Neverland & the finger

Brilliant opinion piece by Simon in The Age yesterday.

‘I DON’T want to grow up. I don’t want to be a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” So said Peter Pan as he set off for Neverland in J. M. Barrie’s immortal fairytale. But were Peter Pan living in Melbourne today, he wouldn’t have to fly away anywhere. He could be as boyish as he liked, for as long as he liked, right here. His playfulness would moreover be seen as good — even essential — for the economy.

The signs are everywhere that childishness is more popular than ever, that infantilism is in. Look around. Adults read Harry Potter, rapt like children. Movie screens are dominated by cartoon characters, pirates, superheroes and sequels (“Tell me the story again, Mummy!”). Workers queue round the block to buy a new brand of doughnut. Women dress like teenagers. Men lose days playing with their Wiis.

The rest here.

Also much wisdon on rudeness from Thornton McCamish:

‘Oi!” someone shouted. I kept walking. Then there was a dog-whistle. I turned, half-expecting to find a runaway hound at my throat. But there was no dog in sight, just a guy lumbering up the street. He was whistling at me. He wanted to know where he could find the pub. I told him. Then he lunged off, without a word, like I’d ceased to exist.

Then there was that man in the city, scowling at his parking meter. As I walked by, he asked me if I had any change. I said no, I didn’t, sorry. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” he muttered. I said: “Pardon?” “Just piss off,” he told me matter-of-factly, already lining up the next passer-by.

The rest here.

“This is the world in a vessel,” said Jonathan Williams of the British Museum.

oh wow oh wow oh wow. buried treasure.

David Whelan and his son Andrew, 51 and 35 respectively, were out metal detecting in a Harrowgate field in England. See, right there, drama and mystery. Even before we get to the buried treasure. David is only 16 years older than his son – was he a real dad to Andrew, or did they grow up together, with Andrew’s grandparents taking on a parenting role? Is he still with Andrew’s mum? Were father and son always close, or was metal-detecting a way of bonding, a throwaway suggestion from a burnt out social worker that they took seriously because they were stumped for anything else? If so, who initiated it – Andrew the genxer, searching for an activity that demands both silent concentration and comradely proximity? Or was it David, searching for a way to communicate something both simple and unspeakable – unthinkable to say it aloud! – to his first born boy?

Either way, in this Harrowgate field, they hit upon some lead casing. It was protecting something. “I just kept going and going. A ball of earth rolled out of the side of the hole and I could see a coin stuck in it. We dug the hole out. We crouched down on our hands and knees.”

They scratched underneath, and saw silver – a pot, dirty, but clearly something special – is that engraving? – and bits of silver and more coins poking out. “We were sat there shaking – it was unbelievable. We made sure we got everything out and then packed up for the day and went home to find out what to do with it. We told the antiquity authority and handed it over all intact.” An applaudable move – any further foraging at that stage would have hindered archeologists’ investigations about the pot’s provenance.

In fact, the pot is at least 1000 years old. It is engraved with deer and lions, and plated inside with pure gold. A French communion pot. And it was packed full – full! – of Viking loot – silver rings and gold armlets, brooches and dress ornaments. And coins! There are 600 coins, thieved or traded from Samarkand in central Asia, Afghanistan, Russia and north Africa, some of them never seen before. There was so much loot that, according to the British Museum’s Hayley Bullock, “if somebody asked me to fit it all back in now, I’m not sure I could.”

The very youngest of these coins – dated 927 AD, is the clue that unravels the story. The coin was minted by King Athelstan – the first “King of All Britain” who knew about alliances and swept though the country, challenging Viking power. It’s likely that the owner of the loot buried his treasure in the field as a safety deposit, expecting, one day, to return. He never made it.

The British Musuem will now value the treasure – expected to be well over £1,000,000. Then they have to buy it – the proceeds will be split between the Whelans and the owner of the land.

And my favourite part of this story is David Whelan’s response when asked what he was going to do with the money the two will recieve.

“We don’t need owt. We’ve got all we want. It’s a thing of dreams to find something like this. If we had found one coin we would have been over the moon.”

For video of the BBC’s story on the treasure, featuring David and Andrew Whelan, click here.

Heartbreaking story of the week

From The Guardian:

One October day I discover I have one mother too many – and no father. I’m five years old. “I want every girl to take a letter home to her parents,” says Reverend Mother after assembly. I don’t like the sound of this. Her French accent makes “parents” rhyme with “ants”, which get everywhere, live in colonies, and pass secret messages. I’m not sure what parents are but I understand there has to be a man in it somewhere. It’s wartime, a time of austerity, when we have just one of everything: one ration book, one gas mask, one identity card, one mother, one father. Many things I have at home – an upright piano and our pregnant cat patriotically misnamed Tommy – but not a man in sight. Already I’ve heard of other girls’ mysterious midnight epiphanies when fathers come home from the war and astonishing baby brothers and sisters appear out of thin air. No such excitements at the house where I live.

The rest here.