Friday 30 November 2012
Friday 23 November 2012
Thursday 25 October 2012
single most important
I ask myself : What is the single most important thing in your life so far?
My answer is clear and beyond any doubt : Being born to parents who were practising Christian Spiritualists. Both were psychic, healers, and public speakers.
I was dimly aware of this even while I was still in my elementary school, My mother could explain to me, quietly and simply, the nature of the resurrected Jesus on that first Sunday in the garden after the crucifixion. My school teacher, who had introduced us to the Bible story that morning, had no explanation beyond the bare words of the text in the King James Version. My mother spoke to me of materialisation, how “Touch me not” and a lack of recognition indicated a process developing but not yet complete. That was quite sufficient for me in those very early days.
When I was just ten years old - this was at the beginning of 1938 – we started to go to a little Spiritualist Church in the front room on the first floor of a building along the Harrow Road. My mother and my father often conducted the service. I played the harmonium to accompany the singing of the hymns. And it was here I first began to experience the powerful reality of psychic energy and to make my first tentative steps as a clairvoyant.
My brother and I spent the summer holidays of 1939 with an aunt and uncle in South Wales. After the Prime Minister’s broadcast on Sunday 3 September we stayed there until it was relatively safe for us to return to London for the autumn term of 1942.
By the following January, my life was settled into a pattern that was to be repeated with variations for much of the rest of my life.
My daytime job, as it were, was as a sixth former at Mercers’ School in the City of London. Here I sometimes played the organ for morning assembly. The hymns sung and the prayers spoken were constituents of a sort of noncommittal English Gentleman’s practice of Christianity. Social acts which began each school day because this was the recognised code of behaviour. There was never any sense of connection with anything beyond the school hall. Natural but never supernatural.
On Saturdays I was a Special Talent Exhibitioner in the Junior School of the Royal Academy of Music.
And on Sundays, at fifteen years of age, I was the organist and choirmaster for St Peter’s Church in Fulham. It was my initial introduction to High Mass and Solemn Evensong with Benediction within the orbit of the Church of England. It was very different from anything I had previously experienced. I may not have realised it at the time, but there was a palpable sense of reverence for the Real Presence amid the sumptuous celebrations of the liturgical action. A completely different atmosphere from the nonconformist services of my younger days.
Mercers’, the RAM, and St Peter’s, Fulham, was my life in the outside world. Life at home had a special quality of its own. Activities conducted in private and in contact with ‘the other side’.
On one evening each week I sat with my parents and a colleague in a séance devoted to spirit photography. As part of the proceedings my mother moved into deep trance so that a guide from the spirit world could use her voice to communicate. In the course of time the trance element of our séances grew in importance. We opened our doors to a rather larger number of people and a regular guide from a higher level of consciousness channelled his spiritual wisdom in the form of a general address followed by individual guidance for each one of us in turn.
We had a little party for my seventeenth birthday on December 5th, 1944, and a few weeks later I was a full-time student at the Royal Academy of Music.
Days at the RAM were bliss. It was easy to make friends. We were young professional musicians working together.
On Sundays, as a professional musician, I played the organ for Church of England services. I was devoted to my job. Determined to provide the best possible music to complement the Book of Common Prayer and to contribute to those communal acts which were Mattins and Evensong. There was a sense in which each congregation was its own social entity. Yes, our prayers were addressed to ‘Our Father, which art in heaven’ but the deity was, at best, so distant as to be almost out of range. It was not until much later I began to appreciate how the banishing of the reality of the Divine Sacrament had left an empty void which was hard to fill with any sense of the numinous.
It was in the evenings at home that I began to fully appreciate the continuity of life beyond the confines of each individual earthly incarnation.
It began, now and then, as I practised the organ in our living room. It was as though I moved through the symbols set out on the printed page to a connection, an engagement, with the composer of the music. It was not, perhaps, that then I set out to perform each piece of Bach as Bach might have played it. It was more that I moved away from simple earth consciousness into a state where I connected with the edges of the infinite.
