Community living

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 7th January 2009

Kate Chisholm reviews recents radio broadcasts

Phew! Normal service has been resumed. No more panto; no more guest editors forcing Evan, Jim, Ed and Sarah into embarrassingly coy interviews with Karl Lagerfeld et al.; no more year-end reviews of the year behind and portentous glimpses of the year ahead. I don’t know why every year we have to go through this rigmarole. Does anyone really want, or dare, to look back even for a moment? As for the future, for once I’m really intrigued and even excited by what lies ahead. No one can say where this economic downturn might lead, or how long it will last. All the experts are just as baffled as us ordinary mortals. I used to worry that I could never understand what the financial experts were saying; now I know I needn’t have bothered. Natural forces have reasserted themselves. The world is full of mystery. One thing, though, is for sure: we’re all in for hard times. Maybe, just maybe, this might not be such a bad thing, as guest editor Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor discussed with the PM on Today last week. In that rare thing, an interview that was truly inquiring despite being non-confrontational, the Cardinal and Gordon Brown between them agreed that our current difficulties might encourage us to return to a more community-based lifestyle, with a renewed interest in local societies and volunteer groups.

There’s no harm in dreaming, as the Revd Canon Dr Jane Shaw illustrated in her series of talks on The Utopian Dream — and its Disappointments for The Essay on Radio Three. She grew up ‘in community’ because her father was the Master of the Great Hospital in Norwich, originally founded in 1249 for the care of the sick and the poor and now a cluster of flats and cottages for those over 65 built around a chapel and cloister. The experience has shaped her life and she now lives and works as a don at New College, Oxford, practising community by living in college while researching the extraordinary variety of ways in which communities have chased the ever-elusive utopian ideal.

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