Caistor October 2013

On Thursday of last week Tove, my wife, and I flew from Tirstrup Airport in Denmark to Stansted Airport in England. From there we drove a hire car for about 3 hours northwards. We arrived at my parents house, my old home, in Caistor, Lincolnshire about 4pm that afternoon.

The reason for the, long overdue, visit was that my father has been ill - he developed heart problems and has been in hospital to have a defibrillator fitted. He came home the day before we arrived.

On the evening we arrived he did not look well, but thank goodness he has improved very slowly each day. It is, as I said, a slow process but it is going in the right direction.

The biggest problem for him is that he must rest and he is a very active man. He finds it irritating and frustrating that he cannot get up and do things like he did. My father is 82, my mother is 81.

They are coping very well, and they have the support of many, many wonderful friends and family. However, they are very independent and are not good at asking for, or accepting, help.

It can be frustrating for me to be so far away at this time.

What was really good, and also interesting, was the strength of the local, informal, community. This network of friends is there when needed, but not intrusive. The network exists as a web of informal and interpersonal relationships that ignores the socioeconomic roles that the specific individuals in the network have. I would like to study this more.

It was also very nice, and nostalgic, to visit the house that had been my home from the age of 14 years. And to take a drive around the Lincolnshire countryside I knew so well. The countryside that, in some ways, made me who I am. But it was not just the countryside, but the social network and 'culture' of that specific place and time that made me who I am.

We came back today. Leaving Caistor at 2am today and driving back to Stansted, where we flew back to Tirstrup. We both enjoyed the trip very, very much. It is a little stressing to return to daily working life again.

Here are a few photographs of people who are very important to me.

CAISTOR

As I will soon be travelling back to England, to my home town, I thought I would write a little bit about the place. I regard it as my home town, although I was 14 years old when my parents moved there. That is 46 years ago, and they are still there.

My home town is CAISTOR, in Lincolnshire, England. It is a very old town, as the name implies. 'Caistor' stems from the Anglo-Saxon ”ceastre” (which meant a camp or a settlement) which in turn stems from the Latin 'castra', or camp. All English place names that include castor, caistor, caister, chester, cester and so on have the same roots. This suggests the presence of a Roman camp as the origin of the place. There remains a tiny bit of 4th Century CE Roman wall visible near the Church and a 4^th Century Roman cemetery was discovered in 2010.

Some years ago it was claimed that post holes from a 1^st Century Roman Legionary marching camp were found. However, I have heard no more of this. It is not impossible that a temporary camp was there much earlier, giving rise to the civil settlement later.

Legend has it that it was Legio IX Hispana that was based there briefly in the 1^st Century. This is the so-called 'lost legion'. This legion was certainly based in the permanent fortress at York by 108 CE. York is just an hours drive north-west of Caistor. This legion had ceased to exist by the 150's and there are many theories about this.

Caistor also appears in the Domsday Book that was completed in 1086 for William the Conqueror. It is called 'Castre' in the Domesday Book.

More of its earlier history is little known. It was an agricultural settlement and market town. In the late 17^th Century a serious fire destroyed much of the town and most of the buildings in the centre today date from this period.

After the emergence of Methodism in the 18^th Century, which began at Epworth in Lincolnshire where the Wesley brothers were born, Caistor became known as a hotbed of Methodism, and regarded as a rather radical place. It must be remembered that Caistor was an 'urban' centre in the midst of a very traditional rural society. How 'urban' it was I don't know, the population today is about 2,700.

The Grammar School, which I attended, was founded in 1633. The original school was used as the school hall when I attended. Dawn French, the actress, attended the school 1969 to 1970, when I was there. However, she is younger than me and I certainly don’t remember her. Sir Henry John Newbolt, (1862 – 1938) the poet and David Ricardo (1772 – 1823) the political economist both attended the school.

The RAF had a base just outside Caistor during World War 2, as a training school and maintenance unit. This was closed in 1945, but used by the air force again from 1959 to 1963 by No. 269 Squadron RAF with PGM-17 Thor missiles. I don't remember that, but the area is still referred to by locals as the 'rocket site.'

We moved to Caistor in September 1967, I was 14 and my brother was 11. We moved from a tiny dot of a village to the 'big city' of Caistor. It was the first, and only, house my father has ever bought. The house was built in 1749 by a farmer. When he died it was divided into 3 houses by his 3 sons, and my parents own the largest of these. The original interior has, of course, long since been ripped out and modernised. That happened before my father bought it. But the brickwork is original.

Well, Tove and I will be staying there Thursday to Monday night, sleeping in my old bedroom. 

