In early July, Howard Pugh of Ledbury restarted his regular Hazel Meadow auction of farm and garden machinery and just about anything else that the countryman could desire. In the past I have bought a 2.5 metre flail, a trailer, sheep hurdles, feed troughs, assorted iron work, tools and trees. I once accidentally bought a box of 24 pairs of heavy duty welding gloves for gardening and lighting fires. However, these gloves which are also ideal for handling brambles attracted the attention of my wife who immediately commandeered them as Christmas presents for various members of the family.
Auctions have always had a great appeal for me especially when, during the sixties, it was common following a death, for the contents of a house to be auctioned off in situ. This created an extraordinary crush as bidders moved from room to room following the auctioneer. Most people however stayed until the end to see who then purchased the house when it too was sold.
My daughter caught the auction bug and at a Southampton car auction waved to attract the attention of her husband to pose the question, “Shall I bid for this one?” He paused before saying, “Too late. You’ve just paid £1800 for it.” She was not deterred, and some years later along with Anthony, surprised us by buying a smallholding at an auction in the Green Dragon Hotel in Hereford’s city centre.
Auctions give us a glimpse of the realities of life. No pretence, no equivocations or caveats: The item is either wanted or it isn’t. The question then becomes, how much is the bidder able to pay. Or to put it another way, what is the bidder prepared to deny himself in order to obtain the item under the hammer?
This question was posed in the New Testament parable of the man who sold everything he had so as to buy an exceptional pearl. The Pearl of Great Price is a metaphor for the decisions we each make throughout our lives. Because we simply cannot have everything, our choices are our decisions. If, like me, you believe in the concept of free-will, you probably remember those moments when the hammer came down on our choices because, only then is it possible for us to start valuing the benefits of the good choices and counting the costs of the bad ones.
Talking of choices leads me to recall a very recent visit to the house of one of the finest contralto soloists I have personally known, and from whom I have obtained so much knowledge, pleasure and delight from music and choral singing in particular. During a long career she sang the part of the Angel in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in cathedrals throughout the country, and was generous in her praise of the efforts of others particularly her pupils. Sometime after her death, one of her executors took a small group of us around to her home for us to choose an item we would like as a memento. I chose a biography of John Henry Newman who wrote the poem set by Elgar, and a photograph of the Irish Baritone Henry Plunket Greene who sang the role of the Priest and the Angel of the Agony in the very first performance of ‘Gerontius’ conducted by Hans Richter in Birmingham on the 3rd of October 1900. The photograph was taken at Elgar’s home Craeg-Lea in Malvern, and in which my friend Diane Walkley also lived for many years.
Gerontius is a seven part poem written by Newman following his move to Catholicism and follows the journey of the soul of a faithful man until its Guardian Angel lays it to rest when, after it has glimpsed God involuntarily cries out:
Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain,
Lone, not forlorn,—
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain,
Until the morn.
There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne’er can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its Sole Peace.
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love:—
Take me away,
That sooner I may rise, and go above,
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.
In John Henry (Cardinal) Newman’s case, he used his prodigious intellect as a kind of Distillery: In which he distilled millions of tiny existential questions to produce words of a clarity that ordinary folk could understand. In so doing he can help us find the grand purpose to our own lives but also to see it in the context of the history of mankind. For Newman, and now for me, belief arises from the application of personal reasoning and is not, as some believe, an illogical substitute for it.
Talking of reasoning and logic however, reminds that my wife believes an attitude to life is crucial. Even-so she won’t buy me a printed T Shirt with the slogan:
“I’m not Eighty one, I’m Twenty one with …
Sixty years experience.”
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