And as I sat and practised on our elderly upright piano, there was one composer with whom I began to feel an affinity which was personal and special. This was my music. These were pieces I had written in that earlier life. In other words, I was beginning to experience the reality of the continuous life of the psyche and the spirit embroidered, as it were, with episodes when the fullness of life was experienced via the medium of a succession of temporary mortal bodies. Each generation preparing the way for the next.
I was influenced, too, by the guide who spoke to us at each of our weekly séances. His teachings I was later able to identify as neoPlatonist. The concept of the original Perfect Unity breaking apart with the desire for life and then, at the very moment of separation, wishing to return to that original state of perfection. But it was too late. The energy spread out and away from the centre. The rate of vibration slowed as it moved. Its nature changed. The kosmos came into existence. With each life, as we learn, the desire to return to the incandescent centre is there to create tangible steps in that direction.
In the course of time I have become aware of some of my previous incarnations. I have met once again with some of those with whom I shared a previous life – or a succession of lives. On a few very special occasions I have passed through a time slip and relived episodes in the company of the companion with whom I had walked for a while.
I freely admit there have been times, sometimes extending into years, when I have lost sight of that very special objective. When I have gone, seeking wisdom, along a different footway. Of my own free will and inclination I became part of the Roman Catholic domain. In the end I did not find the authoritative voice of truth I was seeking. But, when responsible for the liturgical music at Westminster Cathedral, I experienced, during two invaluable years, the annual procession of the liturgy from birth to death to resurrection – and back again.
And so it came to pass that, at the exact moment of my life, when the conditions were exactly right, I was reconnected with the infinite, the planes of reality beyond the mundane reality of this world. The door was opened. I chose to step across the threshold – a liminal experience - into an early manifestation of what I came to know as the Wicca – which others readily condemned as witchcraft and the work of the devil! It wasn’t and it isn’t!
I reengaged with circles of sacred space and the melding of psychic energy. Around me and beneath my feet I felt the energy of the earth and the almost imperceptible changes from day to day, from summer to winter and back again. The companionship of gods goddesses and other spirits was as it had been from my youth up.
And now, as my 85th birthday looms around the corner, I review the comings and goings of this present interlude as I prepare for a return to the untrammelled life of soul and spirit. I shall be guided through the balancing of the karmic books and encouraged to consider the possibilities that can lie ahead. I shall make choices. I shall return.
francis cameron, oxford, 25 october 2012
Wednesday 24 October 2012
Monday 22 October 2012
as it was, is now
I am re-reading Andrew Marr’s account of Edwardian political affairs in his ‘Making of Modern Britain’. More often than not I find myself filled with gloom. So many of the events of a hundred years ago are being replicated today.
I am reminded of my ten years as a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1960s. How difficult it was to introduce new ideas. How it took two years to introduce an alternative harmony syllabus. Alternative, not replacement. “I am quite content with things as they are. I see no need for change.” The words of one of my senior colleagues.
Marr fills in for me many of the details which were only outlined in our wartime history classes. A century ago, reform of the House of Lords seemed a dire necessity. Today the matter is still unresolved.
Then it was Home Rule for Ireland. Now it’s Home Rule for Scotland.
Somehow I feel it’s not the haves fighting a desperate rearguard action. It’s more like a state of being disengaged.
francis cameron, oxford, 22 october 2012
Saturday 20 October 2012
Friday 19 October 2012
Saturday 6 October 2012
Friday 28 September 2012
on picking up pevsner once again
I take up my barely surviving Pelican copy of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Outline of European Architecture and wonder about the man and his observations.
The man was born in 1902 and was one of those who brought professional scholarship to England. A wider vision nourished among the broad expanses of a continent - though in the wartime years of the early 1940s German origins were played down. (After 1939 Germany was the ‘evil “them”’ against whom, as though crusaders from the Age of Chivalry, we were battling while the blood of our survival gently ebbed from our veins.)
