say I'm French because my mother gets a bit pouty otherwise... and also because France goes through enjoyable phases of being brilliant at football, or bypassing mediocrity straight into operatic absurdity, with the players channelling the spirit of revolutionary heroes, and simply refusing to play. Such a blend of technical wizardry and psychological truculence is utterly riveting.

France, thankfully, is in rude health and is in the midst of an intriguingly tight election race. Whoever wins will be safe in the knowledge that the nation is not about to implode as a political construct. Alas, Britain is a union under threat, and if Scotland withdraws in 2014 then that union will likely collapse. Under such circumstances, I will be forced to call myself English. This will cause me acute concern, partially because Americans will confuse me Hugh Grant, but mostly because of this...

...I am ashamed of the St George's Cross flag.

I'll pause there, so you can fetch the kindling for my pyre...

Look, I know this is controversial, but if I am going to have to live in a modern England, I believe it should not be reflexively branded with medieval, Christian iconography. For one thing, I take umbrage at the singular, religious imagery on a political symbol intended to represent each and every citizen in this country. To be brutally frank, England simply isn't a predominantly Christian nation anymore. While we may still have an official religion - one founded 500 years ago by a misogynist hypocrite looking to weasel his way out of marriage - Anglicanism itself has been dwindling in popularity for over 150 years. Even in Victorian times, England and Wales were peopled by more non-conformists than members of the Church of England. At least that, however, was still an age of profound faith.

Today, censuses show Christianity is hovering at around 53% in Wales and England, yet a YouGov poll in 2011 showed that only half of the people who described themselves as Christians actually believed in Jesus! Despite their own protestations, I am reliably informed that believing in Christ is a basic requirement for being a Christian - the clue's in the name. These people might be better termed Humanists instead, and there's no shame in that. In fact, the YouGov sample group revealed less than a quarter of the population meets the actual criteria for being a practising Christian. It seems, therefore, that while Christianity is indeed the most common religion in this country, the vast majority of us are not Christians. Some of us are even Jedis, apparently... this logically means there are also Sith, so be on the lookout for any Death Stars in your vicinity.

Okay, so some of you will argue the English flag is part of our traditional cultural heritage. Well, so is the Union Flag (it is only called a Union Jack on a ship's mast), yet this may also be consigned to history in a couple of years. Things change, and nations evolve. South Africa created a new flag in 1994 to symbolise the end of apartheid, and other novel designs were used for the flags of Croatia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece and many, many other countries. In fact, England's flag is weird in its particular antiquity, being only a few decades younger than Denmark's, which is the oldest flag in the world. Obviously, as an historian, I do like a good bit of tradition, and I am not advocating we chuck out everything pre-dating 1945. However, I am not talking about some quaint ceremony like the changing of the guard, or judges wearing wigs. What concerns me is how we choose to advertise ourselves to the world. It is time we redesigned our national flag to reflect England as it is, not as it was.

Admittedly, this does fill me with some trepidation - recently we've been a bit crap at national branding. The London 2012 Olympics logo appears to have been the work of a robot in a jigsaw factory that developed its own artificial consciousness, suffered an existential crisis and slumped into ketamine addiction. Rather than pay some overpriced design agency, we should probably just get a Blue Peter viewer to draw a new flag with crayons and some glitter glue... Imagine our athletes proudly standing atop the podium, with a portrait of a shimmering turquoise hamster fluttering elegantly on the nearest flagpole... Okay, that's ridiculous. None of our athletes will be on top of the podium.

I jest, of course - but I am serious about the need for a new flag. Consider the flags of America and France, two nations with many more Christian citizens than us, but deliberately secular political systems - the separation of church and state are enshrined in law, and their flags were carefully designed to be emblematic of moral ideals, not religious predilection. The colours blue, white and red symbolise the virtues they wish their citizens to strive towards, while the American flag has 13 stripes to signify the original colonies, and 50 stars to represent the current states. While it is true that Americans seem to confuse a bit of fluttering fabric with a sentient being, when pledging allegiance to the star spangled banner, at least to the outside world it is a neutral statement of values. In comparison, what does our current flag say about us?

England's flag, at best, is symbolic of Christian charity and nobility - Saint George was said to have given his money to the poor, and died with admirable dignity - but at worst our flag is synonymous with the barbaric atrocities of the Holy Crusades. Have you ever wondered why England's patron saint is in fact a long dead Roman soldier who never set foot in this nation?

