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Young, Austen, Keats and Burns: a local perspective on the ‘immortal memory’

Back in 2020, I was asked by the 820th Mayor of Winchester, Cllr Eleanor Bell, to propose the toast to the ‘immortal memory’ of Robert Burns at her Burns night supper – at the Holiday Inn just outside Winchester. I had little idea of what was involved and no idea what to write, but thought it might be fun to try and add a local angle to my comments. After a day or two’s amateur research, I came up with something close to the following, although I have slightly expanded and corrected it before publishing it today. Given the short section about Jane Austen, it seemed particularly apposite to make it available today: January 25 is Burns Night and 2025 is the 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth:


Thank you, Madam Mayor, for the opportunity to say a few words about the life of Robert Burns.

I cannot claim any particular expertise or insight. Despite a Scottish heritage – the Tods originally come from Dalkeith in Midlothian – I can’t claim to have read all his works.  However I will try my best to provide some unexpected insight – and bring to light a few aspects of his life that you might know.

Born in 1759 just outside Ayr – the son of a tenant farming family.  He lived in difficult circumstances. His father continuously struggled financially – although the family made sure he got as good an education as they could afford.

He worked for many years as an agricultural worker and as a tenant farmer himself.  It was only following the spectacular success of his first published book of poems that his circumstances were transformed.

He moved to Edinburgh before spending all the money he’d earned in about 18 months and retraining as Excise Officer.

But then, tragically young, his health began to fail – and he died at the age of 37.

A man of enormous passions – he had, shall we say, a colourful love life – 12 children are known of – from at least 4 different mothers – only one of which he married – and there are more than 900 direct descendants of his alive today – but also great political passions – and a great ability to capture those passions and the passions of everyday life in verse.

I’m going to try something quite brave now and seek to find linkages between Robert Burns and Winchester

We know that Robert Burns is Scotland’s favourite poet.

But who was Robert Burns’s favourite poet?

Or rather who was the poet he most liked to quote…

And this is something we know – and we know the quote he most appreciated – and repeatedly cited in his letters:

“On reason build resolve
That column of true majesty in man!”

Described by Burns as “My most favourite quotation” in a letter on 10th August 1788.

He really likes this quote – in another letter he writes:

Come, then, let me act up to my favourite motto, that glorious passage in Young:
“On reason build resolve
That column of true majesty in man!”

And who is the Young he refers to?

The Reverend Edward Young.

Born at Upham in 1683. Educated at Winchester College. A true Winchester district man.

Taken from his poem “Night Thoughts” written between 1742 and 1745 – which some of you may know from the engravings prepared for it by William Blake.

And some of you may also know the quote:

Procrastination is the thief of time

Some of you may live it!

The reference to reason and resolve wasn’t the only part of Night Thoughts that Burns liked to cite – another quote – surprisingly relevant and surprisingly prescient for today’s world of fake news:

“What Truth on earth so precious as the Lie!”

and again, from the same, when Burns was unclear how one of his works would turn out, he cited Young’s:

“Tis nonsense destin’d to be future sense.”

And one of Burn’s most brilliant, insightful and oft-cited phrases

‘Man’s inhumanity to man’

also clearly echoes the same poem’s

”man’s revenge, and endless inhumanities on man’

Burns may never have set foot in our county, but if we believe his letters, one of our former residents clearly provided him with a fair share of creative and philosophical inspiration.

So now we know a bit of what Burns thought about a poet originally from our area.

I’m not going to claim any literary knowledge, but I am interested to know what writers from our area thought of Burns.

What, for example, did Jane Austen think of Burns?

We can’t know exactly, but in her unfinished novel Sanditon, sadly unfinished due to her death in our town only a mile or two from here, she has the heroine, Charlotte Heywood say of Burns:

 ‘I have read several of Burn’s Poems with great delight,’ said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak, ‘but I am not poetic enough to separate a Man’s Poetry entirely from his Character; – and poor Burns’s known Irregularities, greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his Lines. – I have difficulty in depending on the Truth of his Feelings as a Lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a Man of his Description. He felt & he wrote & he forgot.’ ”

While Burns may be Scotland’s favourite poet – I think we can see from that why Jane Austen is England’s favourite novelist.

They are, of course, the opinions of Jane Austen’s heroine – and not of Jane Austen herself. But would she have cited those feelings of ‘great delight’ if they weren’t feelings she had herself. I suspect not!

