‘Well, I’ve got to tell you,’ said Nathaniel ‘The Professor’ James, taking a deep draw from his Senior Service, ‘I don’t like your chronology.’
Where once the Haymarket was a tumult of football talk, ribald banter and friendly exchange, now all was silence. Bede’s face was stone, and not a hair in the long, grey beard moved.
‘Oh, come on,’ said The Professor, ‘Don’t take it like that. Disbelief doesn’t sit well on a religious face.’
Bede turned around and looked at his entourage, a penny-mix of studious hermits, amateur theologians and star-struck members of AFC Lindisfarne Priory. None of them spoke.
This had been coming. Much of the journey up the East Coast Main Line had been taken up with the Professor’s disgruntled comments regarding the work of the Bedes.
‘The Venerable Bede was brilliant,’ prising open a bottle of Nut Brown, as the loco started to heave out of Grantham, ‘Excellent ecclesiastical history. And his chronology is a good read – hilarious in places, actually, as he tries to work out when the day of creation was and why the moon looks older than that (cart, horse, pass me them matches…). But it’s not good enough to build a tradition on, or, if it is, the tradition itself is absolutely rubbish.
‘How much chronology do you need, for Christ’s sake? Once you’ve got AD sorted – which he didn’t invent, but I’ll accept that he helped it catch on – what else is there to do? The Debatable Bede just moved the chairs about: year zero, talking in “Noventannos” – for some reason he thought centuries were too long — and “triannos” (why on earth would you group years in threes when you already know there’s a quarter day in a year?).
‘Then you’ve got the Questionable Bede, who tries to renumber the whole thing in order to make the year of his birth year zero. Clearly an agenda there, and frankly the stake was too good for him…’
At this point the ticket collector arrived, and a woman in the next row asked how much it would cost to move to second class. I poked Jack Dudley awake.
‘No more!’ he screamed, before regaining his composure.
‘The Lamentable Bede deliberately attempts to resurrect the ideas of the Questionable Bede, and meets the same fate. Some tradition! And then there is a bit of quiet – I would imagine successive Bedes are exterminated by the church until any whiff of heresy is gone. Enter the Rosary Bede.’
‘Do you think he’ll continue with Bill Morris?’ asked Jack, now resigned to being awake while the Professor held court but resistant to the idea of listening to him.
‘If he’s got any sense he will,’ replied Bert Tatsfield, who was seated next to the Professor and in the process of closing his own eyes.
‘Ar,’ I said, prising open a Nut Brown, ‘I like the look of him.’
‘All notion of historical enquiry gone! Science at the service of the church! And what the Rosary Bede instigates, an unthinking succession of lesser Bedes continues. I suppose there are some advances, or at least a consolidation, there: abandoning the tri-noventae duncery for example, and counting in hundreds and thousands again – this was the legacy of the Centi Bede and the Milli Bede, respectively. But it’s a…’
‘Where do you get all this stuff, Natty?’ asked Jack.
‘The library,’ said Natty, taking advantage of the break to find and light a cigarette.
‘But isn’t there anything better in there? A western, maybe? Or a history of football…?’
‘What’s your point, Jack?’ said the Professor, getting a beer.
‘Well, you seem to have read an awful lot of books that you don’t like.’
‘And have told us an awful lot about them,’ added Bert, without opening his eyes.
‘Knowledge is power,’ answered the Professor, a little uncertainly.
‘I suppose it must be,’ said Bert, ‘After all, it’s normally only the King gets a carriage all to himself.’
‘Can you maybe just skip along to the Enlightenment, Natty?’
The exodus had, indeed, continued, but I thought the comment a little unnecessary, all the same. ‘Can you maybe just skip along to the Enlightenment, Natty? The Medieval Bedes do seem rather…’
‘Reactionary? Yes, and you can imagine what happens in the Reformation…’ (We pretended we could), ‘Well, there’s the Commendable Bede, who did a lot of work for the poor of Jarrow but wrote pure drivel, coming up with some fantastical cosmology where the moon was the sun with its fire out. Enlightenment only in terms of chronology, you could say. The Recommendable Bede is only recommendable in comparison to the Commendable Bede. The Readable Bede wrote children’s stories, but deliberately, rather than the infantilia that the Commendable Bede produced.
