Why is it that “fun” gets colonised by extroverts and people who are entertained by hairy chest contests? I would like to offer an alternative introduction to those who have just boarded a cruise ship. With respect to the charismatic and remarkably engaging Felipe, may I present “Cruising for Introverts”?

Introverts’ cruise director

Hello. My name is Jo Ind and I’m the introverts’ cruise director. I’d like to welcome you on board this vessel for a vacation we hope will be awesome, in the true sense of the word.

The first thing an introvert needs to understand when boarding a ship with more than 3,000 other people, is that there’s always a place where you can be alone. Even while hundreds of passengers are at the Mega Deck Party doing the Cha Cha Slide, you can still find a quiet spot where all you can hear is the hum of the engine and the sounds of the ocean. Wander around the ship and find yours.

Arrivals and sailaways

Secondly, take note of the information that can be found in small print on the front of the daily news sheet – the times of the ship’s expected arrival in port and its sailaway. If the ship is due to arrive at 7am, set your alarm for 6am and head for the bow. There you will find a handful of your fellow introverts sharing a moment of exquisite beauty – the ship sliding slowly into harbour just as the sun is rising.

These arrivals are what cruising is for. They are gentle, majestic, silent and different with each new morning and each new port. Please don’t miss them.

Kids’ Club

If you have children with you, let them try out the onboard kids’ club. If you do, there’s a good chance they’ll make friends with children their own age from all over the world.  Once that happens you won’t see them between breakfast and one o’clock the following morning. This leaves adults free to do adult things – such as reading.

When you’re visiting a different Caribbean island each day, there’s plenty to read about. Obviously, you can’t get to know another country well in the space of eight hours, but if you read about its history before you visit, you can use the snippet of time well enough to get a good taste.

Onshore

Each island has a different topography and a different response to a colonial past. When you get onshore, walk round, take a taxi, ask questions, chat to people who live there and notice the subtle changes in prosperity, etiquette, language and outlook. Gather literature from museums, cathedrals and fortresses.  Go to your quiet spot when back on board. Sip a pina colada, gaze at the sea and digest what you have learnt about the peoples with whom you have spent your day.

Fun Day at Sea

Travelling in this way is so intense and sensuous, you’ll be glad to have a Fun Day at Sea.  This is a day when the shop doesn’t dock, you are surrounded by water and the extroverts play things like Hit the Jackpot and a Larger than Life Game Show. Go back to your quiet spot and notice the blueness – the ocean, the sky and the nothing in between.  Here the horizon curves, the water rolls and the starless heavens are a bright, bright dome.  Spend time here. Know the circling roundness of it all.  Live this moment. Take it home. Go back at night and be enveloped in darkness.

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you

If you cruise like this, you are likely to become deeply happy.  The depth of the ocean, the slow movement in the sea, the vastness of the sky, the volcanoes, the waterfalls, the sand, the faces, the stories, the welcomes…. They might well put you in the mood for dancing. Go on. Go to where the DJ’s playing:  “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you”.  Dance the night away with the best of them. 

What should a mum do about swearing?

What is a mother to do? Do I tell my son it’s unacceptable to swear and forfeit pocket money whenever a foul word leaves his lips? Does that mean I have to clean up my own act? Do I want to do that? Could I? Do I tell him it’s sometimes acceptable for adults, but never for children? It’s OK in private, just not in public?

Cue Melissa Mohr and Holy Sh*t, a Brief History of Swearing… How I wish she had written it before.

This is an utterly delightful book. It’s beautifully written, witty and in many places laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also a serious book.  She looks her subject matter square­-in-the-face. Mercifully, she never resorts to being silly or coy, though she does acknowledge her own sensitivity to taboo and the words she herself finds hard to write down.

Swearing has a history

Mohr looks at the history of swearing, as in taking oaths (that’s the “holy” bit of the title) and at obscenities, those emotive words that tend to remind us we have bodies (that’s the “sh*t” bit).

She traces their stories, from Roman times, through to the Bible, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries right up until the present day, looking at how oaths and obscenities have evolved and how they are related to the culture of the day. It claims to be a brief history but it seems pretty thorough to me.

It’s worth reading for the chapter on the Bible alone. I learnt a great deal from that and not just about swearing. For example, Mohr asks the question – why does God swear? Every word God says is true, so why does he say to Abraham: “By myself I have sworn” in Genesis? And why does God command us to swear by him: “The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by him alone you shall swear.” (Deut 6:13)?

Mohr explains the role of swearing is related to the establishment of monotheism.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, God was one of hundreds of gods a person could worship and so he was in a quest to establish himself as the one true God.

Swearing is a key weapon in this campaign. When you swear by God, you acknowledge that he is omnipotent; he is the one that can see your actions, hear your words. If you swear by Baal, you acknowledge his omnipotence instead. That is why God asks his people to swear by him and why he swears himself to them, by way of example.