The book is about architecture. Not Elizabethan Tudor Georgian Regency Victorian; but Romanesque Gothic Renaissance Baroque Romantic. My friend Francis G Grubb had introduced me to ‘Architecture’. He took me to Southwark Cathedral. Pointed out the columns of the nave. The stonework of the clerestory. It was my introduction. It has taken me far and wide ever since.
As I picked up my 1945 paperback a few minutes ago and drifted my mind across the table of contents and a few sentences and pictures here and there, I began to muse on the idea of Europe. I’d never really thought about it before. It was there on the maps in my schooldays. So far as I was concerned it had always been there. But this morning, after a peaceful night, I let my mind loose to explore.
The Greeks – of course – had a word for it. Evropé was one of those human women visited and mated by a god. All-Father Zeus. In ancient times.
In the year I taught second form European History, everything began with Carter & Mears in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. So convenient. So easy to remember. And before that? Rome, republic and empire, was the keynote. An origin, so they taught us, of our civilisation. Not so simple a question after all.
Pevsner’s Europe is only partly a geographical expression.
A shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave?
francis cameron, oxford, 28 september 2012
Thursday 20 September 2012
at the end of A Day for Ronald Hutton
It is Sunday 16 September 2012. We are at the Conway Hall in London. The Centre for Pagan Studies has mounted A Day for Ronald Hutton. I recall their Day for Doreen Valiente in 2009. I recall their Day for Gerald Gardner the following year when I spoke my own heartfelt tribute to Dafo.
Doreen Gerald and Dafo are now among the Old Ones. Ronald is still with us, speaking with brilliant shining eloquence and passion. There was, too, a fine programme from other speakers : Rufus & Melissa Harrington; Prudence Jones; Philip Heselton; Peter Nash.
I may, at some time in the future, say more about each of them and their talks. For now, though, it's a general impression that occupies the forefront of my mind.
We are all, each of us, that much older than we were when last we met.
My mind goes back to that First of May in 1995 when two of us went to Avebury. Not for a ritual. Just because it was Beltane. It was good to go to Avebury on Beltane Day.
For me, there may have been a subliminal preprompting. The outcome was entirely unanticipated. In the village shop, beneath a small stand-alone table, my eyes were drawn to a modest stack of magazines. I bought one. It was my introduction to Pagan Dawn and to the Pagan Federation.
And in June 1995, at Blacklands Lakes in Wiltshire, there was Michael de Ward's In the Presence II, where I first heard Ronald Hutton and Prudence Jones - and where I first spoke on parallels between the Pagan and the Christian liturgical years. Fred Lamond was there then, though not with us today at the Conway Hall. I'm glad to have heard him on other occasions and to have read what he had to say about the Bricket Wood coven.
A display ad led us to our first Pagan camps. Oakleaf made an impression which created its tangible after-image down the centre of the field when most of the tents had been folded and stowed away, their occupants homeward bound. Steve Jones was prominent at that camp. We continue to meet now and again. Steve is here for Ronald's Day. Steve, like me, notices the apparent lack of young people. He doubted there was anyone younger than thirty in the hall.
I recall my first Pagan Fed annual corroboree. Rufus Harrington impressed me then. He's impressed me every time I've heard him speak.
But we are, each of us, that much older than we were when last we met.
Our Day for Ronald was largely occupied, as is so appropriate, with thoughts of history and different historians with their differing interpretations. That is as it should be.
Ideally, the study of the past prepares us for the future. And it's that particular aspect I find myself involved in just now. In a few weeks' time I shall be 84 years old. I look forward to leaving this physical. I look back to look ahead. What have I done with this life? How shall the books be balanced? What loose ends might there be for me to tidy up next time around? What may I leave behind, knowing I went as far as needs be? What have I begun that deserves to be a marker for where and when and to whom I shall return?
So, on this Day for Ronald Hutton, the words from the platform and the interpolations of the questioners leave me with ample thoughts to mull over.