You can blame King Richard I, famously dubbed the Lionheart by propagandising Victorians, who adopted the red cross of St George as his official logo during the Third Crusade in the 1190s. Already, by this point, St George had been dead for 900 years, having been born in what is now Israel and executed in Turkey by the Roman Emperor Diocletian in the year 303 AD.

The execution was a particularly bloody one, and St George's martyrdom was undoubtedly brave, but his role as Roman soldier made him venerable to subsequent generations of soldiers, no matter the morality of their cause. King Richard's adoption of the cult of St George went hand in hand with his zealous butchery of innocent civilians in the Holy Land. It seems a rather cruel and insensitive gesture for us to fly the same motif from our flagpoles as Richard did while he waded through Muslim blood.

You may argue that a lot has changed since then. Well, I wish that were true. Our military personnel have thrice been recently deployed in culturally Islamic regions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), where the weight of history is felt far more profoundly than we might realise. It didn't help that our ally, President George Bush, made a cringe-inducing reference to a "Crusade" against Al Qaeda, in a speech after September 11 2001. With our troops ensconced in areas of Islamic faith, even international cricket and football matches are rendered politically inflammatory by clueless English fans donning chainmail coats and St George tabards while they chug beer and chant songs.

They see it as just a bit of fun, but this mindless perpetuation of crusading references does nothing to quell genuine anger in parts of the Middle East. If we are genuinely concerned about the safety and security of our armed forces, then it might be wise to avoid dredging up the controversies of our past. Our soldiers are trained to win over hearts and minds - that job is made harder by a tactless reminder of centuries of ideological war between Western Christianity and Eastern Islam. At present, we are the national equivalent of Basil Fawlty, reminding everyone not to mention the war, before goose-stepping through the dining room...

Of course, it is not only foreign Muslims who are wary of the St George's Cross. As a typical bleeding- heart leftie, I get skittish around the national flag because it has been appropriated by right-wing nationalists, such as the English Defence League. Confused by multiculturalism, and lost amidst the jumbo bedspread of Britishness, this political underclass is desperately trying to reassert their ethnic vision of Englishness, and they are using the national flag as a symbol of their cause. So, not only is the St George's Cross redolent of medieval war crimes, it is now synonymous with ideological groups promoting racial intolerance. How has this come about?

For me, England's complicated past is part of the problem. Historians who study this conundrum, like Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, know full well that England's history is defined by contrarian moments of peaceful toleration and violent vitriol towards other races, religions and nationalities. England welcomed the Protestant Huguenots from France, yet treated Catholics like terrorists. We lynch-mobbed the Jews and banished them in the 12th century, only to harmoniously readmit them in the 1650s. In times of panic, we have been all too quick to single out the strangers among us, blaming sinister fifth columnists for our own ills.

Both as an independent England, and as part of a larger Britain, in the past we have cast ourselves in a mythologised role as island fortress, cut off from Europe and dedicated to championing common liberty. We have viewed ourselves as Christian warriors, there to kick evil in the knackers and punch tyranny in the face - Winston Churchill even named his personal aeroplane after St George's dragon-slaying sword, Ascalon. Unlike modern, multi-cultural England, our national pride was fostered through oppositional comparison, pointing at Johnny Foreigners and making disparaging remarks about their lack of hygiene or cowardly nature (hello, France...) This is an oft-tried technique - in order to distinguish yourselves from those around you, you have to highlight and exaggerate your differences, thereby creating their 'Otherness'. Football fans are brilliant at it. Arsenal and Spurs fans share so much in common, yet would have you believe the other is a different species altogether. Today, the right-wing nationalists like the EDL are tapping into this powerful, aggressive psychology to target British Muslims, and they have co-opted our national flag to do so. Not even Oswald Mosley went that far...

As for the EDL, the startling irony is that St George is venerated by many of those foreigners they want to boot out of the country. I was in Bulgaria a few years ago, and was surprised to witness a St George's Day parade in Sofia. It turns out, St George of Lydda is the Patron Saint of seven sovereign countries, several regions, and countless cities. He is nationally revered in places as far away as Brazil, Palestine, Greece, Ethiopia and, obviously, Georgia. While I cheerfully applaud the ironic fact our national saint is in fact a foreigner, I'm not entirely convinced the right-wing nationalists actually realise this. I get the feeling they believe St George was a plumber from Essex, who went around slaying dragons in Epping Forest at the weekends. Alas, the later medieval story of the dragon slaying is set in Libya, and it is highly unlikely that St George of Lydda shopped at Lidl.

