New Year and Minnie Louise Haskins December 31, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Beachcombing is about to settle down to frying some aubergines (as you do). He thought though that before this he would offer by way of New Year greetings to all his readers the sentence that ends this piece in bold.
Banal and even objectionable in their way these words by Minnie Louise Haskins were sanctified by history when George VI broadcast them in the first grim nativity of the war (1939), to millions of families within the Empire.
The words always move Beachcombing despite himself. He hopes that pantheists, Marxists, aetheists and Platonists can replace ‘God’ with the Universe/dialectical materialism/the One (delete as appropriate) and also find some satisfaction in the sentiments expressed.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown’. And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand Of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way’.
Sincere good wishes to all except Beachcombing’s enemies for 2011!
Nota bene: given what Britain experienced in 1940 either the hand of God is hellishly elusive or the British preferred to hang around the gate waiting for a duracell-powered torch.
