The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
Catch phrases have a way of springing up almost overnight. No one ever knows who starts them or where they come from but quite suddenly they seem to be on everybody’s lips.
Sometimes they make sense but more often they don’t. A favourite one when I was a boy was, ‘I’ll boil your egg.’ I still don’t know what it was all about. Another, even more senseless one was. ‘Big Aggie’s man.’ Nobody ever seemed to know who Big Aggie was or what the man was supposed to be doing. Catch phrases were on everybody’s lips and quite often you found them plastered over the walls.
This business of writing on the walls is not a new thing by any means. In the dim distant past men used to scratch all sorts of signs and pictures on walls. Archaeologists have found many interesting things that have thrown light on ancient people. Some of them are preserved in various museums. Possibly the most interesting are the signs which the Christians used to scratch on the walls of the catacombs of Rome. I believe that a pane of glass has been preserved because Oliver Goldsmith once scratched his name on it. I can understand a young fellow’s love of carving his name somewhere. Mine, like the names of most other boys, was once carved on a desk. I saw it once again not very long ago and probably it spoke of some time when the carving of it helped to pass the time during a dull lecture.
There was a famous occasion in history once of a boy carving his name. His grandfather gave him a pocket knife and one day he went to Westminster Abbey and by some accident he was locked in. Poor Peter was locked in the Abbey all night so he curled himself up in the Coronation Chair - I saw it during my holidays, with the famous stone which made headlines a few years ago. There Peter went to sleep. In the morning when he wakened there was nothing much to do except to wait until somebody would let him out. To pass the time he carved his name on the Coronation Chair, so deeply that it could never be got off and it is there to this day. It says, ‘Peter Abbott slept in this chair July 5, 1800’
These reflections came about, of course, because there has been a great to-do about some texts of Scripture which were painted on a couple of rocks, called the Wren’s Eggs at Whitehead. I’m afraid I agree with those who think that that was not the place for Scripture texts but that’s my opinion. Those who argue on the other side have a very good precedent because the Bible tells us of some famous writing on the wall. It was in the days of Daniel that Belchazzar, the King, had a great banquet. In the middle of the feasting, the fingers of a man’s hand appeared, writing on the wall. It was Daniel who interpreted the message and it was a one of doom and of judgement against the King.
The message was ‘God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.’ Nowadays, when some impending doom is hanging over men or nations or industry, we say, ‘The writing is on the wall.’ It seems to me that there is only one way to avert the judgment of the writing on the wall and that is to be such a person, or such a nation, that the judgment will never fall.
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