'twas well done ..
francis cameron, oxford, 18 september 2012
Monday 17 September 2012
Saturday 15 September 2012
Tuesday 11 September 2012
homegroups
I’m trying to get my computers to talk to each other. Shouldn’t be too difficult. They all run on Win7. I’ve done my best via the Control Panel. Just managed to get #2 machine to send a file to the printer which up to now has only responded to machine #1. So far so good. Now what I want to do is exchange files (docs, photos) between one computer and the other. Not been able to find the right Help files so far. Hey ho, the wind and the rain ..
Friday 7 September 2012
Thursday 6 September 2012
new jeanette winterson
My inner voices suggest I go into our local Waterstone’s. I diverge. There on the table in front of me, the new Jeanette Winterson is on display. The back cover promises This is Lancashire. This is Pendle. This is witch country. Can a man be maimed by witchcraft? Can a severed head speak? ‘Based on the most notorious of English witch-trials, this is a tale of magic, superstition, conscience and ruthless murder.’
Enough! Leave the keyboard and take up the daylight gate.
francis cameron, oxford, 06 september 2012
Wednesday 29 August 2012
heaven and earth
Tuesday 28 August 2012
tidying up
this time and next time
francis cameron, oxford, 28 august 2012As I approach my 85th birthday I find myself reviewing the main events of this life with an eye to being ready for the next. There are aspects I brought with me into this world. Others are newly woven into the web. Some of them I would like to carry forward. Then there are books to be balanced and loose ends to be tidied.
I've long been aware that one of the reasons for choosing my 1927 parents was that they were musical. They both sang. My mother was my first piano teacher. Several decades ago, in a different life in a different country, I had set out to become a concert pianist. Circumstances intervened. I never got there. Now, in London, I had a second chance.
I'm also aware I chose the time and place of my birth because both my intended parents were psychic. For the first thirty years of my life my experience of psychic reality was something to cherish. When I became a Catholic I embraced that church's set of rules. My psychic life, I put aside. There it lay dormant until a remarkable sequence of events in my mid-40s released me from the illusions of my earlier days and restored my connection with psychic reality. I continue to explore. My ventures into the Other Side are like a boundless plain with no horizons. The further I go, the more possibilities open up. It's an exciting prospect.
Thursday 16 August 2012
Saturday 28 July 2012
Friday 27 July 2012
latin won't let me go
I’m picking up some research work I began 35 years ago and never had the time or opportunity to do more than write some preliminary reports. And this revising means I have to brush up my Latin. For the first time in my life I’ve been able to make a very reasonable shot at translating some of Julius Kaiser’s war reports. He doesn’t exactly write a glowing account of the Britons he faced when he raided the south coast. The men, he says, grow their hair and moustaches long but shave off all the rest of their bodily hair. Then they cover themselves wth woad which turns their skin sky blue. Ten or a dozen brothers share their wives with each other in a very friendly kind of open marriage arrangement. When a woman gives birth, the father is considered to be the mother’s original husband. They didn’t teach that at any school I went to.
And that’s not the only thing they didn’t teach us. The latin primers introduced us to ‘hasta’ a spear and ‘gladius’ a sword. (But not to ‘vagina’, which is the correct term for a sword’s sheath. I learned that one day when I was singing the Proper of a Latin High Mass. ) In short, we were taught a rather restricted version of the language in an imaginary setting which was supposed to inspire us to emulate the Romans and their great empire. (We, the British, did rather better with our Empire, of course. Or so we were led to believe.)
What I’m finding now is that working with carefully chosen scraps of genuine classical Latin, I’ve once again become very sensitised to nuances of meaning. I’m asked ‘Are you free next week?’ – and I find myself saying ‘I shall be free next week’ or, if pushed, ‘I *will* be free next week’. But that’s next week. In the future. Which requires a future tense of the verb. Today I am free. Am I free tomorrow? Perhaps, by the end of tomorrow I shall have been free – a Future Perfect tense. Perhaps, even, a perfect future. But then I should remember (is that a subjunctive?) our English came to us in ‘three keels’ and more across the dark North Sea. We are no longer constrained. We are free. Free today. And free tomorrow?
