Jane Shilling celebrates first love
Imust be one of a tiny minority of people who have never knowingly listened to a song by Ed Sheeran – they don’t play him much on Radio 3. But I know that he polarises opinion in exceptionally lively fashion. On the one hand he is adored by the squintillions who buy his albums and flocked to see him play solo at Glastonbury. On the other, he attracts the sulphurous hipster opprobrium that certain very successful musicians seem to command.
Last year I joined the adoring camp – not on artistic grounds, but because I heard a fragment of Desert Island Discs in which he explained to Kirsty Young that he takes his former school friends on tour to keep him grounded.
At 26, Ed is hardly old enough to have old friends: most of us are quite slow to value the love of the people who knew us when we were young. But he has now compounded his preternatural wisdom by announcing his engagement to another long-standing friend – Cherry Seaborn, with whom he went to school in Suffolk.
The fates of childhood sweethearts in literature are distinctly mixed – in the run-up to the wedding, Ed and Cherry should probably avoid too close a study of
Wuthering Heights or Le Grand Meaulnes.
But when it comes to exchanging the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue (or wherever the titans of pop do their wooing these days) for the deep, deep peace of the double bed, picking someone who knew you when you were a Year 10 nerd in a dodgy blazer, and still fancies you, has to be a pretty good bet.
Each night at 9.05pm Great Tom, the loudest bell in Oxford, rings 101 times – calling home the scholars of Christ Church college. The nightly clamour is regarded with some dismay by the denizens of Pembroke, the adjacent college – yet no one, as far as I know, has tried to serve a noise abatement notice on Great Tom.
By contrast, the village churches of England are plagued by complaints from their neighbours, who find their fantasies of rural life sadly at odds with the bells and smells of the real thing.
The sound of church bells is as fundamental a part of our island soundscape as the blackbird’s song or the breaking of waves on the shore, so it is cheering to hear that Government, in a rare example of a policy inspired by a poet, intends to change planning regulations to protect church bells. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls …
In 1935 a dashing RAF officer, Derek Rawnsley, had the brilliant idea of making lithographs by great artists available to schools at minimal cost.
Flt Lt Rawnsley was killed in 1943, but his widow, Brenda, carried out his idea with tremendous verve, popping up in a bikini on a beach favoured by Picasso in a successful attempt to persuade him to contribute.
Now the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in West Yorkshire is to revive the School Prints scheme, commissioning six artists, including Rose Wylie and Martin Creed, to produce limited edition prints to be given to six local schools and offered at low cost to schools nationally.
The proceeds will pay for artists to visit schools, bearing the message – as resonant now as in the post-war years – that art is for everyone.