You will, by this point, have realised that I am not simply advocating the flag be changed - I would also like to do away with St George's Day. That is not to say I want to banish all mention of the man. While I find it slightly odd that he has been elevated above indigenously English martyr saints, such as St Alphege, St Edmund, Charles I and St Alban, that is the Church's prerogative. If they want to venerate him as England's leading saint, it's fine by me.

My argument, however, is with national civic veneration of St George. We don't even hold a national Bank Holiday in his name on 23 April. As a country, England assigns more credence to Jedward's choice of hair gel than our official Saint's day. Say what you will about the cynical marketing of St Patrick's Day, but at least the Irish give a damn. St George's Day is an arthritic tradition plugged into an iron lung - it is being artificially kept alive by a weary band of romantics, fearful of a faceless, anodyne England. Many of those who take part in the muted celebrations do so out of an obligated sense of tradition, while the rest of us can't even have the day off so we can ceremonially wheel out the barbecue and eat undercooked burgers in the April drizzle. As a national hero, St George simply doesn't mean enough to us anymore.

The Americans take a day to celebrate Christopher Columbus and their many Presidents, while this year the French are dedicating all sorts of festivities to the 600th birthday of Joan of Arc, who freed them from English rule. Columbus, Lincoln, Joan of Arc - these were real people, whose actions shaped the development of their respective nations. St George may have existed, but the English can hardly pound the streets of Slough, united in joyous song at the slaying of local dragons by our borrowed knight in shining armour. Not even the The Sunday Sport believes in dragons, these days...

Personally, I am not a great advocate of overt patriotism, because it does tend to lurch towards jingoism in times of uncertainty - all that flag-waving has a propensity to suddenly become feral xenophobia. It is hard not to recall the bizarre ostracism of French fries in America, when the invasion of Iraq failed to win Gallic approval. When Britain did the same to German products in WW1 (including rebranding the royal family as The Windsors), at least we were actually at war with them. However, it seems clear to me that England does need a hero, of sorts, and a national day of unity is a healthy notion if it can be made truly inclusive for all our citizens. St George has clearly lost his razzamatazz, and I think that may be because England is not once what it was.

As a society, we have matured in our self-perception. St George is a martial saint, whose name was once proclaimed by heroic medieval kings before the commencement of battles. God was an Englishman, they opined, and St George would lead the charge. But we have shrugged off our jingoistic faith in the almighty's love for Albion, and our sense of military romance has long since evaporated. The glory days of Waterloo, Trafalgar, and Agincourt have lost their patriotic patina in these pan-European times. Today, war is cruel - robbing soldiers of life and limb as they patrol dusty roads, destined only to see fleeting glimpses of their enemy before a bomb tears off their legs. There are no thin red lines or valiant sieges anymore. Our soldiers are esteemed professionals, and their heroism is undoubted, but England has lost its taste for war. The Falklands was the last hurrah - now, we soberly honour the fallen far more than we boisterously rejoice in military victory.

For this reason, I suspect the time for soldier saints is over. However, there are many great other English men and women in the tea-drinking, warm-beer pantheon that could replace St George. In my opinion, there is one who stands tall above the rest. St George's Day shares its date with the death (and possible birth) of the world's finest dramatist, William Shakespeare. If ever there were a man who positively represented England, then surely it is the bard? He came from common stock, rose to acclaim through talent and graft, gifted our language with 1700 new words, and summarised the human condition in all its glorious and absurd facets. In his writings, there are traits recognisable to every one of us, no matter our age, race, gender, religion or politics. He is known and admired around the world, and he is quintessentially and unquestionably English.

I don't know about you, but I'll be celebrating Shakespeare Day on 23 April... unless you really have built a funeral pyre for me.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1406355 2012-04-05T19:00:00-04:00 2012-06-05T05:12:01-04:00

Greg Jenner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-jenner/
In fact, Easter is just one of many confusingly indistinct holidays that blend weird paganism, Christian theology, and modern marketing into a seamless melange of oddly abutting practices and customs. Christmas and Halloween are equally strange, and are growing in popularity despite an increasingly secular world, so how much of Easter really is Christian in origin? It may be more than you realise.

