Thought for the Week: Enthusiasm
Ken Veitch reflects on enthusiasm and inspiration
A man of about forty, wearing a green tweed jacket, bustled into the room. Mr Peters, our new teacher of French, was a scholar of Balliol College, Oxford who had been a wartime translator at Bletchley Park. He exuded positivity and a love of his subject. We would rush to read or buy any book that he recommended. We all did well in A levels and more than fifty years later I still have a love of all things French.
I was in the music society at school. We enjoyed many Halle concerts at the old Free Trade Hall in Manchester. My ‘baptism’ into live music was Rossiniâ‘s overture from The Thieving Magpie, conducted by John Barbirolli. Then the Latvian conductor Arvid Yansons ignited my lifelong interest in the works of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich.
I inherited my mother’s love of tennis and her Quakerly pacifist outlook. Since the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher allowed American cruise missiles into the UK without any control over their possible use, I have campaigned for disarmament and an end to the arms trade. In this work I met Jane Gilmore, a teacher whose projects on conflict resolution were used in schools across the country. At her home in deepest Shropshire she produced, along with lovely lunches and walks, a series of brilliant and humorous leaflets exposing the dangers of US/UK military and foreign policies.
On a visit into Herefordshire, my wife Kay and I chanced on a cafe in Leominster. Not far away was Clyro, on the Welsh border, where Francis Kilvert was a clergyman in the 1870s. In his diaries there is a particular intimacy and keenness of observation. Here he relates a walk in summer:
The breeze from the sea stirred freshly with a cool light after the warm shelter of the hollow lanes. A gate led into a shady road cool and damp, dark and quiet as a cloister. The air was filled with the fragrant aromatic scent of the pine trees and the soft carpet of fir needles. Fields of ripening wheat began to glow golden along the hills and the ferns, fresh washed by the rain of the night, beamed clear and brilliant green where the sun slanted silently through the windows of the wood.
One afternoon this summer I took my grandchildren to play in the sunlight beside the River Tyne. They delighted in simple things. I heard their laughter and the ‘plooomph!’ of the stones they threw in the water. Later, little hands made a cake, with immense concentration as the flour was weighed and the eggs whisked. Now the leaves are beginning to turn. Children are back at school. It is a time of reflection.
The events I have listed all call for enthusiasm - a quality deriving from the Greek word ‘inspired by, or close to God’. I think we have cause to be deeply thankful for such experiences.
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