Last week I commented on the slowness of the pace of cultural change, and the time it seems to take for ideas to percolate down to become a part of common awareness. I was prompted to think about this further this afternoon. While I was making dinner I was listening to one of my Bob Dylan CDs, and my attention was grabbed in particular by his song Hurricane. If you don’t know it, the subject is the arrest and wrongful conviction of a black man (the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter). Dylan recorded the song in 1976. We are still protesting about similar injustices today.
On my way into the studio after dinner I paused to look at the regional TV news my wife had turned on. The item we saw concerned the “stately home” Harewood House, located not far from Bradford. The actor David Harewood has discovered that his ancestor was a slave owned by the Lascelles family, who own the house. As slaves his ancestors had been given the name of the “family seat” back in Yorkshire, probably back in the 18th. century. It seems that the family today have taken this on board very seriously and are using the house as an opportunity to provide information to the many visitors who pass through the place, about the origins of the family’s fortunes and the nature of slavery. Cultural change may sometimes be glacial in its pace, but there are some welcome signs.
Talking of change, the progress of my picture is not much quicker than the movement of a glacier. At least the direction of change is now beginning to appear.