No offence …

I’m reading with huge enjoyment the book about ‘James Herriot’ — the vet and writer famous for “All Creatures Great and Small”, which was recently re-launched on TV. His son and biographer is enormously interested in the Herriot phenomenon, particularly in America, and how everyone fell in love with these tales of old-fashioned veterinary practice, animals and — of course — human nature.

He not only includes adulatory letters from fans, but some flak from readers as well — such as a U.S. criticism of ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’ aimed at the occasional ‘my God’ in the dialogue. I think this may be an example of differing cross-atlantic usage and emphasis — in the same way we were taught in French not to translate ‘mon Dieu’ literally as it was a much milder oath than in English.

And of course it’s become pretty common in English, too — Herriot’s characters are not unusually blasphemous. The recent film of Jane Austen’s “Emma” had the title character using a casual “Good God” to her younger friend and protegée, Harriet. To us this seemed jarringly out of character for those people and that period, but no doubt to those who have grown up more recently than Maggie and me it didn’t seem incongruous. (Just as it wouldn’t have done in the recent “All Creatures Great and Small”, when the character of Tristan didn’t get the terminology of pre-decimal money right in a pub scene!)

The ‘God’ reference takes me back to Maggie hearing me doing my part, that of a suspect in a stage whodunnit. When I first needed to learn lines, it taught me how many ways there are of — quite conventionally — expressing a thought. Well, this passage of interrogating my character involved all whodunnit suspects’ remarkable solitariness at the time the murder was committed. So often they all turn out to have been somewhere that no one can vouch for.

My particular absence of alibi was that I had taken myself off on a solo walk. And I was getting irascible with the questioner. “I went for a walk! Just went for a walk! God! — there’s nothing unusual about that, is there?”

Maggie swears that I tried every word order in that last sentence, ending with “There’s nothing unusual about that — is there, God?”

I don’t myself feel that the good Lord is as touchy about meaningless allusions as some devout people suppose.

Of course “blasphemy” in modern life takes another turn — or several. “Loonies” are out. We can’t laugh at madness. And we can’t even use the name of anyone ever involved in slavery. This bothers me a little, because it extends zero tolerance of dreadful and long-outlawed practices to not even admitting the existence of individuals involved in them. After all, every one of us is certain to have had ancestors who didn’t query or challenge the press gang, wholesale hanging, mocking the afflicted, sections of society having no vote, etc etc. The norms of their time. As we in general do not challenge ours.

I’m thinking of a brief exchange between me and the late Brian Tully, during “War and Peace” at the Bristol Old Vic. We were at the Little Theatre and there was no access between one side of the set and the other without crossing the building via the fire escape on the outside wall. Thus during the evening Napoleon and his army repeatedly trooping across that fire escape would be visible from the street below — a street which now must have a different name from the old Bristol name, with unacceptable connections, which it bore at the time.

At one juncture Brian, who was playing Bonaparte, was crossing the walkway in one direction, and I was passing him doing the reverse. As we briefly drew level, I quipped “Brian — there’s a place for people who think they’re Napoleon”. Unenlightened twentieth century humour. “I know” Brian retorted, “And it’s not at the bloody Bristol Old Vic.” Wherever he was playing, Brian considered that he was slumming. He said he had left the National Theatre because he was “having to support people who should have been supporting me.”

Well, now I’ve risked offending everybody. The things you find yourself doing in Lockdown.