Easter is, of course, an extremely reverential period for Christians around the world, as they commemorate the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. But the nomenclature of the festival is entirely pagan, and has nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever. It is generally agreed by historians that Eostre was a pagan goddess in the Saxon religion, possibly associated with the dawn and the bringing of light. Put simply, she was the harbinger of spring after the long cold winter. As harbingers go, she was way more popular than Doom and Sorrow, who were total and utter berks that nobody liked... not even their mums.

Pagan beliefs are hard to identify clearly in the historical record, but we know of Eostre thanks to the Venerable Bede, a brilliant monastic scholar who documented the transition from paganism to Christianity in Dark Ages England. He was pretty vague on how Eostre was celebrated by the Saxons, but it seems to have been a fertility rite. This would make sense, what with all the lambs being born, and flowers blooming... Of course, the story of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection fitted rather snugly into the pagan model of death (winter) followed by rebirth (spring), meaning the Church could effectively bolt the former onto the latter without angering too many heavily-armed bearded warriors.

Superimposing Christian rites onto pagan traditions was hugely successful for the Church, as you will notice by the dating of Christmas to the same week as Roman Saturnalia, but the consequence was a certain fuzziness in how people behaved. Historians dub it 'syncretism', while cynics prefer 'hedging your bets'. In any case, early medieval Christians clung onto some quirkily pagan habits. My favourite is this 'spell' for fertile crops...

1) At night, dig up four clumps of soil from the four corners of the field
2) Then take a sample of every grass, herb, tree in the field, and add it to milk from every cow, and honey from every bee hive.
3) Now add holy water to this concoction, and drip it in the holes...
4) Now sing an incantation, asking them to grow.
5) Now sing the Lord's Prayer, several times
6) Now take the four clumps of earth into the church, and get your local priest to sing four masses... one for each clump
7) Now get four crucifixes and write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on them. Place the crucifixes in the holes you have dug, and shout 'Grow!' nine times
8) Now sing the Lord's Prayer nine times
9) Now turn east, bow and say a prayer
10) Now turn around clockwise three times, and then lie prostrate on the ground while chanting about your lovely green fields
11) Now bless the plough and bless the seed
12) Now plough a furrow, and place a cake of honey and milk in it.
13) Well done, you now have a fertile field!

This enormously elaborate ritual has all the hallmarks of a pagan fertility rite, except with the not-very-subtle substitution of pagan gods for the Gospel-writers. It's as if farmers just clicked 'Find & Replace' on their laptops and figured God probably wouldn't care. It seems that a relatively lax attitude by parish priests meant that switching from paganism to Catholicism was the equivalent of changing your electricity provider - a bit of a nuisance, but ultimately you could still power the dishwasher.

However, the switchover was not as simple as that at an institutional level. For starters, the wider Christian Church was in total in disarray over when Easter should be observed. In the early 2nd Century, there were some who celebrated it on the Jewish festival of Passover, on the 14th day of the moon. This had the habit of landing on random days of the week, which didn't seem suitably sacred. Apparently, Tuesdays just didn't cut it when it came to miracles... (Incidentally, our days of the week are still named after pagan gods - Mona, Tiw, Woden, Thunor, Freya, Saturn, Sunne) Soon after, Syriac Christians suggested Easter should fall on the Sunday after Passover. In 325AD, the Council of Nicaea decided to enforce this worldwide... unfortunately, they had not counted on Britain failing dismally to tow the European line (sound familiar?)

When St Augustine arrived in Canterbury in 597AD, having been sent to convert this pagan isle to Christianity on the back of a terrible pun from the Pope ("not Angles but Angels!"), he discovered the Irish Church had decided on its own dating of Easter. The confusion reigned for another 70 years, with one famous Saxon victim being Queen Eanflaed who was forced to watch her hubby, King Osway, stuff his face at an Easter banquet while she was still fasting during Lent. It seems the King and Queen were on separate calendars - she Roman, and he Irish. The Roman calendar finally won out in 664AD at the Synod of Whitby. Today Whitby is known for its excellent fish and chips, and a weird legend about Dracula... I'm not sure if they are connected but it seems unlikely.