Taking oaths is a tool to establish monotheism

The taking of oaths, which is still part of our legal system and government today, is rooted in that tool to establish monotheism that goes right back to the days of Abraham.  How interesting.  (Well, that’s one way of putting my response. What I actually thought was “Blimey!”)

And while we’re talking fascinating anecdotes, listen to this.  Mohr takes us on a hilarious romp through the use of euphemism in the Hebrew Bible. She says it never refers to the genitals when hand, foot, side, heel, shame, leg or thigh will do.

Eve is made from Adam’s penis

She then quotes the scholar Ziony Zevit, who argues that, in the Genesis narrative, Eve is actually made out of Adam’s penis, in particular from his penis bone. Most mammals have a bone in their penis, a baculum, which helps with erections. Humans, spider monkeys, whales and horses don’t, but the other species can’t achieve erections through blood pressure alone and have a baculum to assist.

Zevit claims that the ancient Israelites would have known about anatomy, being familiar with skeletons, and would have known men and women have the same number of ribs.  Zevit thinks that in this story, the word “tesla” often translated as “rib” is actually a euphemism for genitals, as it so often was. What the story really means is that Eve was made from Adam’s penis. The baculum was taken from him and used to create his companion, thus in one neat myth you explain where women came from and why men don’t have penis bones.

Is swearing good or bad?

But enough of these tit-bits, I’m sure that what you really want to know is whether swearing is a good or a bad thing and how embarrassed we should be feeling when our children start saying: “Bugger.” (If indeed other people’s children do.)

Mohr does have a view, but she restricts her opinions on the rights and wrongs of using obscene language to the introduction and the epilogue. I am grateful to her for that. I am also grateful to her because through reading her entertaining history, I found myself developing my own thinking , so now I feel confident and robust in what I am passing on to my child.

When my boy was aged six, he came to me and said: “Mum. I really want to swear. Can I? Will you be cross with me?” I said: “That depends. Is it one of those occasions when only a swear word will do?”

“Yes,” he said.

“In that case,” I replied.  “Swear quietly and make sure you don’t repeat it outside this house.”  He came over and whispered in my ear: “F***ing Mrs Stapleton!”

And he was absolutely right.

• A version of this review  appeared in Third Way.

Griffiths writes in a Romantic way

Griffiths’ subject matter is Romanticism. She therefore writes in a Romantic way. If you don’t realise that and start saying: “Hang on a bit, that’s a bit of an outrageous claim isn’t it? Where’s the evidence for that?” you’ll end up getting very irritated indeed, which would be a shame when you could be out in the forest playing.

Romanticism was the movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, partly as a reaction against the industrial revolution.  It gave us the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake and John Clare.

Romantics criticised reason

Romantics criticised an over-emphasis on reason, the enlightenment, materialism and the bourgeoise. They celebrated nature, the imagination and the artist and gave us the concepts of genius and faerie.

Griffiths argues that we need a resurgence of the vision of Romanticism to heal our consumerist, urban, health-and-safety-crazy culture which deprives children of animals, nature and the freedom to roam.

Kith means native country

Kith, she says, does not refer to friends and extended family, as most of us understand it in the phrase “kith and kin”. It comes from the Old English cydd, which means native country, one’s home outside the house.  Her claim is that in being deprived of nature, children are deprived of their kith and feel an ache for it, a nostalgia, a longing for belonging.  “In West Papua, a mountain may be referred to as ‘mother’ to all the children who grow up in her foothills,” she says.

She says: “Romanticism, now, here is necessary as a way of understanding childhood, not as a passing interest in the past but because Romanticism comprehends what is perennially important, beautiful, valuable and good in the human condition, and finds these treasures within us all.”

Romanticism for the twenty-first century

Griffiths is re-imagining Romanticism for the twenty-first century. She is re-creating the childhood vision of Wordsworth, Blake and John Clare in a culture of Play Stations, SATs and Amazon wish-lists.

And she does it well.. She writes of woods and wonder and fairy tales in a way that re-awakens deep longings.  I welcome the words “kith” and “childscape” to my vocabulary because thinking of childhood not just as a time but as a place with its own contours and geography within the mind, is a vivid, almost tactile way of understanding it, which helps us to honour our children and treasure our beginnings.

I wish Griffiths wasn’t so silly

I just wish Griffiths wasn’t so silly. At times it seems she would rather stick her tongue out at modern, urban lifestyles than enter into a reasoned discussion about them.

“Why are some many children in Euro-American cultures unhappy?” she asks.  (Am I the only person who hadn’t noticed that they were?) “Why does the dominant culture treat young humans in ways which would be illegal if applied to young dogs?” (Whaaaaat?)

She asks us to imagine the outcry if so called ‘public’ houses displayed signs saying ‘No Jews unless Accompanied by a Gentile’ and then says that is the experience of kids. “It’s really ugly.”   (If I were to say all the things I think about that statement I wouldn’t have space to write anything else in this review.)

