Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

The Spectator's notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

Charles Moore's thoughts on the week

This week, my family celebrated a century of continuous occupation of the house in Sussex where my sister now lives. The place came into the family in the 19th century, but was let to the Church of England Temperance Society as a home for 38 ‘adult male inebriates’ until my great-grandfather and his second wife reclaimed it. Their reoccupation is commemorated by a carved panel in the dining room which quotes the first line of the 127 Psalm — ‘Except the Lord build the house, their labour is but lost that build it’ — in Latin. The couple’s initials are picked out from the rest of text in gilt and the date — MCMVII — is shown by raised lettering. By chance, 38 of us — only a minority of us adult, male and inebriate — sat down to lunch on Sunday. The obvious point that the first half of the century traversed had been very, very much harder than the second struck me. Two world wars had killed one man in the family, wounded and imprisoned two others, and made life poorer and tougher for the rest. This explains the sense of a golden past lost which I remember from growing up in the 1960s. The English educated classes are very unusual in history in having led a life in the past more secure and attractive than the one they experienced for most of the 20th century, so their folk memory is quite different from that of 99 per cent of the population of the world, which links the past with poverty and oppression. But although we tend to think of the present as pretty dreary, I suspect it will look very good compared with most of what history brings. In some respects, 2007 in Britain is like 1907 — rich and peaceful and fairly free, but with threats to European civilisation becoming darker. The second line of Psalm 127 ‘Except the Lord keep the city: the watchman waketh but in vain’ may prove relevant. Will our descendants reunite in the same place in 2107?

1 | 2 | 3 Next page