‘What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft on Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile;’

So begins the second verse of Bishop Heber’s hymn ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’. These days, if the hymn is printed in a hymnal at all, the second verse is omitted not because Ceylon is now Sri Lanka but because, I suspect, ‘man’ and ‘vile’ are no longer acceptable.

I haven’t come across a single vile person, man or woman while I’ve been here in Sri Lanka. That doesn’t mean there might not be individuals here who are a bit off. It’s just that I haven’t encountered them. And as I was taught you can argue from the general to the particular but never from the particular to the general I must assume that not every Sri Lankan is as those I’ve met.

It’s St Paul and the Western church’s doctrine of Original Sin that gives Heber ‘vile’, but the problem for Heber the hymn writer must have been that ‘Original Sin’ neither fits the line nor makes the rhyme. So ‘vile’ it is.

While I’m not keen on ‘vile’ as a word, I’ve only ever heard it in relation to the taste of a medicine, I am inclined towards the doctrine as I understand it. I think the doctrine of Original Sin fits with self preservation, the human tendency towards self centredness, and that basic biological reality that the human foetus takes for itself whatever it needs before the nurturing mother. I also see Original Sin as a state to be moved or delivered from rather than one to remain contentedly in. It concerns me that a good deal of the individualism of today may owe more to Original Sin than to the good of humanity and creation. But I may be getting out of my depth.

There’s a plaque in memory of Bishop Heber in St Peter’s Church, Fort, in Colombo which celebrated the bicentenary of its consecration last Sunday. I was at the service. Bishop Heber worshipped in St Peters when he visited Ceylon in 1825. Ceylon was in the Diocese of Calcutta of which Heber was Bishop. During last Sunday’s Service the hymn was referred to, not sung, and not the offending line.

Incidentally above that plaque there’s one for Percival Acland Dyke, the brother or cousin of one of my forebears. He lived and worked here for more than forty years. Perhaps that’s why I feel at home at St Peters, or perhaps it’s because there Bishop Heber reminds me that I’m part of ‘vile’ humanity for whom there’s hope.

And while I’m on plaques or monuments I do hope the Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t come here and see these. The BBC news tells me the Archbishop is in speedy offending monument removal mode. He would surely want all the monuments and plaques at St Peter’s removed as some people must associate them with colonial oppression. Come to think of it the existence of most of the Anglican Communion could be associated with colonial oppression. What is he or the General Synod of the Church of England to do about that?

I never mind being corrected. If I’m wrong that is! I sometimes object to the manner in which I am corrected but that is not an issue this time. Sri Lanka does not have the most public holidays of any country in the world. It is Cambodia with 28 followed closely by India depending on which state you are in. There are 21 National holidays in India and then different additional holidays for different festivals in different states. Sikkim, now a state of India, has 40 public holidays. England and Wales have only about eight bank holidays a year though that number will increase this year for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. New Zealand has eleven public holidays with each region having an additional holiday.

Yesterday was a National Holiday here in Sri Lanka, Independence Day. I saw the frigate SLNS Gajabahu off shore in the morning, the main mast of a ship dressed with signal flags, ‘25 Gun Salutes for the Nation’, and heard the salute at midday. I missed the ceremony and the lowering of the flag on Galle Face Green by minutes but stayed into the evening and watched the small boys and their fathers and brothers flying kites. I counted up to fifty kites then stopped counting. Many of the kites were in the colours of the Sri Lankan flag, green, orange, yellow and red, and there were two with the design of the Union Jack and tails of red, white and blue.

What’s in a Name

It was Ceylon when I was growing up. It is now Sri Lanka or, officially and informatively, the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. The Romans called it Serendivis, the Persians Serendip (from which serendipity) the Ancient Greek geographers, Taprobana. Marco Polo writes of it in 1250 as Ceilan. The Portuguese who discovered it by accident called it Ceilão, the French Seilan, Ceylan, then the Dutch Zeilan to Seelan and Seyon and the British, Ceylon. The islander name was Lanka from the Sanskrit Lankadeepa – resplendent island. Sri, means honourable as in honourable sir. The tea still tastes the same and the tea is still Ceylon.

My First Visit

I first came to Sri Lanka in 1968 not long after I had been ordained a priest. While here I went with a group of young Sri Lankan Christians by train from Colombo to Bandarawela in the mountains. I’d only just arrived and was very tired so I had a sleep on some newspapers on the floor of the carriage under the seat. I gathered later the locals were surprised at a European, well, a New Zealander, doing this, but they were not displeased. Without realising it I was following local custom. I simply needed to lie down to sleep and it was the obvious place to do it. There was a possibility I would work here but I found the food so spicy with chilli that even the outside of my mouth burned. In those days I thought that I must not work in a country where I couldn’t eat the food of the people, where my hosts would have to prepare something ‘special’, so that never eventuated. I don’t have any difficulty with the food now so I guess my taste buds must have become more educated.

Public Holidays

In 1968 I seem to remember Sri Lanka had an eight day week, a Buddhist week, which was introduced to appeal to the Sinhalese, largely Buddhist, majority. That played havoc with international trade as the rest of the world (except Burma, I think) had a seven day week and so work days and weekends didn’t coincide. When that was dropped a number of Buddhist public holidays were introduced, Poya Days at full moon once a month and Buddhist Wesak Day. There are public holidays for other religions like the Hindu Festival of Lights, Deepavali and Thai Pongal Day celebrated chiefly by Sri Lankan Tamils. There are the Muslim Festivals of Id-Ul-Fitr and Idul Adha, the Christian Holy Days of Good Friday and Christmas Day and there’s Labour Day on May 1st which is almost a religious festival. Add in Independence Day, Sinhala and Tamil New Year, and perhaps some I’ve left out and the result is that Sri Lanka has the greatest number of public holidays of any country in the world. Incidentally, on many of them including Poya Days and this coming Friday which is Independence Day alcohol may not be bought or sold.

Biased News

The only news in English on the television in the hotels I’ve stayed in has been on Moscow Today. There’s been Al Jazeera in Arabic and the news in Mandarin I guess from China. Of course there’s local news in Sinhala and, I think, in Tamil. I assumed the Moscow based news would be biased. It was certainly interesting to hear the Moscow report of the 20th anniversary of the founding of the American Military Prison at Guantanamo Bay. But then I realised the anniversary was probably not even mentioned on the BBC or CNN or any of the other news channels with which I am more familiar so where is the bias? The editors decide what is the news. Whichever way you look at it there is a bias, or censorship.

Guest List

The guests at the Galle Face Hotel, over the years, include actors and film stars, Vivien Leigh, Lawrence Olivier, Noel Coward, Alec Guinness and Ursula Andress, Sting and Scarlett Johansson, and writers including George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov and Mark Twain. It couldn’t be a Sri Lankan Hotel unless a cricketer had stayed here – Sir Donald Bradman in 1938. Yuri Gagarin stayed at the GFH. And many politicians and Heads of State from Princess Eugenie, Empress of France, the young Emperor Hirohito of Japan in 1921, Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Richard Nixon, Kurt Waldheim, Edward Heath, and, in 1958 Che Guevara.

Prince Philip

I was shown around the museum at the Galle Face Hotel. In glass cases there is some of the cutlery, China and glass that, no doubt, my Grandmother would have used when she stayed here in the early 1900s. And there’s a car in the museum. It’s a 1935 model Standard Nine car which was bought by Prince Philip who was a 19-year-old midshipman serving in Ceylon at the time. It was wartime and it was the first car he ever owned. It is said that the asking price was 12 Pounds Sterling but that after much bargaining he bought it at Rs.450 which was equal to seven weeks’ of his Navy pay in 1940.

Sir Donald Bradman

From my garden in Kennington, South London, I can hear the sound from the home ground of the Surrey County Cricket Club, the Oval, and can tell from it whether someone has hit a six or been bowled out. The Oval was the first ground in England to host international Test cricket in September 1880. Had I been around I would certainly have heard the noise in 1930 for Australia’s 701 and as Don Bradman (244) and Bill Ponsford (266) put on 451 for the second wicket, and in 1948 for Bradman’s farewell duck. Even I, who loathed cricket at school, chiefly, I suspect, because it was compulsory, love the description of the Australian Cricket Team’s visit to Ceylon in 1938 which you can google at thuppahis.com/2020/12/11/don-bradmen-and-his-men-in-ceylon-1948/

At the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo there is, on duty in the dining room on the terrace, an elderly man in immaculate khaki uniform and cap, ex army I would guess. He carries a catapult. A Y shaped hand made catapult. I had one as a child as did my elder brothers. Some dictionaries give slingshot as a synonym. Others make a clear distinction and suggest that a catapult is a very large contraption such as that which launches aeroplanes off ships’ decks while a slingshot is hand held. My younger son tells me it’s a slingshot so, though I never called it that in the past, slingshot it is.

At my hotel in Negombo there is also an attendant with a slingshot. I gather there’s another at the hotel down the road. The problem is the crows. They are aggressive and are after food. There are great nets around the open air dining rooms to keep them out but the crows are clever. They walk in through the gaps in the nets that are there so that I, and other guests, can get in and out.

Yesterday at breakfast a crow came into the dining room, hopped onto a table, took two packets of sugar in its beak and flew out. When I asked a waiter how the crow managed to open the packet to eat the sugar he looked at me with tolerant understanding of my ignorance and said, “They eat the packet and the sugar.”

The crows also line the edge of the swimming pool and watch me taking my morning exercise. A group of about fifteen of them gather outside the dining room walking about on the sand seemingly having an early morning conference. The man with the slingshot can’t be everywhere at once.

My brothers and I went out with our slingshots to try to hit tin cans off fence posts. We gathered up small stones and spent hours in competition with each other. I was the necessary loser. I had poor sight and wore glasses from when I was six or seven so perhaps that was the reason.

Here in Sri Lanka as I watched the attendants with their slingshots I came to realise that while they make the right gestures they never actually let fly a stone. When I asked why I was told, “The crows don’t know there’s no stone. I pretend and the crows fly away. If there was a stone I might hit a guest.”

Well! Stone the crows!

Of ‘Stone the Crows’ I discover from ‘Phrase Finder’:
‘There have been a few attempts to explain the origin of this odd phrase. I’ve found mid-20th century references from England that describe it as an Americanism and American newspaper articles that call it ‘an old English phrase’. The dates of those are more or less right but not the locations – the phrase appears to have originated in Australia. Most of the early citations in print come from down under. It has a sort of Australian twang to it and is in common with several other similar phrases, all with the same meaning: ‘starve the bardies’ [bardies are grubs], ‘stiffen the crows’, ‘spare the crow’. Crows were unwelcome guests at sheep farms as, given the chance, they will kill and eat newborn lambs, so the association with annoyance isn’t hard to see. The link in meaning to surprise isn’t obvious, but then there’s no particular reason to expect to find one. Stoning crows was a commonplace enough activity and calling it up into a phrase could have been done for no reason other than that the person who coined it just liked the sound of it. There are other expressions of surprise or annoyance like, ‘I’ll go to the foot of our stairs’, ‘strike me pink’, ‘I’ll be a monkey’s uncle’, or, ‘if that don’t take the rag off the bush’. None of these have any sensible literal meaning and stone the crows is another to add to that list.’

Bannisters, hand rails and steps have never really been my thing though bannisters do have a particularly affectionate place in my memory from sliding down the bannister at home as a child. It was a beautiful bannister with a good curve half way down. We weren’t meant to slide down the bannister but we did. And I must have had some awareness of steps, ramps and rails from the alterations we did to the entrance at St Luke’s in Christchurch when I was there. We installed a ramp to make it easier for people in wheelchairs. But it’s only this week I’ve really noticed hand rails, or rather the lack of them.

My booking was for a five star hotel in Negombo, Sri Lanka. On the website it looked wonderful, with a huge curvey swimming pool that made the kidney shaped pools of the 60s look like a comma on a sheet of A4. I was a bit concerned when I arrived because the only entrance from the street seemed to be at first floor level with a drive up a sort of mound and then a long flight of steps. I couldn’t get to the handrail of the steps because of airport style scanners on either side. I’m not all that good at steps and stairs without a handrail these days. The path from the street up the side of the mound was steep and didn’t have a handrail.

The room was lovely with a stunning view. ‘Welcome’ was spelled out in tiny flowers and leaves on the bedspread and there was a towelling elephant on the bed – towelling origami. When I did an explore I discovered that there were steps into the swimming pool but no rail anywhere. There was no pool ladder. I would be able to get in but it would be very tricky getting out. I gradually realised this hotel was not going to work for me. The staff were very good about it. Having just checked in I checked out.

I’ve found another hotel also five stars, the Jetwing Beach. It’s not as new as the first but there are two swimming pools and one of them has pool ladders at the side. I’ve just had a swim in the one with steps only. No rail. It’s 4ft deep so I’m never out of my depth and it’s 45 meters long so eight lengths morning and evening is very good exercise. And after my eight lengths, every time, there’s been a friendly pool attendant with a towel and a helping hand to steady me as I clamber out.

Of course I’m noticing handrails and the rest because now I need them. I wonder what I’m not noticing that other people need.

PS Apart from that the chef at the Jetwing Beach cooks egg hoppers to perfection. Well, my perfection.