francis cameron, oxford, 27 july 2012
Wednesday 18 July 2012
up with the curtain
we live in a world of showbizz, as I see it, that is. the most highly regarded entertainers are paid sums far in excess of ministers of state doctors nurses schoolteachers and professors. so let us sit back and enjoy it. an incredibly youthful smiling young man comes onto our screens and explains the innermost mysteries of the universe against a background of corruscating imagery few of us will ever see anywhere else in our lifetime. an optimal travel guide facilitates himself against sometimes staggering backgrounds while he unlocks doors and leads us through glimpses of sacred rituals usually reserved only for initiates. the elderly and the ebullient offer us entrancements of the impossible. vehicles we shall never drive. quicksteps we shall never dance. obstacle courses we shall never complete. a contest of bat and ball is built up to a climax of anticipation followed, as in some of the most moving classical dramas, by the inevitable almost anticipated fall from grace. post coitum tristis est. for a couple of coins we can read all about it, be touched by the indiscretions of the great and the good. trivia is magnified for the attention of the moment. and the daily politics? – for that has long been my constant entertainment – they let us see the squirms and grimaces of those we have elected to steer the ship of state. where are we going? fear not. we’ve been there before. even if we didn’t buy the t-shirt. but that was long ago and only the spoilsports will disturb the frisson of the moment with their pallid reminders. what’s next on the bill? good. bring on the tumblers the jugglers the shakers and movers.
francis cameron, oxford, 18 july 2011
Friday 13 July 2012
Saturday 7 July 2012
Monday 2 July 2012
what was I taught at school?
What was the main lesson I was taught at St Mary’s Church of England Elementary School?
I know the answer to that question when applied to the Mercers’ School. That answer came to me just a few days ago, when I was in one of my ‘one single word’ modes of mind. And that single word, for Mercers’, is : Conform!
With St Mary’s it’s more difficult. More elusive. I thought of each day’s classes beginning with Scripture. And that suggested to me : Gentle Jesus, meek and mild / Look upon a little child. That might have been a factor, but it wasn’t the final solution.
Then it came to me :
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
He made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate
It’s one of the verses from a well-known hymn we often sang. All things bright and beautiful by Cecil F Alexander. Written in 1848 and still frequently heard at weddings in the late 20th century when fewer and fewer are aware of any hymns that might be familiar, even to a small proportion of the wedding guests at a ceremony.
When, in the 1950s, I played the organ for the Church of St Barnabas in Pimlico, that verse – although still printed in the hymn books – had to be omitted. Something to do with the political (social?) persuasion of Philip Rowe, Vicar. I wondered why, but chose never to raise the query.
And the first time I went to Palma de Majorca, the Sunday morning sermon at Mass was very much on those lines. We should accept the station we had been born into.
What has brought all this into my mind at the beginning of July in my 85th year? I’ll call it the local Zeitgeist, though that may not be quite the right word. The very real feeling of an inevitably stratified society with an upper layer riddled with some whose interests are limited to themselves and whose care for the serfs at the castle gate never has even a moment’s consideration. I see it every time I watch a political programme on the television. Though there, there is a tinge of concern for the way votes may be cast at the next election. Beyond that : Nothing. Blank incomprehension. ‘You chose us to rule over you. Now just be quiet and let us get on with the job.’ Except that, today, the situation is different. The voices from below are not silent. And today their messages have wings more powerful even than in 1945.
francis cameron, oxford, 2 july 2012
Saturday 30 June 2012
thoughts
In a manner of speaking, I had my one and only photographic exhibition when I was eight or nine years old. It was no great shakes! Come the summer term of 1936 or 1937 I won a school prize. I’ve no idea what it was for, but I asked ‘could I have a camera, please’ – and the kind folk of St Mary’s Church of England Elementary School gave me a Kodak Hawkeye 620 Major. A simple box camera with a fixed exposure and a fixed aperture.
During the summer holiday of that year, we spent a day at Weston-Super-Mare and I took a few family photographs which were ‘exhibited’ on the green baize notice board in the school corridor when the next term began.