John Keats – one of our greatest Romantic poets – what does he think of the Scotland poet who helped blaze the way for the romantic movement.

We all know that in September 1819 he came to Winchester and wrote his famous ‘Ode to Autumn’ either on a walk through the meadows to St Cross or up to newly planted corn fields on St Giles’s Hill depending on whom you believe.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.”

(Intriguingly, Burns was also quite a fan of autumn. He wrote in a letter in August 1793 that “Autumn is my propitious season; I make more verses in it than all the year else.”)

But coming back to Keats, you may not know that the summer before he visited Winchester, he went on a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District with a close friend.  And that he deliberately designed the tour to include Burn’s birthplace and his grave.

On July 13, 1818 he visited Burns’s birthplace and wrote to a friend about it.

Then we proceede[d] to the Cottage he was born in – there was a board to that effect by the door side – it had the same effect as the same sort of memorial at Stratford on Avon – We drank some Toddy to Burns’s Memory with an old Man who knew Burns – damn him and damn his Anecdotes – he was a great bore – it was impossible for a Southron to understand above 5 words in a hundred. – There was something good in his description of Burns’s melancholy the last time he saw him. I was determined to write a sonnet in the Cottage – I did – but it was so bad I cannot venture it here.

However after visiting Burn’s tomb, on July 2, 1818, Keats was rather more successful –

On visiting the tomb of Burns

The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun,
     The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem,
     Though beautiful, cold—strange—as in a dream
I dreamed long ago. Now new begun,
The short-lived, paly summer is but won
     From winter’s ague, for one hour’s gleam;
     Though sapphire warm, their stars do never beam;
All is cold beauty; pain is never done
For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise,
     The real of beauty free from that dead hue
     Sickly imagination and sick pride
Cast wan upon it! Burns! with honour due
     I have oft honoured thee. Great shadow, hide
Thy face—I sin against thy native skies.

So as we gather here in Winchester today – and ponder the greatness of Robert Burns – we are lucky to have two local guides to help us along the way – and one man who was a guide to Robert Burns in his journey to greatness.

Edward Young provided Burns with poetic inspiration and Burn’s favourite motto.

Jane Austen seemed unsure of Burn’s morals – but completely clear that we should read his poems with great delight.

And John Keats was so inspired by Burns that he designed a walking tour to visit the sites where he had lived and wrote poetry in his honour.

We can do no less than join them in our admiration.

So please be upstanding and let us join with Keats in honouring Burns, with Austen in delighting in his poetry.

And toasting the immortal memory of Robert Burns.

Categories
20s plenty City Council County Council COVID19 Cycling Walking Winchester

COVID-19 and our local streets

I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges and opportunities that COVID-19 offers to the way we use our streets and roads here in Winchester.

The lower level of traffic is causing some immediate problems, such as increased speeding; revealing other problems, particularly in places where our pavements are too narrow for the number of people who want to use them; and also showing great opportunities, with a big increase in walking and cycling, particularly on our rural roads.

As we move into the recovery phase, we also need to do more to make our centres “social distancing” friendly. This means wider pavements and, learning from other countries, more opportunities for businesses to have widely spaced outdoor seating areas. People need to feel confident and safe coming back to our towns and villages knowing that they can easily move around in a socially distanced way.

What sort of measures would this give us?

  • We need to tackle the heavily walked and queuing areas where the pavements are too narrow and the roads are too wide. An obvious place to start is the one-way system. I’d like to see if we could cone the whole one-way system down to a single lane with the rest reserved for walkers and cyclists – single lane in North Walls – single lane in St George’s St – narrowed single lane in Jewry St – narrowed single lane in the upper section of the High Street. If possible, we also need to do something for pedestrians on City Bridge and Romsey Road bridge too (although given both are heavily used by buses, this will be harder).
  • We need to cut cars and lock in the change on roads where we have seen a dramatic increase in leisure usage. In my own area the road where this is most visible is Sarum Road. I’m sure there are plenty more. As a minimum, we need signage which shows that this is a road where cars drivers are not the priority users and should expect heavy foot and cycle usage.
  • On speed, we need to finish the job in Winchester and extend the 20 mph zone to residential areas across the whole city. We also need to narrow roads and widen pavements or add cycle lanes where there is a particular risk of people driving too fast. I would love to see up an uphill cycle lane on Chilbolton Avenue, for example.
  • We need to create space for businesses to use the highway for widely spaced outdoor seating. The most obvious option to do this is to fully pedestrianise the Square. We may need a couple of blue badge parking spots for people who need parking near the centre, but we should definitely stop through traffic.
  • Finally, one minor irritant that I know concerns some people. We need to revisit our push button crossings. Can we make them sensor or timer driven – so we don’t all need to push the button?