So, do we today celebrate Easter on that day declared by the Council of Nicaea? Nope! Yet more tinkering, this time in the late 16th century, saw Western Europe switch to the Gregorian Calendar instead of the Julian Calendar. So, now West and East were on different systems again... except, typically, Britain once again caused confusion by refusing to jump to the Gregorian system until 150 years later, when it found itself having to drop 12 days from September to catch up... meaning September 2nd was followed by the 14th. Sigh. In short, this now means that Easter can fall on one of 35 days, and the computation has become more complicated than trying to assemble an Ikea space-station.

To add yet more chaos into the mix, Easter has now become synonymous with chocolate eggs and rabbits. On the face of it, this seems as logical as declaring Christmas the yoghurt festival, and having Santa's sled pulled by newts. Yet, there is a curious obviousness to both of these interlopers.

Rabbits are often said to be fecund little critters, frequently noted to be shagging like... well, rabbits. Oddly, this extraordinary sexual fertility was interpreted in ancient science as the exact opposite - goodness knows why, but it was thought that rabbits and hares were hermaphrodites who could impregnate themselves. This gave them a slightly weird association with virginity, which the Christian Church soon picked up on. Surprisingly for such rampant humpers, hares and rabbits became animal ciphers for the Virgin Mary in medieval Christian art. Of course, to the slightly backwards Saxon syncretists who were still prostrating themselves on their fields and chanting gibberish to their crops, animals noted for their constant reproduction made perfect sense for an Easter fertility association.

Eggs, in theory, have nowt to do with Jesus. He didn't have to climb out of one, like in that weird bit in The Matrix. Yet, in the Greek Church it is said Mary Magdalene brought boiled eggs to the tomb of Jesus, to feed the other mourners, and when the tomb was found to be open the eggs miraculously turned blood red. A second story states Mary was proclaiming the resurrection to Pontius Pilate when his eggs also turned red, upon his refusal to believe her. These stories may be apocryphal, but they carry a weight that has lasted through history. The tradition of egg-painting, particularly in the colour red, is still very common in Eastern and Central Europe - and there are charming ceremonies where baskets of eggs are blessed by the priests.

You may be wondering where does the egg-eating come into it? Well, in the medieval era eggs were considered to be dairy products (they were derived from animals without causing harm or the spilling of blood) so they were banned for Lent. This gave them a tinge of luxury when the 40 days of fasting was over... people were eager to eat them again. Don't worry, I'll refrain from making a terrible egg-citement pun. Oh, crap. Sorry.

Of course, as always, eggs are the most blindingly obvious symbol of fertility and neatly tie into the pagan Eostre. It is easy to forget in this age of battery chickens that medieval hens only laid from spring to autumn - the Saxons would have had every right to associate Easter with the arrival of eggs. Indeed, to this day there are still curious local Easter traditions such as egg-rolling (where eggs are rolled down hills) and egg-tapping (basically a game of conkers, but with hard-boiled eggs). It's hard to know how ancient these are, but they are certainly pre-date the modern age.

In the 19th Century, Father Christmas evolved into Santa Claus with the express purpose of educating children about divine morality - if you're good, you get a reward. He's basically a training-wheels version of God for kids too young to comprehend an invisible deity. In the 17th Century, a similar thing seems to have happened in Germany with the Easter Bunny. This anthropomorphic personification appears to be almost entirely pagan in concept (it's also really, really weird - a mammal that lays eggs? They should have called it the Easter Platypus...) However, the Easter Bunny (actually, it's a hare in Germany) rewarded only the well-behaved boys and girls, teaching them to be moral and Christian. It became popular worldwide once it was taken to America and spread outside of the German communities of Pennsylvania.

Of course, modern Britain is becoming increasingly secular and many of the religious overtones of Easter are being forgotten. Ironically, it seems to be returning to a springtime fertility festival, where we eat roast lamb and spread daffodils around the house. Yet the Christian elements are very much there, even if they seem to be entirely nonsensical upon first glance.

So, in short, Easter has continued its relevance for more than two millennia, and thanks to the invention of chocolate, it doesn't look likely to vanish anytime soon. As an unashamed chocolate fiend, I for one am very glad...]]>