‘Going into the nineteenth century, as you would expect in the Industrial Revolution, there is an interest in using time to measure speed. That begins the work of the Veloci Bede, and continues with the Increased Bede. Learnèd stuff to be sure, but it’s more chronometry than chronology.
Bert Tatsfield nodded; we were passing over a set of points.
‘Then the Undisturbable Bede investigates chronologies within Romantic novels. The conclusions are fairly unsurprising (time moves faster when everyone is happy), but the reason is because the author is having more fun when he describes the misery.
‘He dies of cholera, and then you get the Smokable Bead, also something of a Romantic, but more William Blake than Emily Brontë. Building on the work of the Venerable Bede, who divided the hour into Puncti, and mentions the atom only briefly (the time of the blink of an eye, according to the Greeks), the Smokable Bede establishes the atom as one millionth of a Puncti, and then further divides them into Wonders, Cupolas, Visions, and Parpadae Angelicae (the atoms of angels), giving no indication whatsoever of how they might be measured. Neither, incidentally, does he give any reason for adopting this system over the minutes and seconds which were unknown in the Venerable Bede’s day but universally accepted by his own time. In a pamphlet he circulated around Newcastle in the 1880’s he gives a measurement of the lifespan of Moses, correct to three decimal places of a Parpadae Angelicae, without offering any evidence or argument whatsoever.
‘Complete rubbish, in short, but unfortunately the twentieth century has seen a sharp decline in standards from even that low point. The Risible Bede, The Unintelligible Bede, The Laughable Bede, The Ignoble Bede and now the Ignorable Bede, although he is trying to style himself “The Bede to Read”. He is desperately trying to harvest the cult of Bedism but I don’t see it hanging on much longer.’
‘I don’t see us hanging on much longer,’ said Bert, now roused from his dozing, ‘Pass me a beer, Gonby, and get the cards out.’
‘But we don’t have a table!’ cried the Professor.
‘I will stand on all fours and have my legs scratched by cats before I hear another word about these contemptible Bedes,’ said Bert, at which Natty James fell silent for some time.
□ □ □ □ □
We were on our fourth or fifth round in the Haymarket by the time we began to be irritated by a bearded chap on the next table, who claimed it was possible to reckon time by the amount of beer consumed, and urged his acolytes into keeping a steady stream of “dog” so they didn’t “lose track”.
‘And how much chronology have yous ever written, ea?’ replied the Ignorable Bede with a lift of his beard.
‘Better to be silent and thought of as a fool then to write Time, Gentlemen, Please! and remove all doubt.’
‘Thassuncoal for!’ cried one of the Bede’s hangers-on. I looked around the Haymarket. Few of the flat caps would have concealed heads concerned with chronology, even the populist doggerel of the Memorable Bede, but I despise violence as an unnecessary and unwelcome encroachment upon drinking time, and decided to intervene.
‘Let us settle our differences like civilized men…’
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen!’ I said standing to separate the puffing chests, ‘There is no need for this nonsense. We are not stags, elephant seals or dung beetles. Let us settle our differences like civilized men.’
‘What do yer suggest, like?’ asked the Ignorable Bede.
‘A drinking competition.’
It took a while; the men of Jarrow can drink. Gradually, though, the Ignorable Bede became in turns the Ignorant Bede, the Imprudent Bede, the Intolerant Bede, The Intolerable Bede and the Incomprehensible Bede. We were all pretty merry, in fact, by the time the Unwakeable Bede was carried out by his now-less-admiring acolytes and deposited in a random stall in the Haymarket, thus giving rise to the limerick:
There was an old man from Jarrow Whose chronology was so shallow That he drowned in his cups, Spewed his guts and woke up In a fruiterer’s wooden wheelbarrow
which we recited in crescendo on the way to St James’ Park. It was our first visit since 1905, and a more enjoyable game than the 8-0 spanking we received on that occasion, but a defeat nonetheless, as Wolves struggled to find their feet back among football’s elite. We would have to wait three more tri-annos before we saw a win up there, by which time the posturing of the Unwakeable Bede (the name stuck) would have faded into irrelevance in the wake of the revelation of AFC Lindisfarne Priory’s bought ledger.