She should have stuck to what she is good at

Griffiths critique of “Euro-American” culture would be more persuasive if she was more accurate. She writes about exuberance, for example, and quotes the nineteenth century author Landmann who claimed exuberance was a trait in children that bordered on abnormality.“Whereas Laudmann asserted that exuberance was a character fault, society now calls it a medical disorder: ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).”

In making out the judgement of our mental health professionals has become so distorted they can’t tell the difference between exuberance and the disturbed inability to pay attention that gets classed as ADHD, she goes too far. That’s a shame because the phenomenon of ADHD and the prescription of Ritalin is indeed a worrying feature of our society that is worthy of examination and debate, but to my mind Griffiths almost blows her credibility on the issue by being ridiculous.

I think Griffiths would have done better if she had stuck to what she is good at – re-kindling a vision of Romanticism – and resisted her critique of the dominant culture, where she needs to be more balanced, accurate and rigorous. She may well say that balance, accuracy and rigour aren’t dominant features in Romanticism, to which I would say: “Fine. Be Romantic.  But leave the critique to those who do it well.”

Let yourself be wooed by faerie

I enjoyed Kith when I gave myself permission to skip over its more irritating moments, allow myself to be wooed by faerie and simply ask:  “What aspects of the Romantic vision do we need to rediscover in our Churches?”

The themes of Romanticism, says Griffiths, are passion, imagination, heroism, a dislike of social convention, a sense of justice, a sense of quest and chivalry, a desire for integrity and the authentic, a will towards self-determination, a willingness to see the sublime, a concern with the particular and local, a need for freedom, an innate love of nature, intuitive creativity, a sense of inner, epiphanic, spontaneous time, an interest in the daemonic, a belief in faerie, an ability to endow the ordinary with mystery, an anti-mechanistic world-view and a sense of wildness and the transcendent.

I would like a more Romantic church

Yes. I’d like all of those, please. There isn’t one of them that isn’t right at the heart of Christianity (once the concepts of daemon and faerie within the Romantic mind are properly understood).

Now…reading Kith has got me imagining… I wonder how many of the children in our inner-city church have been in a forest…let’s see if we can find a way of spending some time there….

• A version of this review appears in Third Way.

So that was how I came to be doing something I had not done for five years, ten years, 20 years in some cases – laying my hands upon my treasures…opening them, smelling them, remembering what I had been doing and who I had been when I had drunk deeply of their meanings.

My books are familiar – yet strange

But as I leafed through these layers of self, I was surprised to find strangeness and familiarity in equal measure.

Take The Continental Philosophy Reader, for example.  I remember buying that from a store in London when I was in my 20s.  I recall how excited I was to have it.

Good grief.  It included Claude Levi-Strauss on the Structural Study of Myth, Michel Foucault on The Discourse of Language and Hans-Georg Gadamer on The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.  Who wouldn’t have been wetting herself?

I don’t understand them

But as I looked through the fat and juicy tome, I realised that some 20 years on, I didn’t understand a word of it.  What ever was it all about? Did I really read that kind of thing just for the Hell of it? Today I can barely read a newspaper.

Yet in the margins of this inscrutable text, were my annotations showing just how much it had meant to me:  “YES!!!!” , “Cf mimesis”, “Cf Rubem Alves”, “Yes, yes, yes!” I got it once. I don’t get it now.

All of which caused me to ponder…where did that thinking go? Is it lost, just because I can’t remember it?  Do the things we can’t recall disappear or have they become a part of us, affecting who we are, at some level creating us, even if we can not trace them?

‘Now there’s a question,’ I thought as I stood at the bus stop tapping a reply into my Blackberry.  ‘I was a feminist when I last thought about it – about four years ago – but I don’t know if I still am because what would involve thinking and I haven’t got time for that.’

Motherhood means I can’t think

Since I’ve had entered motherhood and endeavoured to look after my family, earn a living, be a good friend, go to the gym, sing with my jazz band and play the organ (oh, and then there’s the cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing, bill paying, gardening etc), life has been about immediacy – how to get Arch’s shoes on without a fuss so we both get out of the house on time.

My only time for reflection is when I’m waiting for a bus. I use those moments to strategise: ‘If Arch is going to Oscar’s party on Saturday, I’ve got to buy a present. The only window I  have for doing that is before work on Monday, which means I won’t be able to go to the gym, which means I’ll have to go on Sunday night, which means I can’t take him to see Sheila.’

Backlog in the brain

All the time this is going on, some part of my brain is building up a backlog or things I would like to reflect upon – how has being a mum affected my feminism? If giving birth is both so horrific and so natural what does that say about the nature of nature? If my brain is no longer what it was, does that mean I am no longer the person I was or is there more to me than my cognitive functions?

I feel as though I’m living on borrowed thinking. It’s as though I’m using Internet Explorer 6 and keep seeing the prompts to update my browser but don’t have time to press the button.

Can you be a feminist if you can’t think? That’s one to add to my list. Right – must load that washing machine.