Why should that random thought suddenly pop into my head and make me engage Word to share a few words with you?
A daughter and a granddaughter and granddaughter’s friend are staying with us overnight before setting off for Weston-super-Mare in the morning. They are going to a concert on the sands. The hearing of the name sparked off the memories.
I’ve only once been back to Weston-super-Mare in more recent years. It’s changed, of course. And it hasn’t changed altogether. The special area we went to was designed as an all-day safe accessible swimming area. When the sea came in, it refreshed the water in the pool. When most of the sea went out, the pool was there for us to enjoy. I could see the structure was still there. Not quite boarded up. Simply securely padlocked as though to keep it closed for the winter.
I took a couple of photographs. From a distance. The atmosphere and the fringe of dusk tinged the whole image with blue. We got very sunburned, when we were young.
francis cameron, oxford, 30 june 2012
Friday 29 June 2012
Thursday 28 June 2012
magnetic lines of force
One of the most abiding impressions from my schooldays took place in the physics lab of Caerphilly Boys’ Grammar School. We put a simple bar magnet on the workbench, covered it with a sheet of clean blank paper and then gently shook out a small quantity of iron filings onto that part of the paper closest to the bar magnet. I was impressed by the way magnetic lines of force formed themselves from our scatter of iron filings. Seventy years later I am still entranced by that demonstation.
Now, why should I so suddenly remember this episode?
I had picked up, not for the first time, my copy of Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. A very scholarly exposition. I was struck, more than ever I had been before, by her proposition that ‘in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination’. As I digested this statement, I found myself musing on the bridge between experiences registered by our physical senses and experiences which we each generate with our inner senses. For me, the scientific and the numinous have equal – but different – reality.
In everyday life we are surrounded with magnetic lines of force. We do not see them, though we may see the tangible results of magnetic interaction. I am also aware of those many among us who, as it were, ‘tune in’ to the frequency of this manifestation and make it the substance of creation.
francis cameron, oxford, 28 june 2012
Tuesday 19 June 2012
Monday 18 June 2012
my 1965
The girl in the film was reminiscing about the summer of 1965 and that struck a chord for me. 1965 was the year I went to Canada to adjudicate for their Federation of Music Festivals. I was one of three judges from the UK who went out in January each year. From time to time one of those judges decided to stay. I came back to my jobs at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street (just round the corner from Carnaby Street, as one journalist put it). It was also the year when I began examining for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. The year when once again I worked for the summer season as Assistant Director of Music for the Parks Department of the London County Council. The year when the Roman Catholic parish churches in Canada began celebrating the Mass in English on the First Sunday of Lent. The year that the RCs later held a one day conference in London to talk about the kinds of texts that might eventually be approved for singing in the Englishing of the liturgy.
At home my children sang the Beatles’ songs. I made tape recordings of the Thursday Concerts from the BBC Third Programme. I listened to some of the items over and over again while I processed films in the darkroom. Webern began to make sense to me. The Berg Violin Concerto seduced me with its beauty. I took students to hear Boulez at the Royal Festival Hall. I gave first performances of new music in some of my organ recitals. In the evenings, after work, there were interesting coffee bars here and there in Soho. The one in Meard Street had Night on a Bare Mountain on the juke box and the tables were shaped like little coffins.
New York was the great experience at the start of my American tour. It felt like all the pictures I had seen in art books were actually there on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. Columbia had a splendid modern organ for my recital there. A friend gave me a ticket for Radio City Music Hall. I did the tourist thing with Grand Central and the Empire State. And fell in love with the Chrysler Building, still one of my top favourites. I was in Los Angeles for Palm Sunday, Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, Forest Lawn, and the Oceanarium. Back to New York for Good Friday and, thanks to Harold Axe and one of the rare coincidences of the calendar, was a guest at his family’s Passover Celebration in New Jersey.
