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Barnhill, Jura. June 2015. (Thanks to the kindness of the Fletcher family).

A Persistent Shadow?

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Phil Connors (Bill Murray) : Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs. Lancaster?

Mrs. Lancaster : I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen.

Bill Murray runs in snow in Groundhog Day

Phil Connors (Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day 1993

February 2nd, last Saturday, was Groundhog Day, a notable date in the calendar of enthralling Pennsylvanian Dutch superstition, when signs of any shadow cast by the furry creature Punxsutawney Phil forecast the release of winter’s icy grip and the emergence of spring.

The crucial part of, “the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather”, is that, if the shadow of the bewildered Marmota monax is seen, winter will persist.

In the wonderful 1992 movie Groundhog Day, the weary weatherman Phil Connors – played magnificently by the dead-pan Bill Murray  – is captured in a seemingly endless narrative as the same day repeats itself over and over again.

The early bulletin on the morning news broadcast to which his radio is tuned, turns, endlessly, to the exactly the same discussion.

Many who have become sufficiently accustomed now so as to barely flinch as they hear the latest Brexit spasm ooze from their own radio news, earnestly seeking the emergence of spring in the same stagnating political narrative each and every morning, will likely empathize with the weary weatherman Phil Connors.

Groundhog

Marmota monax or Groundhog

Yesterday, February 7th, was the 207th anniversary of the birthday of Charles Dickens.

Dickens’ story Bleak House, published in the early 1850s, centres on the seemingly interminable process of litigation in the early 19th century Chancery Division.

Bleak House has no small measure of Groundhog Day about it. The case progresses with all the fluidity of treacle left outside in a Pennsylvanian winter.

In his preface to the tale, Dickens writes: “At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of—a parsimonious public.”

If Dickens was alive today he would surely hear the dull echo of the Chancery’s pedantic Victorian dispute resolution in Jarndyce and Jarndyce resonating, with equivalent fervour, from Augustus Pugin’s Westminster panelling in a contemporary Gothic revival within current political process.

Dickens opens his story with a fossilized scene which refuses to admit natural extinction. It is not at all impossible that the legal and political landscape will yet continue to be haunted by similar Jurassic spectres of party politics like a shadow cast upon the sunlit uplands of Brexit rhetoric.

Megalosaurus

Megalosaurus

“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”

(Charles Dickens, Bleak House, opening passage)

Images from Britannia Imagequest


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