The Wedding at Cana from The Gospel According to John

Although one of the better known miracles in the New Testament, the Wedding at Cana is missing from the three Synoptic Gospels and makes is sole appearance in the Gospel According to John.

A quick precis for us cheerful agnostics; the wedding is the story of Jesus being invited to a nuptial feast, only to be told that there’s no drink in the house. Although initially not keen to work the miracle (mine hour is not yet come) Jesus eventually instructs the domestic help to fill several vessels with water, which when presented to the host are now filled with good wine.

Here’s the text in full. Once again, I’m using the King James Authorized:

And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there: And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage. And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.

As I mention, it’s one of the better known miracles, and has inspired what I first heard as the Urologists’ Grace, a little prayer to say at the beginning of medical dinners. My apologies if I have got the words slightly wrong. Feel free to let me know a more correct version:

Oh God above, our Lord divine,

Who made the water into wine,

Have pity on us humble men,

Who seek to turn it back again.

Amen to that.

Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman by James Sharpe

One of the more colourful and easily recognised characters in history, Dick Turpin is portrayed as the greatest of the highwaymen, the gentlemen thieves of the road who preyed on the rich of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The reality, as James Sharpe illustrates in this excellent history of the man and his attendant phenomenon, is that Turpin was little more than a pock-marked thug, a common criminal who committed some pretty nasty crimes.

We meet him in the days running up to his execution in York on a chilly Saturday in April 1739. John Palmer is in York Castle, kept in a strong room awaiting trial at the assizes for horse stealing. Word is out, however, that Palmer is, in fact, the wanted outlaw Dick Turpin:

‘Since he was suspected to be Turpin’, ran another ’Letter from York’, in this instance dated 23 March, ‘the whole countrey have flock’d here to see him, and have been very liberal to him, insomuch as he has had wine constantly before him.’ The same source noted that the gaoler at York Castle ‘had made £100 by selling liquors to him and his visitors’.

It would appear from accounts of the time that drinking in prison was hardly discouraged, and although Turpin was hanged at York, things got pretty bibulous down in London as well. Bernard de Mandeville’s contemporary account of execution day shows the condemned drinking copiously before being loaded onto the tumbrel:

The prisoners themselves, on Mandeville’s account, usually took care to be as drunk as possible before leaving Newgate, but, on their way to the gallows, ‘the courage that strong liquors can give, wears off’, and the condemned find themselves in danger of becoming sober again.

Before his demise on the end of a rope, Turpin started his career as a butcher in Essex. At some point in his twenties he got mixed up with bad company and was soon running with a gang of men who would break into peoples’ houses and rob them at gunpoint. The crimes that this gang committed included rape and violent abuse of the elderly; one victim being burned on the fire in an effort to make him tell them where the loot was hidden. Hardly the actions of gentlemen thieves.

After the gang was broken by the law, Turpin escaped and turned to highway robbery. Even so, things got hot for him again and he made himself scarce, reinventing himself in Yorkshire as John Palmer. It was there that he was arrested for horse stealing in 1738. During his incarceration he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law. The letter got into the hands of someone who recognised his handwriting and the game was up.

So how come the legend? A century later, Gothic novelist William Harrison Ainsworth recreated Turpin as a dashing highwayman in his novel Rookwood, describing him as a man who:

...could sing a good song, was a choice companion, and could drink three bottles without feeling the worse for them.

He also created Turpin’s supposed flight to York in one night on Black Bess, and the legend was born. Strangely enough, the subsequent enthusiasm for highwayman coincided with the end of the practice in the country...

Nearly three hundred years after he was hanged, Turpin is ubiquitous, especially in the pub:

...there are, indeed, so many pubs alleging Turpin associations that if all their claims were true, the career of England’s most famous highwayman would have been passed in a combination of perpetual motion and a permanent alcoholic haze.

On the evidence provided in this fascinating book, we are asked in conclusion whether he really deserves his fame.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

One of my favourite books, this was first lent to me in January 1994 while I was doing my A-Levels and created quite an impression on me at the time, especially in the way that the gender of Winterson’s protagonist, a vulnerable and subversive Lothario, remains undeclared throughout the novel.

The story is about a love affair, or rather the end of an affair, ended by what appears at first to be the narrator’s noble intentions but turns out to be foolish heroics. After numerous affairs in their youth, (including one with a woman who blew up men’s lavatories and another with a giant who carried his midget parents around on his shoulders), the narrator tells us that they are in a steady and unexciting relationship with a woman who works with small furry animals at London Zoo. Into this staid existence comes Louise, an Antipodean redhead, married.

