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Two peeves (from a comment on a friend's LJ)
1) Is it only my impression that Moffat and RTD only know how to write heroes who look exactly like public schoolboys from the seventies? I guess it's right for a modern incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, who was an Oxford man after all, and a Victorian one; but both Sherlock and the Eleventh Doctor look exactly like people I might have met at King's Canterbury in 1977 or so, just a few years older. I am not a pusher of diversity for its own sake, but I find their similarities a bit troubling.
2) Much more important is the drift of the heroic image away from a man in his thirties-forties towards a teen-ager. The heroes of the past tended to be men of some experience and with a past, projecting the image of a young father even when convention did not allow them to be (like Pat Ryan in TERRY AND THE PIRATES or even Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, they would have wards or nephews); today the general idea is to cast someone barely old enough to vote as the hero. I don't mean just Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl, where the fantasy element is at least obvious. To me, the most blatant and disturbing instance has been the rejuvenation of Superman. Superman is your dad, the dad we always wanted to have; he is the person who looks over you, who makes sure you are safe, who gets the kitten out of the tree - the reason you feel safe in your bed at night. The fifties Superman was clearly a man in his forties; Wayne Boring's had a recognizable receding hairline. But since the seventies he has been getting younger and younger. Dean Cain's Superman, in particular, looked like he'd just got out of high school; and it's not a coincidence that since then TV has focused on Superboy. To me, this is positively unsettling, as if one watched one's parents devolving into adolescents - like a real-life version of Buffy's Band Candy episode.
2) Much more important is the drift of the heroic image away from a man in his thirties-forties towards a teen-ager. The heroes of the past tended to be men of some experience and with a past, projecting the image of a young father even when convention did not allow them to be (like Pat Ryan in TERRY AND THE PIRATES or even Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, they would have wards or nephews); today the general idea is to cast someone barely old enough to vote as the hero. I don't mean just Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl, where the fantasy element is at least obvious. To me, the most blatant and disturbing instance has been the rejuvenation of Superman. Superman is your dad, the dad we always wanted to have; he is the person who looks over you, who makes sure you are safe, who gets the kitten out of the tree - the reason you feel safe in your bed at night. The fifties Superman was clearly a man in his forties; Wayne Boring's had a recognizable receding hairline. But since the seventies he has been getting younger and younger. Dean Cain's Superman, in particular, looked like he'd just got out of high school; and it's not a coincidence that since then TV has focused on Superboy. To me, this is positively unsettling, as if one watched one's parents devolving into adolescents - like a real-life version of Buffy's Band Candy episode.
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I lived in Canterbury for only about three months - (some years before you were at Kings), had little to do with the cathedral, and foolishly assumed that Kings was analogous to Christ Church and Westminster etc
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... just looked it up; est. 1179, refounded 1560; one of the nine schools in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors' School, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St Paul's, Westminster, Winchester.)
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My main recollection of him was that he insisted on a class for me, and told my father that I should learn an instrument, because my ear was fine in one to one, and simply needed training. It was still unheard-of for girls to be choristers, so a memorable incident.
I've an idea that his daughter - or it might have been his wife - adult by my standards, but younger than my mother - once had tea with us while the boys were rehearsing, but I might have muddled that with another choir occasion