The future

On Thursday Tove and I travel to England to visit my parents, especially my dad. He is having a pacemaker fitted later today and could be home tomorrow. So I won't be getting much clever stuff done on here for a while. 

However my interests are very broad and, of course, at a fairly amateur level despite wide reading and a curious mind. 

So who knows what may appear?

Goodbye to an era .... sort of.

I have decided to end my association with 'Facebook' and close down my FB page. I have done this for very personal reasons that I will not discuss.

I will miss it to some extent, of that I am sure. I have met some very interesting people there. However, it has taken up too much of my time, mental energy and 'focus' at times. If I want to say things in future it will be here.

This will be a place where I could write anything. I have no theme in mind, and the title gives only a very vague idea really. I ended up with that title because all the 'meaningful' ones I tried were taken.

SO - see you here ... maybe :)

General Thoughts.

What do religious and political belief systems have in common?

1. Often, a founding figure and/or a group of key figures – who is/are beyond criticism.

2. Often, a central text, texts or documents.

3. Saints and sinners.

4. A strong tendency to fragment into a variety of groups – often intensely hostile to each other.

5. Traitors, heroes, heretics – mythic figures.

6. A mythic history or origin myth.

7. A strong tendency to require followers to accept the mythic apparatus.

8. Varying degrees of sanction for those who deviate from the central myth.

9. Often an iconography and a symbolic vocabulary.

10. A tendency to ignore , reject or adapt facts that are contrary to the central mythos.

11. A strong tendency to ignore reason and scientific realism.

12. An acceptable 'vocabulary of motivations' (great concept that – thank you C. Wright Mills.)

It was a dissatisfaction with the 'anti-realism' of religion that led me to choose atheism many, many years ago. All I have learned since then is plenty of other good reasons to be an atheist and none at all to be religious, or that modern cop out 'spiritual'.

I am beginning to see a similar development in my attitude to political ideologies.

I grew up in rural England in the 50's and 60's, the eldest child in a family of traditional British conservatives. By traditional British conservative I mean in the tradition of Churchill or MacMillan, not Margaret Thatcher. Politics was not an issue in my family, things were as they were. As a teenager I became a more or less traditional supporter of the Labour Party. Again, this was the 'traditional' Labour Party of Harold Wilson. Essentially a social democratic party with socialist tendencies. The modern Labour Party bears no resemblance to the Party I supported at that time.

I arrived at university in October 1974, and very quickly moved to the political left. I flirted with the Socialist Workers Party for a while and was, in general, a Marxist. The early 1970's were, still, marked by the radicalism of the 60's, especially in the university world. So I lived in a very politicised atmosphere, and it was wonderful. Many late night discussions, debates and arguments.

Yes, it was a lively place, the University of Essex in the mid-70's.

However, the point of this is not to present a detailed history of my university days, as interesting as that might be, for me at least.

What I have come to realise is that all 'ideologies' share most or all of the random list of features above. In fact, belief or value systems that exhibit these features could be defined as 'ideologies'. This includes just about all political and religious systems of thought.

And I cannot, personally, tolerate them any more.

I learned long ago that one cannot argue with religious true believers and that one encounters the same long list of logical fallacies in their 'arguments' and the same denial of empirical evidence.

It has slowly dawned on me over the last 20 odd years that one encounters exactly the same problems within political discourse. It has only been a sort of 'faith' on my part that has kept me 'believing'.

Recognising the faith based nature of my political views and recognising the element of 'belief' involved finally led me to reject all such systems of though as essentially special pleading, distortions of reality, power games and egoism.

I am in the process of trying to put all this together into a much better and better documented and argued piece. I am aware of the many problems this unearths and the potential philosophical issues I may have to tackle.

We, as rationalists, cannot and must not use the same flawed methods in our argumentation. We must be much less sure of ourselves and much more humble.

I have taken up a position of nihilism (which is, I think, a respectable position to take). I am in the process, as stated, of, in effect, justifying that position.

British?

I have noticed that I have a strong tendency to refer to myself a 'English' rather than 'British' and that my homeland is 'England' rather than 'Britain'. I wonder why that it. I do identify myself quite strongly as 'English', but I have never really thought through why that is so.

Personal News

My father is in hospital over in England. He was admitted last week with cardiac arrhythmia and discharged again on Sunday. He was admitted again yesterday. I have spoken to the hospital and his pulse is normal right now, but they are keeping him for tests and so on. His pulse has varied between 30 and 350 bpm. We are hoping to go over soon - I must see him. My father means a very great deal to me.

The first day

Today is Tuesday 15th October 2013. I have started this blogging lark once or twice before, but never got anywhere much with it. However, having been blocked by Facebook yet again I thought that I would try once more. If I can use an hour or two on Facebook I should be able to do so here.