Their affair is passionate and destructive. The furry animal specialist leaves, distraught. Louise’s husband Elgin gets nasty. They leave it for three days but the pressure starts to get to our narrator:

Was I in sound mind and body? I took my temperature. No. I peered at my head in the mirror. No. Better go to bed close the curtains and get out the gin bottle. That was how Louise found me at six o’clock on the evening of the third day. She had been telephoning since noon but I had been too sodden to notice.

And after that? Bliss, happiness, cancer.

Louise has a rare form of leukaemia. The only person who says he knows how to treat her is her estranged husband. Arguing that saving Louise’s life is more important than their love, the narrator leaves her to get help from Elgin and holes up in Yorkshire. She finds work in a local wine bar, a far cry from her life in London with Louise:

The wine bar, otherwise known as ‘A Touch of Southern Comfort’, was staging a spring festival to attract back customers whose overdrafts still hadn’t recovered from the Christmas festival. For us who worked there, this meant dressing in lime-green body stockings with a simple crown of artificial crocuses about our heads. The drinks had a spring theme: March Hare Punch, Wild Oat Sling, Blue Tit. It didn’t matter what you ordered, the ingredients were all the same apart from the liquor base. I mixed cheap cooking brandy, Japanese whisky, something that called itself gin and the occasional filthy sherry with pulp orange juice, thin cream, cubes of white sugar and various kitchen colourings. Soda water to top up and at £5.00 a couple (we only served couples at Southern Comfort) cheap at the price during Happy Hour.

The narrator spends the next months fending off the advances of Gail, the wine bar’s owner, (fifty-three and as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse). After a pretty alcoholic evening, Gail sets out a few home truths:

Gail was drunk. She was so drunk that when her false eyelash fell into her soup she told the waiter it was a centipede. “I got something to tell you kiddo,” she said leaning down at me the way a zookeeper drops fish at a penguin. “Want it?” There was nothing else to have. Magic Pete’s was an all-night drinking club, low on amenity, high on booze. It was Gail’s revelation or find 50p for the jukebox. I didn’t have 50p. “You made a mistake.”

Desperate, the narrator runs back to London to find Louise, but she has vanished without a trace. She never took help from Elgin; she stayed in their shared flat but is no longer there. The book ends with a return to Yorkshire and Gail, who looks like she’s moving in... And in the last few lines, something wonderful, or is just as vague as he narrator’s real identity? (Interestingly enough, the last time I read it I was much more optimistic as to the outcome.) Why is the measure of love loss?

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing’s first novel is a short but intense story about the disintegration of a woman’s life under the unforgiving heat of the Zimbabwean sun. Covering racism in colonial Africa, the expectations of marriage and the limits that society places on women, The Grass is Singing is one of the most memorable debuts of the mid twentieth century.

Starting with the aftermath of the murder of Mary Turner by her black housekeeper, Moses, the novel looks back on the events that led to her death. Sketching out her Mary’s childhood, Lessing portrays a woman haunted by her youth and her mother’s relationship with rural poverty and her alcoholic father:

For thousands of people up and down Southern Africa the store is the background to their childhood. So many things centred around it. It brings back, for instance, memories of nights when the car, after driving endlessly through a chilly, dusty darkness, stopped unexpectedly in front of a square of light where men lounged with glasses in their hands, and one was carried out into the brilliantly-lit bar for a sip of searing liquid ‘to keep the fever away’... And later, when she grew older, the store came to have another significance: it was the place where her father brought his drink. Sometimes her mother worked herself into a passion of resentment, and walked up to the barman, complaining that she couldn’t make ends meet, while her husband squandered his salary in drink. Mary knew, even as a child, that her mother complained for the sake of making a scene and parading her sorrows: that she really enjoyed the luxury of standing there in the bar while the casual drinkers looked on, sympathetically; she enjoyed complaining in a hard sorrowful voice about her husband. “Every night he comes home from here,” she would say, “Every night! And I am expected to bring up three children on the money that is left over when he chooses to come home.” And then she would stand still, waiting for the condolences of the man who pocketed the money which was rightly hers to spend for the children. But he would say at the end, “But what can I do?” I can’t refuse to sell him drink, now can I?” And at last, having played out her scene and taken her fill of sympathy, she would walk away across the expanse of red dust to her house, holding Mary by the hand...

Her father isn’t a violent man, just a hopeless soak:

That is not to say that he drank himself into a state of brutality. He was seldom drunk as some men were, whom Mary saw outside the bar, frightening her into a real terror of the place. He drank himself every evening into a state of cheerful fuddled good humour, coming home late to a cold dinner, which he ate by himself.

As an adult, Mary moves to the city and shies away from marriage but when she overhears people gossiping about her at a party she impulsively ties the knot with an indebted and incompetent farmer, Richard. Inheriting her mother’s misery, she festers with resentment, trapped in a loveless marriage. The heat and the lack of money slowly grind her spirit, although it is her attitude to the native workers that finally dooms her.