A CHANGE THAT’s as BAD as the REST

Tomorrow, September 1st, is “officially the first day of autumn” according to someone on BBC1's Breakfast this morning. The office referred to is the Meteorological Office, which – uniquely, as far as I can see – determines that the seasons begin three-monthly on the first day of, respectively, September, December, March and June.

This is not what I was taught, nor what most websites aver if you put “first day of autumn” in Google. To the rest of us, autumn will begin at the equinox, which varies a little from year to year but this time falls on September 22nd. However, television being as powerful as it is and weather forecasters being put forward as “stars”, the Met Office ruling is beginning to take hold far beyond. Thus the political parties hold what they call their “spring conferences” during the winter.

Some years ago, the forecaster Penny Tranter referred to that day, March 1st, as the first of spring. I wrote to her querying this. My letter evidently had some impact. Tranter duly wrote back, accepting that it was a Met Office thing. A day or two later, Michael Fish did a little detour from his forecast to explain that forecasters measure the quarterly seasons from the first of the month (though not why they do so). Every viewer but me must have wondered what had brought this on. Subsequently “officially” started to be routinely attached to the matter.

Well, I don’t accept that the whim of the Met Office counts as officialdom. I shall continue to cling to summer for another three weeks and I shall not be counting 2012 as featuring “the wettest summer in a century” until I see statistics that measure that season from June 20th (this year’s summer solstice) to the autumn equinox. It may be convenient for forecasting but the weather is not so critically important that it trumps tradition.

It’s a function of growing old, of course, that one deplores change and deems it increasingly often as “change for change’s sake”. But insofar as it is coherent to argue about particular changes, I don’t see that objection to them necessarily can or should be dismissed as old-fashioned or fogeyish.

It seems to me to be a great pity that we are replacing our own traditions with those that belong to others. Bonfire Night, also known as Guy Fawkes’ Night, has all but vanished. When were you last asked for a penny for the guy? Fireworks, like Easter eggs and hot cross buns, are sold all the year round. As with fruit and vegetables, there is no seasonality any more. In the 1950s, it would have been sacrilege to let off fireworks before or after November 5th or, at a stretch, the nearest weekend to that date. Now the bangs – shop-bought firecrackers today consist of little else – begin in earnest in October and go on well into the week after Bonfire Night; indeed, they can break out at any other time of year.

This nice old celebration, Britain’s last outdoor party before winter sets in, has been displaced by that end-of-October junket from the US, Hallowe’en. But British kids aren’t versed in the workings of “trick or treat”, so little actually happens, save the watching of spooky films on television or DVD. In any case, kids aren’t allowed out unchaperoned after dark any more, except to sit in groups in a shopping precinct and get smashed on alcopops.

My partner spent his 1950s childhood in Dundee and he recalls the old Scottish custom of ‘guising’ on Allhallows Eve; and strictly on no other night. This entailed children dressing up, usually en travesti or with outer garments back to front. A boy might wear his older sister’s dress or a girl her father’s coat buttoned behind her. Thus attired, the kids would troupe round the neighbourhood knocking on doors and announcing that they were ‘guisers’ or players in disguise, like medieval mummers.

If the troupe was turned away, a favoured reprisal would be to secure a length of thread with a drawing pin to the wooden window frame of the curmudgeon’s family room and slip a button onto the thread. From some distance away, the button could be agitated against the pane, bringing puzzled householders to their windows.

But most people would invite the kids in, request their various party pieces (songs or recitations) and then send them on their way with cake or sweets or apples. In some houses, there would be an evolving party going on, packed with guisers at various stages of their tours of duty. David says that the Hallowe’en sequence in Meet Me in St Louis, led by the wonderful Margaret O’Brien as little Tootie (“I killed him!”), gives a good – if necessarily way too dressy – impression of what guising was like, bearing in mind that it is a 1940s Hollywood re-imagining of the first decade of the 20th century.

Another festival hijacked by US commerce is Mothering Sunday. In Britain this used to be a religious festival, held on the fourth Sunday in Lent: “Jerusalem which is above is free; which is the mother of us all” (Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 4:21, the epistle for the day). The mother originally celebrated was the mother church. On this day, young people working away from home were excused to return for worship with their parents. Hence, their own mothers were honoured too. A marzipan confection, called a simnel cake, was a traditional offering, roguishly used here by the poet Robert Herrick:

“I’ll to thee a simnell bring
‘Gainst thou go’st a-mothering.
So that, when she blesseth thee,
Half that blessing thou’lt give me”.