1965. Swinging London was the place where things were happening. And perhaps it was also the year when, somewhere within the confines of the metropolis, I began to yearn once more for the wide open spaces.
francis cameron, oxford, 17 june 2012
Sunday 17 June 2012
visiting the likeness
every now and then I go to visit the likeness of the bodhisattva. she, for I feel I am in the presence of a ‘she’, sits patiently there, as she has done for so many ages. when I first saw her, I felt at once the power, the energy still latent from within the likeness. the power built up from the accumulated devotions of those who had stood before her over the years and made psychic contact. thoughtwaves of intensity linking the mortal to the immortal who had returned.
on my first visit I felt the presence of those many from the past, urging me to tune in and make my own psychic contact. a moment of intense intimacy between the bodhisattva and myself. later on, it was as though each time I made a pilgrimage to be with her again, to be part of her peace solace and strength. with each visit the contact was stronger, more insistent. when I was with her a few days ago, I felt this reservoir of psychic energy now extending over a greater distance. tangible even as her likeness came into my sight.
I stood and smiled to myself. it remains infallible. the more we consciously make use of latent psychic energy, the more energy there is there at our disposal.
francis cameron, oxford, 17 june 2012
Friday 15 June 2012
Wednesday 13 June 2012
Tuesday 12 June 2012
will we ever learn?
Saturday 9 June 2012
Monday 4 June 2012
Sunday 3 June 2012
Saturday 2 June 2012
what have I done that's best?
As I look forward I look back. What in my life have I done the best? What would I like to carry forward into my next?
Top of the list and instantly into my mind comes my playing of Liszt’s BACH Prelude and Fugue as the last item of what turned out to be my last organ recital. I didn’t know at the time that this would be so. My aim had been to show off the versatility of the instrument Henry Willis had built, in full consultation, for the Church of St Michael at the North Gate, in Oxford. I know I excelled myself. At the back of my mind is still the impression that people stood up and cheered as the last chord reverberated. I may have imagined it. Maybe it was the angels in heaven.
Two other performances then come to mind. First I remember a Saturday, the annual speech day (parents’ day) at St Felix School, Southwold, where I was standing in for Douglas Hopkins who was touring on the other side of the world as an examiner for the Associate Board of the Royals Schools of Music. The girls sang so well. I used every bit of the techniques I had learned from Douglas. And from others. They sang beautifully. They lived inside the words. They enhanced them. I remember that performance so well. We reached such a standard of perfection, I never could bring myself to attempt that item again. The title and the name of the composer escape me. I cannot forget how the senior choir sang the phrase “frost on the window pane”. They created an icy cold.
The other performance is in a different context. I had gathered together a small choir of students from the RAM. They may have still been collectively called I Cantici (which was meant to echo an instrumental ensemble called I Musici) or we may have metamorphosed into the Francis Cameron Chorale. The concert was in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. We sang the four Marian antiphons as set by William Byrd. Though the texts are Latin, my little chorus expressed the pure beautiful painful intensity of Byrd’s music.
In my general teaching I am grateful that I have been able to reach out and point in the right direction for some of my pupils.
So it’s music music music once again. And that I shall be happy to carry with me into the next episode.
As for the rest. There are things I have done well. Others, not so well. Isolated incidents I wish had not happened. Others where I cherish the memories. Places I have been. People I have met. Particularly, people I have met. Some experiences brought me pain and distress at the time. On the balance sheet they now occupy minuscule space. I look back and know I have had a full and fulfilling life. Lessons learned. Lessons still incomplete.
Others will write the final verdict.
francis cameron, oxford, 2 june 2012
2012 june 02
Oxford has many trees but few statues. The trees are evident almost everywhere. What statues there are, are placed high up in classical manner on the edges of roofs and pediments. I have yet to find a monumental statue of the kind often seen in other cities. Even the image of Queen Victoria is notably absent. I wonder why.
Si monumentum requiris. That may be the answer. Oxford itself is its own monument. And monuments within monuments.
The greatness of Oxford is in its scholarship. And scholarship is not well portrayed on a plinth. Save when both plinth and scholarship lie within the womb of imagination.
But then Oxford is Town as well as Gown. And Town seems not to have to have indulged in a taste for statuary. Its monuments lie in modest commerce. And an ebullient Town Hall.
