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Merry Christmas ya filthy animals!

MartyFunkhouser said:
You too fella
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The Brilliant David Starky


Merry Christmas and thank you to all those who have followed my work over the last year.


While celebrating at my home in Kent, I’ve been thinking about what this season really means, and how it might relate to the ideas I talk about it on David Starkey Talks.


I was raised as a Quaker, before becoming in my later years a quite determined atheist. It was probably a product of my rebellion against good causes and a love of heresy - that thirst for heterodoxy that, in my view, drives all progress.


Nonetheless as I get older my atheism becomes increasingly sentimental. I regard concentrated thinking, of a kind I do when I write my books or come up with ideas, as a form of prayer. I’m also highly susceptible to the power of place, and I hear the echoes of Christianity when I walk in Churches, or visit Oxbridge, reflecting on those wonderful lines from T.S. Eliot in his poem 'Little Gidding':


A people without history, is not redeemed from time,
For History is a pattern of timeless moments,
So while the light fails on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel,
History is now and England.


Let’s think about that for a moment. A people without history. Who was it, back at the turn of the millennium, who told us here in Britain, that we, whose politics stretched back for more than a thousand years, were a new country? A country, in other words, without a history.


It was Tony Blair, and indeed he sought to make it so, imposing upon us an alien constitution under which we still labour, and actually changing the population into an amorphous blob of world citizens; loyal to nothing, grateful to nothing, sharing in nothing.


And yet what does T.S. Eliot go on to say, that even a people without history are NOT redeemed from time. You see, having studied history my entire life; having indeed, made my life out of history, one realises that even in those periods when we think nothing is happening, history marches on.


Even for those who think they’re controlling events, shaping the world, “shaking the kaleidoscope” as Mr Blair would put it, history is busily working away behind them, marshalling its forces, slowly working its course as a river does.


We here in Britain are not redeemed from time. It might have taken a quarter of a century, but the terrible effects of the changes imposed upon us by Tony Blair and New Labour have become clear for everyone to see. And the reaction to those changes is growing every day. I’ve spent this year trying to spread the word about those effects. And, if it’s not too grandiose, I do regard it as evangelisation.


History is about cause and effect. And people have to know that there is a cause behind the things that are bringing ruin upon this country, and that if something has been done then it can be undone. That has been my mission, and it will be my mission next year and for as many years after that as I can reach.


But if there’s one point of the year uncorrupted by the Soviet clasp of Blairism and New Labour politics, then surely it must be Christmas time. The Christmas season here in England is an accumulation of tradition that even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown dared not interfere with.


Of course we got the shallow reinterpretations of the season by court playwrights like Richard Curtis. But nothing to compare with the great suffusion of meaning we feel when we decorate the Christmas trees (introduced to this country by Prince Albert), enjoy Boxing Day football, a time for the working classes to relax and attend sports - indeed codified as such by the 1871 Bank Holidays Act - or listen to the carols which have filled the Churches of this land going all the way back to before there was an England.


Christmas is a time when we see the traditions of England alive and well, and for a moment we can imagine a country animated by its own spirit, not a foreign one; a country at ease with itself; a country of shared pleasures and obligations.


No people is redeemed from time, as T.S. Eliot warns us, but perhaps if there is a point of the year when time does stop, or simply takes a break, it’s Christmas.


I wish you, and your loved ones, the merriest of Christmases, and look forward to reconnecting with you in the New Year.
 
Danishfurniturelover said:
The Brilliant David Starky


Merry Christmas and thank you to all those who have followed my work over the last year.


While celebrating at my home in Kent, I’ve been thinking about what this season really means, and how it might relate to the ideas I talk about it on David Starkey Talks.


I was raised as a Quaker, before becoming in my later years a quite determined atheist. It was probably a product of my rebellion against good causes and a love of heresy - that thirst for heterodoxy that, in my view, drives all progress.


Nonetheless as I get older my atheism becomes increasingly sentimental. I regard concentrated thinking, of a kind I do when I write my books or come up with ideas, as a form of prayer. I’m also highly susceptible to the power of place, and I hear the echoes of Christianity when I walk in Churches, or visit Oxbridge, reflecting on those wonderful lines from T.S. Eliot in his poem 'Little Gidding':


A people without history, is not redeemed from time,
For History is a pattern of timeless moments,
So while the light fails on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel,
History is now and England.


Let’s think about that for a moment. A people without history. Who was it, back at the turn of the millennium, who told us here in Britain, that we, whose politics stretched back for more than a thousand years, were a new country? A country, in other words, without a history.


It was Tony Blair, and indeed he sought to make it so, imposing upon us an alien constitution under which we still labour, and actually changing the population into an amorphous blob of world citizens; loyal to nothing, grateful to nothing, sharing in nothing.


And yet what does T.S. Eliot go on to say, that even a people without history are NOT redeemed from time. You see, having studied history my entire life; having indeed, made my life out of history, one realises that even in those periods when we think nothing is happening, history marches on.


Even for those who think they’re controlling events, shaping the world, “shaking the kaleidoscope” as Mr Blair would put it, history is busily working away behind them, marshalling its forces, slowly working its course as a river does.


We here in Britain are not redeemed from time. It might have taken a quarter of a century, but the terrible effects of the changes imposed upon us by Tony Blair and New Labour have become clear for everyone to see. And the reaction to those changes is growing every day. I’ve spent this year trying to spread the word about those effects. And, if it’s not too grandiose, I do regard it as evangelisation.


History is about cause and effect. And people have to know that there is a cause behind the things that are bringing ruin upon this country, and that if something has been done then it can be undone. That has been my mission, and it will be my mission next year and for as many years after that as I can reach.


But if there’s one point of the year uncorrupted by the Soviet clasp of Blairism and New Labour politics, then surely it must be Christmas time. The Christmas season here in England is an accumulation of tradition that even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown dared not interfere with.


Of course we got the shallow reinterpretations of the season by court playwrights like Richard Curtis. But nothing to compare with the great suffusion of meaning we feel when we decorate the Christmas trees (introduced to this country by Prince Albert), enjoy Boxing Day football, a time for the working classes to relax and attend sports - indeed codified as such by the 1871 Bank Holidays Act - or listen to the carols which have filled the Churches of this land going all the way back to before there was an England.


Christmas is a time when we see the traditions of England alive and well, and for a moment we can imagine a country animated by its own spirit, not a foreign one; a country at ease with itself; a country of shared pleasures and obligations.


No people is redeemed from time, as T.S. Eliot warns us, but perhaps if there is a point of the year when time does stop, or simply takes a break, it’s Christmas.


I wish you, and your loved ones, the merriest of Christmases, and look forward to reconnecting with you in the New Year.
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I am unsure where you go with all this nonsense

You were one of the last to wish people a Happy Christmas and then complain to those that have already that its a taboo.
 
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