Cooke and Ustinov

Alastair Cooke has died. And two days earlier, Sir Peter Ustinov. All the icons of my boyhood are slip-slip-sliding away.

I've been wondering why it was that Ustinov did so little with his supposedly vast talent, and I think it was because his view of human nature was just too rosy for the times. He believed (as Cooke did too) in the supremacy and triumph of reason. He was (and there's nothing the 20th century hated more) a sentimentalist.

Saint Barbara

In 1969 the Vatican suppressed the cult of a number of legendary saints, including St Barbara (whom my character May Visconti has adopted as her patron.) This was high-handed of them. They argued that Barbara and all the others had never been real people. Well, yes, but it is a well established principle of magic that anything that is the recipient of worship or prayer becomes real. Vatican II moved the Catholic Church away from magic and paganism- and weakened it in the process. I have some sympathy (tempered with disgust) for those (like Mel Gibson's dad) who rebelled against this.

 

Here is a list of Barbara's responsibilities (borrowed from The Catholic Community Forum) against death by artillery, against explosions, against fire, against impenitence, against lightning, against mine collapse, against storms, ammunition magazines, ammunition workers, architects, armourers, artillery, artillerymen, boatmen, bomb technicians, brass workers, brewers, builders, carpenters, construction workers, dying people, explosives workers, fire, fire prevention, firefighters, fireworks, fireworks manufacturers, fortifications, founders, geologists, gravediggers, gunners, hatmakers, hatters, lightning, mariners, martyrs, masons, mathematicians, military engineers, milliners, miners, ordnance workers, prisoners, safety from storms, sailors, saltpetre workers, smelters, stone masons, stonecutters, storms, sudden death, Syria, tilers, warehouses, watermen.