This is one of several short poems, called a canzonet, written by Herrick to one of his many mistresses, Dianeme, and entitled, for reasons now obscure, 'A Ceremonie in Glocester' [published 1648].

Now it is routinely called Mother’s Day, is held (in the US) on the second Sunday in May (after Lent is done) and, like all other religion-derived festivals, has been rendered secular and commercial.

There is a matching Father’s Day on the third Sunday in June, an invention of commerce with no basis in religion or tradition. All the businesses that depend on such compulsory events – greetings cards, gift shops, phone companies, florists, confectioners – must get on their knees and praise the media that gives them free promotion, reminding us constantly that it is this or that meaningless Day.

Of all cultures, it is bound to be that of the US that erodes ours most thoroughly because it is in the States that capitalism is most successful and valued. We have bought deep into Yankee style. So we wear baseball caps as if that most impenetrable of unexported American games is something we value. We applaud ourselves – why did Americans ever start doing that? We high-five each other in a graceless parody of inner-city American blacks. We whoop and holler at sports events and rock gigs and even at more sedate gatherings: at an intimate concert at the Donmar Warehouse in the 1980s, the distinguished American chanteuse Barbara Cook had to shush a pair of over-enthusiastic boys on the front row. Mind you, my gang was no less vocal at Bette Midler’s first big London show in 1978 – but it was at the Palladium and she did bare her breasts at the royal circle.

Americans value certainty above all else. They stare frankly at everything but they cannot detect the shadows. “It’s morning again in America” Ronald Reagan assured his besotted electorate. (He didn’t of course. His writers did, in a television commercial for the 1984 re-election campaign ). And Americans assume that everyone else agrees. “We love your Mrs Thatcher” they would beam when visiting us in the 1980s and then be astonished that one harrumphed and demurred. ‘Dissent’ for most Americans is an alien concept, something ‘Commies’ do, something un-American (unless the government is Democrat). No wonder British politicians are so comfortable in the States.

I don’t know if the banishment of the term “actress” derives from the US. At any rate, most of my actor friends bristle if I use the term and The Guardian has made it a house-style matter. Occasionally, this can cause confusion, as in the paper’s notorious obituary for the Italian movie producer Carlo Ponti who, it was suggested, “had an eye for a pretty young actor”. This, many of us noted, must have been a real eye-opener for his widow, Sophia Loren.

Encouragingly, a multi-authored letter in today’s paper includes Joanna Lumley and Judi Dench, each self-described as “actress”. The subs evidently baulked at “correcting” two such formidable women. But therein lies the nonsense. If it is acceptable to deploy the word “woman”, wherein lies the objection to “actress”? One answer routinely trotted out to that question is “well, you wouldn’t say ‘poetess’ or ‘comedienne’, would you?” and honestly, I don’t see any good reason why I shouldn’t. As in the Ponti obit, there are times when a sexually neutral term critically alters the sense. Imagine how quickly the business of a dominatrix would collapse if she were obliged to advertise her services as a “dominator”: she would be for ever faced with angry clients claiming they’d been misinformed.

Evolution can be as dismaying as change. I could write a book on the fraying of the English language – perhaps I will. People tell me that I should accept that language develops, but if those developments are rooted in ignorance and misuse and if they denude the tongue of subtle distinctions and useful nuances, what is the gain? Several words are losing their particular meanings through constant distortion on television and radio and in the press. “Literally”, for instance, is now widely used as if it means the opposite: metaphorically. “Disinterested” – which means objective, non-partisan, literally without an interest in the sense of a vested interest – is dwindling into a synonym for “uninterested”. “Ironically” is loosening and widening to mean inter alia coincidentally, unexpectedly, amusingly, interestingly, by chance and as it happens.

Meanwhile, pronunciations are changing. Schedule is becoming skedule instead of shedule; forehead is now fore-head rather than forr-ed; the emphasis in words like research and resource has moved from the second syllable to the first, as if they respectively mean “search” or “source” again, as the emphasised first syllable indicates in rewrite or reconsider. Pretty soon we shall doubtless have to re-member, re-main and re-cruit.

I don’t expect the world to stand still. I don’t even want it to do so. Much that has changed in my lifetime has changed for the better. But where we can, we must resist changes that bring deterioration. Or should that be re-sist?