Make sense? Any streets, roads or priorities I’ve missed?

One of my responsibilities at the council is the City of Winchester Movement Strategy, so I’m already talking a lot with council officers and engineers at the City Council and County Council about how we can improve our streets. I promise to pass on any ideas that people send through!

Categories
Chandlers Ford County Council Elections Winchester

Lib Dems beat 2005 results to win 6 out of 7 seats in the new Winchester constituency

How Winchester voted - 2009

On Friday, we found out that we had won 6 out of 7 seats in the new Winchester constituency.

Across the new constituency, the Lib Dem team got 48% of the vote. The Conservative vote slumped to 38%. Labour collapsed to 4%. UKIP got 6% of the vote and the Greens 3%.

These are better results than we achieved at the County Council elections on the same day as we won the 2005 General Election. Compared to 2005, the Lib Dem vote is up. The Conservative vote is down.

Overall, we saw a 4.4% swing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats compared to our vote last year and a clear swing in our favour compared to the results on General Election day in 2005.

Lib Dem team celebrates results in WinchesterMany congratulations to Jackie Porter, Charlotte Bailey, Brian Collin, Phryn Dickens, Peter Mason and Alan Broadhurst on their victories and many thanks to Terry Holden-Brown for his commitment and hard work on the campaign in Chandler’s Ford.

A big thank you to the voters who decided to back our candidates. We also owe a huge debt to the staff and volunteers who worked so incredibly hard over the preceding months, and to our exceptional candidates for their incredible commitment and hard work over the last few months and years. There’s no doubt that their personal work played a pivotal part in our success on Thursday.

It still hasn’t fully sunk in, but these results put us in very good spirits for the General Election campaign – whenever it may come.

Categories
Housing Winchester

A big thank you to everyone who sponsored the ‘Big Sleep Out’

Morning after the Big Sleep Out in WinchesterThank you to everyone who gave so generously to members of the Lib Dem Sleep Out team (or anyone else!) as part of the Big Sleep Out.

Thanks to your generosity the Lib Dem team has so far raised more than £3,800 towards the Nightshelter and the Trinity Centre!  

Big Sleep Out, Winchester, 2009We almost all got rather heavily rained on and didn’t sleep too well from around 3 a.m. onwards, but it was great to be part of such a well-organised and successful fundraising event for such a good cause. And, after all, no matter how wet we got, sleeping out on one damp night in May is nothing like having to do it through the winter or for weeks or months on end. We all knew we had dry homes and beds to go home to afterwards. The important thing was that we raised as much money as possible to help people who don’t have that choice.

Earlier in the evening, there were an excellent series of talks and speeches moderated by Debbie Thrower, who also read a very thought-provoking text on her own account (which I unfortunately didn’t note the source down for).  It was particularly moving hearing from people like Ed Mitchell who had been rough sleepers, how charities like the Winchester Churches Nightshelter and the Trinity Centre had helped them get their lives back on track.  (You can buy Ed Mitchell’s book here if you would like to know more).

There are some good pictures and reports on the Sleep Out at the main Big Sleep Out website.  If you’re interested, you can also read the live Twitter reports of the evening.

Even though the evening is over, it remains an urgent cause and both charities are very stretched by high demand. 60 people a month are turned away by the Night Shelter due to lack of space. On average, 20 of the 50 people who use the Trinity Centre report that they slept rough the night before.

If you’d like to donate to the Big Sleep Out by sponsoring the Lib Dem team, you can do so at http://www.justgiving.com/martintod. You can also give directly without sponsoring anyone. Either way, every penny you give (plus Gift Aid) goes straight to the two charities and will help make a real difference.

Categories
Cost of living Mark Oaten

Cost of living survey

I’ve been working with Mark on an online version of the cost of living survey that he recently put in the Hampshire Chronicle.

Surveys are still coming in and we are still collating the full results, but Mark already used the early results in a debate on the cost of living on July 9th.