Ancestors and Place

  Wishing Stone, Church Lane, Old Clee, (c2017). first encountered making wishes in 1940 as a six year old boy roaming Greetham’s Fields with a gang of older children from Cooper Rd and Ladysmith Rd.  The following ritual was enacted at the ‘Wishing Stone, then, as now, sited beside the back gate of what we called the Curvy Cottage on the corner of Church Lane, Old Clee.   The wish-maker first recited the following rhyme:  To make a wish; First spit and turn.  Then catch a kiss. Next, you stood on the stone, spat on it, turned around three times, spreading your saliva over the surface; girls clockwise, boys anticlockwise.  After making the wish, someone might blow you a kiss, when a couple were said to be ‘sweethearting’.  Needless to say, a common wish in the 1940s was for the war to end. This is not to say that the wishing stone did not once play a deeper role in the social life of adults in and around the village.  The stone belongs to a ...

  We can use the word ‘hope’ to talk about things that we desire for other people. In these cases, the meaning of  ‘hope’ is similar to ‘wish’. This way of using ‘hope’ was used by, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury,  speaking at the Cambridge ‘Ethics of Sustainable Prosperity for All’ conference in 2018.  He defined prosperity as ‘that which is hoped for’.  He maintained that ; “ …morally, such prosperity should be rooted to provide for the common good for all and shared social goals.  Yet we are currently looking forward in panic in our current politics of populist protectionism which puts national security  over global wellbeing and pitches North against South, East against West and rich against poor. Our wellbeing is interdependent and interlocking, so prosperity for the few is prosperity for none.  International crises be they environmental or social do not respect boundaries. The secure border is a toxic fiction”. His prescript...