Drays of doubt

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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29 April

When there is a shortage of water in (parts of) the UK, let's spare a thought for those counties that, in past centuries, were so unshakable in their beliefs that they got stuck in a rut, and, not unlike the Wednesbury lot who (at my hands, too) get such stick for coming to that famously unreasonable decision that no one could reasonably have made*, were worryingly in danger of binding themselves in hide.

The drastic solution was to seed this rigid application of rules and principles (and to hell with the consequences), a bit as one might a patch of ice with salt. So government-sponsored orators would go around, on the back of waggons, proclaiming alternative viewpoints, and arguing for a Grey between the Black and White. (Dr, later Dean, Jonathan Swift - although not one of these orators himself - wrote scripts for them to memorize and employ.)

Of course, some counties were so entrenched in their views, that all this achieved nothing, and the orators were hanged or stoned, and thus - as no one has dared since to send anyone into the vineyard (oops! different topic, as that's a parable) - we have modern Britain, where angels fear to tread in such homelands of dogma, discrimination and dis-ease***.


QED


End-notes

* Yes, how that decision is described** is a bit like divorce, and the behaviour that is so unreasonable that the other party could not reasonably be expected to tolerate it, except that almost any marriage will have given rise to events that are sufficient to flesh out the required particulars for a judge to certify that a divorce can proceed - broadly speaking, first, last and worst, plus a few others.

It must be said, a soul-destroying task, both for the person drawing up those particulars, and for the one reading them, even if both may be (as, respectively, solicitor / legal executive and judge) paid to do it... Pay does not make pleasant the unpalatable, as Seneca declaimed - but it does help!

** If memory serves aright, it was something to do with licensing a cinema, of all things.

*** As Stephen Potter would have called it.


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