The railways were kept away. The central roads are an unsolved problem. Cornmarket and Queen Street. Thronged. The Broad and The High – less so.
Pause for contemplation ..
francis cameron, oxford, 2 june 2012
Sunday 27 May 2012
advance australia fair
Saturday 26 May 2012
Wednesday 16 May 2012
Monday 14 May 2012
Thursday 10 May 2012
cut glass and demotic
Saturday 5 May 2012
Tuesday 1 May 2012
Paxman says Happy Beltane
Monday 23 April 2012
Thursday 19 April 2012
Wednesday 18 April 2012
Tuesday 17 April 2012
gradus :: returning to china
I am preparing to return to China. No, that does not mean I am packing a suitcase and booking a plane ticket. It means I am drawn to begin preparing for my proximate life which increasingly I feel will be in China. I do not yet know what I shall be doing, what career I shall follow. In great part that will be resolved after I have left this world. Just imagine. A peaceful passing. A period in the Gardens of Refreshment, when I shall still be able to communicate with those I have left behind in this world. And then the great examination, the weighing of the scales, the balancing of the books. The status I take with me from this life plus the accumulated experiences from my previous lives. That which has been accomplished. That which remains unfinished but with a desire to continue. That where the line may be drawn. That which I am fitted to do in the life to come. The great Halls of Learning are open and welcoming. What am I fitted to do? What would I most like to do? Which few families are most appropriate to receive me. I shall have, as I have had before, a choice. I shall choose my mother. The circumstances which offer the prospect of my completing what remains to be completed. Of beginning what needs to be begun. So shall it be.
I have lived in China before. When, in this life, I visited the city we westerners call Canton, I climbed a small way up the staircases of an ancient pagoda in a temple courtyard and I lived again myself as a boy serving that temple and climbing those steps.
A visit to the image of the bodhisattva in gallery 38 of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum is a staging post in the present part of my soul’s immortal journey. Soon I shall return to communicate with those whose hands created so much of beauty in the days of those who were then my distant ancestors.
I shall not travel alone.
francis cameron, oxford, 17 april 2012
he who would valiant be
My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage
and my courage and skill to him that can get it
My marks and scars I carry with me
* * *
So he passed over
and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side
* * *
1678
Monday 16 April 2012
john lewis click and collect
Sunday 15 April 2012
F1 Shanghai
Saturday 14 April 2012
looking at pictures from ten years ago
visual diary ten years ago
I think of my photographs as making a visual diary which tells me where I was and who I was with as time goes by. I decide to look back ten years. What was I doing in april 2002? Let’s have a look .. ..
· on the 4th I was in Brighton. I took some photos in the city centre. Looked at the Royal Pavilion. From the outside and in this particular light it looked as though cast in concrete. Then the famous Brighton beach. Speckled with visitors even though getting on for tea time. Talking of which, I wanted a cup of tea. No chance. It was closing time for the tea rooms. In the evening I was the visiting speaker for the local Pagans. I guess it was Francis Barrett, the Magus of Marylebone
· 15th at Sainsbury’s on the ring road and a photo as I emerged from the car wash
· 16th in Oxford’s city centre
· 17th picked up Amy and then to Avebury, the stones, the village, the churchyard, the church
· 22nd Dennis Pratley in his barber’s shop cut my hair and trimmed my beard
· 23rd to that part of North Oxford known as Summertown where I sat outside the Dew Drop Inn, drank a beer and played with memories of someone I’d met there long ago
· 24th out to the Baldons on the trail of a local section of the great Michael Line which has interesting nodes and leylines within easy driving distance
· 25th to the Oxford Union and then on to Rewley House where I demonstrated for the course building a mail order database with Access and Visual Basic
· and on the 27th a Pagan handfasting at Avebury. Caroline Marion Amy Charlie Uffer and Jan were all there.
I have just two candidates for ‘my photo of the month’. Presently I’ll choose one and post it separately.
francis cameron, oxford, 14 april 2012