"Let us now praise famous men,” (from Ecclesiasticus 44.1) has furnished verses for multiple school songs and anthems. I remember being at a Founder’s Day service at a grammar school where I taught for a while (it was probably the last time I wore my academic robes) where the founder of that school was lauded to a point that almost became ancestor worship. (Incidentally two of the grammar schools in which I have an educational history are now care homes!) This was an age when heroes had gained their reputation in war or exploration. Apart from a few very holy saints, I suppose our traditional hero image goes back to Homer’s ‘Iliad’ where warriors were little short of the gods and their fame informs our culture still: Achilles for his heel, Ajax as a foaming cleaner, Hercules as a make of bicycle. Then of course in the time of Empire it was explorers like Cecil Rhodes, Livingstone or Scott, generally white men in shorts (except Captain Scott) Recently it has been tax evading footballers or moronic reality TV stars. I’ve got a bit more time for the explorer as that’s what we have been doing these last few weeks, setting out in pith helmet and walking poles to penetrate the tangled darkness of Crich Chase, to hack our way through the overgrown stiles around Park Head or to decipher the convoluted route that lead us onto the A6 when we wanted the lane at Chadwick Nick.
But one fine consequence of our present predicament has been the lionising of the ordinary: people with their names written in felt-tip on their backs gathered round a ventilator, collecting someone in an ambulance, serving tea in a care home, delivering groceries or emptying bins. We have at last learned to admire these very ordinary, very under-paid, very undemonstrative working folk who don’t have agents or minders but whose roles have suddenly become apotheosised, which the Oxford Dictionary says is to become semi-divine like Homer’s great Trojan War heroes. The gentleman who delivered us some supplies today would probably not easily recognise himself on the dusty and bloody plains of Troy, but he was a better sort of hero – interested in us, concerned to know we were OK, had time to chat despite being run off his feet and he did his very routine job with grace and conscientiousness. All are heroes. They have created websites, ordering, payment and delivery systems out of nothing. Remarkable people!
I am finding all sorts of ordinary things are becoming glorified and elevated. Things like watching a goldfinch, a gin and tonic in the afternoon, Doritos and humus, a delivery driver from the Loaf or Crich Butchers, the willingness of a neighbour to do some shopping for us and buying us some tulips as well. On a late sunny afternoon I love to watch the sun catching the stain glass in our window on the landing and spilling a rainbow of light down the stairs, through the back of a chair and transmuting an iron, a lightshade, a rack of CDs into
something beautiful – an apotheosis of the mundane. And look at the sunlight trapped in that pint of beer. What in Medieval times was called alchemy – the secret magic of transforming base matter into gold. For me this crisis has been a time of alchemy and apotheosis. I’ll make the most of it because I may not get a chance to use those words again, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we can sustain the ‘new reality’, seeing the wonder and beauty in the ordinary rather than in the exceptional, the successful, the celebrity and the wealthy.
In the words of William Blake,
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower ."