In my last ‘Thought’, not a particularly deep thought, but I did enjoy thinking it, I had written ‘It made Shanghai less exotic’. I sent the first draft to a young friend who helps me clarify my thoughts and he pointed out that the word ‘exotic’, these days, has a negative history with colonial overtones. So I changed ‘exotic’ to ‘exciting’ because I didn’t want to give offence to anyone. Generally I don’t want to give offence and certainly not unintentionally. 

Later I went back to my Cambridge English Dictionary and I discovered the definition of exotic; ‘unusual and exciting because of coming (or seeming to come) from far away, especially a tropical country,’ which is exactly what I meant even though I would not have seen Shanghai or China as particularly ‘tropical’. It seems that words change their meanings so quickly that even a dictionary on the internet is out of date.

But it has made me think more about words that have, in my lifetime, changed their meaning and which can now give offence. Or even words that have simply changed their meaning.  A gay party sixty years ago when I began going to parties was a different party to a gay party today. And I remember Cousin Mary, fifty years older than me, describing as ‘amusing’ a situation which was not in the least bit funny but rather interesting and puzzling. Then of course ‘funny’ is an odd word as sometimes it does not mean amusing so that we used to say, ‘Funny ha ha or Funny peculiar?’

And as I now wonder about ‘exotic’ I realise I must be careful about ‘native’. I grew up with trees being either native or exotic and I simply don’t know if these words are all right if applied to trees and plants but not in other contexts. Am I a native New Zealander? I always thought I was. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with the changes.

There’s a whole list of words used in a particular context that mean the opposite to their regular use or something completely different, bad – good, wicked – fun, cool – smart, I’m not sure what the new meaning of ‘sad’ is but I know there’s a meaning other than the meaning I am familiar with. When I was choosing between some frames for my spectacles the optician told me that one pair were ‘sharp’ and the others weren’t. From the tone of voice I gathered sharp was in some sense good or smart or fashionable or at least something positive. I chose the sharp pair.

But it’s the words that give offence that are the problem for me.  I’m told if I read more I would know which words I shouldn’t use. But there’s still a chance I will get it wrong simply because of my age. There are words that I may not say or write now, usually words descriptive of race, religion or gender, that were commonly used sixty years ago and by and large I’ve tried to learn not to use them. Then there are other words never used then that  are commonplace now and some of them offend me, but I must learn to live with it and I do. 

I am irritated when attending a service from the Book of Common Prayer and the person leading the service ‘corrects’ Cranmer’s English to make it acceptable. For example changing ‘men’ to ‘people’. I know some may be offended by the use of the word men to describe people but I would have thought the historical context and the beauty of the language could be taken into account. It seems to me that those who correct have a lot in common with our Victorian forebears who covered the genitalia of statues with fig leaves. There are a lot of figurative fig leaves around these days and they seem to cover  everything other than genitalia!

So that is one problem for me. There’s another, related I think, and much more serious. St Augustine described words as ‘those precious cups of meaning’. It is when I am deprived of the words that I have at my disposal to say what I mean. Then I am forced into a self isolation of expression that is every bit as bad if not worse than that imposed by Covid 19. Of course I’m not claiming some right to free speech that allows me to shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded cinema when there is no fire. I am saying that if my use of words is so judged that what I am trying to say, the meaning of what I am trying to say, is never heard, then I am pushed into a dangerous isolation.

I am fortunate to have a fairly wide vocabulary. What happens to those whose vocabulary is limited and much of it deemed ‘unacceptable’. They are condemned to silence and I suspect it’s a silence that leads to frustration and, in the end, to a dangerous explosion. Or, as I do, they find smaller and smaller groups of people with whom they can say the things they want to say and express the ideas they want to explore and so they end up being with people just like them, with ideas just like theirs, which is not what any of us need at all. 

Thank goodness that since the awful George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, a city and people distant in custom and culture from anything many of us know, the arguments and the discussions about racism have not been restricted to small groups of like minded people but have exploded into major discussion and debate around the world. There has been a mind opening for many, including me, as a result. And the learning has been allowed to happen.  

I need my ideas, the meaning my words contain, to be challenged so that I can learn and grow. And I need to be allowed to get past my first sentence without being challenged for using an ‘unacceptable’ word. Isn’t having the discussion more important than using the right words? I do still want my ‘unacceptable’ words to be explained to me so that I don’t repeat them, but after, rather than during. And I need to learn, even at my age, not to interrupt, and to let the other person get to the end of their sentence before I leap in with a comment or a correction!

There are some things I would like to see standardised such as electric plugs. Even my international multi plug adaptor seems to miss out sometimes. And then I remember the sense of disappointment when I first visited Shanghai more than ten years ago and I realised the rubbish bins were identical to those in Kennington. A standard shape and size and the same colours. It somehow made Shanghai less exciting. I’m not sure why.  Southwark Council bins are probably made in China.

I am very glad that street designations are not standardised. Today I did my brisk walk, saying my prayers, along Kennington Park Road, skirting Elephant and Castle passed the Metropolitan Tabernacle into St George’s Road with a pause at St George’s Cathedral. After the Cathedral, Lambeth Road left into Kennington Road and completing the triangle back into Kennington Park Road and home. Road after road after road, a little boring perhaps? And according to an app on my telephone – 4,797 steps, 3.3km.

Only it wasn’t boring at all. I became aware that even in this small area I passed a Close and a Way. Because I chose neither I missed out on a Crescent but Kennington Park Road becomes Newington Butts. Butts probably because there may have been archery butts there in mediaeval times. There can’t be all that many streets that are Butts.

After the Cathedral I decided not to turn right to a Cut or a Marsh but turned left into Kennington Road and so passed a Drive, a Square and, on the other side of the road, a Walk. Then I had a Terrace on my left and, because I was doing the main roads, I missed a Court and a Passage. I crossed a Lane and further on passed a Row, a Green and, on the home stretch, Kennington Park Gardens.

Going this way I also missed a Mews, a Place, Arches and an Alley. They are on the Walworth Road side. Though we have at least three Ways I haven’t yet found a Broadway. There are no Avenues that I’ve come across yet, nor a Parade. There are lots of Streets. There’s no Triangle but there are many Squares and, very importantly, The Oval. 

It must be confusing for visitors and it all could be standardised and made more simple. It’s years since I was last in New York. In theory it should be the easiest city in the world in which to find your way round. The grid pattern of numbers, streets and avenues should make it so simple that you can’t get lost. It is so simple yet I still get lost.

So much variety in an hour of walking. I’ve lived here for more than twenty years and now, because of Lockdown, I know my local area far better than before and am still making discoveries. It quite lifts the spirit. I hope we never standardise either the names or the designations of our highways and byways. 

Some of the family came to visit. Because they are my designated ‘other household’ the government now allows us to hug. That’s a huge joy and relief. My grandson Freddie has won the poetry reading competition for his year group. From Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes he chose ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. He recited it for me.

It includes this.

Then Dad cries, “Golly-gosh! Gee-whiz! Oh Cripes! How hot this porridge is!

Let’s  take a walk along the street until it’s cool enough to eat.

”He adds, “An early morning stroll is good for people on the whole 

it makes your appetite improve it also helps your bowels to move.”

Years ago now, when I was working in Chelsea, I was in the queue at the checkout at Waitrose in the King’s Road having done the weekly shop. In front of me in the queue was an elderly woman who was slow, but I wasn’t in a hurry, and she chatted to the woman at the checkout. She was from the Philippines, the woman at the checkout that is,  I learned from their conversation. At one point the elderly customer reached out and took the hand of the checkout lady and held on to it, then, rather embarrassed, she turned to me and said, ‘I’m so sorry to hold you up but it’s wonderful just to be able to touch someone.’ 

I know there is dirty money because I hear and read about money laundering and you only go to the laundry if you have something dirty that needs to be washed and made clean. The most obvious dirty money, obvious to me that is, is money acquired criminally like from robbing a bank. Or from robbing anybody. It’s dirty because it’s not legally yours.

Then there’s the money gained in other countries by dubious methods by our standards here in the UK. This needs to be laundered so that it can be used or invested here and so can become legal and clean. I gather that’s one of the reasons oligarchs want to buy property here.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines dirty money as ‘money that someone gets in an unfair, illegal, or dishonest way’.

So I understand the illegal or dishonestly acquired money. But what about that which is gained ‘unfairly’.

I grew up on a farm, sheep and cattle. The sheep bred either for their wool or for lamb or mutton for the table. The cattle bred either for breeding stock or for their meat. The wonderful thing about growing up on a farm is that you can believe that the money that keeps you and your family going is from something that obviously contributes to the wider community. You are providing food and clothing. The money made is most surely clean. 

But not to animal rights activists or even perhaps to vegetarians. It is most certainly ‘dirty money’ as it’s unfair to the animals that are slaughtered.  And anyway is it ‘fair’ that the land that is farmed is privately owned? It may be legal but is it fair? 

Is the money earned by someone who worked for Wonga, the loan company exposed by the Church of England and now out of business, is the money that was earned by an employee of Wonga, dirty? They may have needed the job but they must have known what they were doing. Until the government changed the law it may have been legal but it certainly was unfair.

I now feel nervous when I buy any item of clothing that has on the label, ‘Made in Bangladesh’, or Vietnam or China, where we know there are people working for very little money, under terrible, by our standards, conditions. Of course there are the directors of the companies and the shareholders who must bear the main  responsibility for decisions made. But is the money the shop assistant is paid for handling and selling that clothing, unfairly gained?

People who have money invested are asked if they wish only to have ‘ethical’ investments. But who decides what is ‘ethical’? Of course ultimately it must be the investor. While I realise tobacco companies are a big no no for the ethical investor I gather there are funds that are of such complexity that it’s very difficult to sort them out. I think the Archbishop of Canterbury had difficulty over that with the Church of England’s investments. 

As we look back at money made by dealing in the slave trade I do wonder what future generations will look back on, with amazement, when they see what we have invested in without a thought about fairness. Deciding what is acquired ‘unfairly’ seems to me to change from generation to generation and from culture to culture. 

I would not like the job of watching as the collection plate is passed around in church, when of course lockdown allows collection plates to be passed, I would not like the job of deciding which 50p piece, has been unfairly gained. And then, having made my judgement, of handing it back to the giver with my, ‘I can’t accept that. It’s dirty money.’

There is a statue of which I am particularly fond. It’s in Waterloo Place, that’s at the bottom end of Regent Street, below Piccadilly Circus, in London. I hope they don’t remove it. It’s of Field Marshall John Fox Burgoyne and he’s a sort of forbear of mine. His sister was my paternal grandmother’s great grandmother. 

The brother and sister were the illegitimate children of one John Burgoyne, known as Gentleman Johnny. He was, I was told by my grandmother, the first British general ever to surrender to an enemy, which he did at Saratoga, and so lost the American War of Independence. He is also a character in Shaw’s Play, ‘The Devil’s Disciple’. I inherited his portrait. But none of that is the reason I’m fond of the statue of his son.

When I was in London in the 1960s, having arrived in 1962 at the age of twenty, my father used to come to London regularly representing New Zealand wool growers. His office was just off Lower Regent Street. He would invite me to breakfast at his hotel nearby and then I would go with him as he went to his office making a small detour to say ‘good morning’, to the statue of Burgoyne. It was a father son thing we did. Incidentally my Grandmother told me that he, Burgoyne, having been Constable of the Tower of London, is buried in the chapel there, between two headless queens.

Now I’m not greatly into statues as such. The Victorians were. There’s a great swathe of them around Waterloo Gardens. I don’t know if John Fox Burgoyne was a good man or not. His statue was erected by his fellow officers of Royal Engineers. It says so on the base. I assume his fellow officers liked him or they wouldn’t have put up the statue.

I do know that his statue is one of a pair of statues by the same sculptor, the Viennese born Sir Joseph Boehm. The other, of Lord Lawrence is the other side of Waterloo Gardens. Lord Lawrence could be more of a problem than my forbear. He was Viceroy of India from 1864 to 1869. Therefore he was, by definition, an imperialist. And that word is now set alongside racist and sexist. Being ageist, discriminating against the over 70s ie me, is not being opposed with quite the same vigour but I will deal with another time.

Lawrence was a civil servant in India and became Chief Commissioner of the Punjab before becoming Viceroy. He was fluent in Urdu and Farsi and he is recorded as being harsh with tribal leaders who feared him not least because, as one of his assistants wrote,

“John Lawrence was full of energy – his coat off, his sleeves turned up above his elbows and impressing upon his subjects his principles of a just state demand…thou shall not burn thy widow, thou shall not kill thy daughters; thou shall not bury alive thy lepers.”

He had some successes and made many mistakes. Some of my Indian friends regard the time of British rule in India as a time of political oppression and to be deplored. Others regard it as a time of liberation in education, health and justice, for which to be thankful. Some, no doubt, would want to see the statues of all imperialists removed, others would be content to leave them be as positive reminders of what the then Princess Elizabeth described in her twenty first birthday broadcast as, ‘our great imperial family’.

None of the statues of which I am aware were put up by the subject themselves. Almost all, and certainly those of Burgoyne and Lawrence were sculpted and put in place after they were dead. The inscription on each of these two statues includes the same quotation from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. ‘How youngly he began to serve his country, how long continued.’ 

And the statues of the very rich that were erected, after the subject had died, were not put up because they were rich but because they gave away much of that wealth, because they were benefactors. But it was ‘dirty money’. And there is a subject for more thought.

Incidentally Sir Joseph Boehm was often commissioned by Queen Victoria and did a statue for her of John Brown.  This stood in front of Balmoral Castle on the lawn until, on becoming king, King Edward vii removed it into a small dark wood between Craig Gowan and the Castle. John Brown was not popular with the royal family. The 

The statue wasn’t thrown into the Dee in the new reign, only removed to obscurity as it is a very fine statue.  So there is royal precedent for, at least,  moving statues from prominence to obscurity.