Hope by Peter Steward
Sitting at my desk at 6 p.m on Tuesday 13th August, I have a rather glum expression on my face.
You see I have 500 words to write for writing group this evening and I can’t even remember what the subject is – so there’s no hope of me writing anything meaningful.
So what am I going to write about and how do I pretend I know exactly what the subject matter is? Isn’t hope a strange kind of word. It has so many meanings and can be used in an both an optimistic or pessimistic way depending on whether you are a glass half full or glass half empty sort of person.
So maybe I’ll make a few comments on the word hope and HOPE that everybody will forgive me for forgetting the subject. As they say hope springs eternal and so I may get away with it. Mind you they also say all hope is lost, so it’s difficult to know where to find hope in the first place.
Bob Hope, now he made me laugh occasionally in those old road movies. So he must have been full of Hope. But then there’s the Cape of Good Hope – a dangerous stretch of water off the coast of South Africa.
I have been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy and in particular the inferno section which has the chilling phrase Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", or "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
So it looks as if hope is something that can be abandoned, something to be warned about. Napoleon said “A leader is a dealer in hope” and that’s much more positive.
Hope can first be seen in ancient Greek mythology with the story of Zeus and Prometheus. Prometheus stole fire from the god Zeus, which infuriated the supreme god. In turn, Zeus created a box that contained all manners of evil, unbeknownst to the receiver of the box. Pandora opened the box after being warned not to, and those evils were released into the world; hope, which lay at the bottom of the box, remained.
This piece has become rather rambling almost a stream of consciousness and for that I apologise. I woke up in the night a few days ago thinking about hope – hoping it would be sunny the next day, hoping I wouldn’t have to do a number of things I had been putting off and thinking about Coronation Street.
That was because actor Graham Hawley had been on celebrity Mastermind in the evening, stating that it was more pleasurable to be a serial killer than appear on Mastermind. This was based on his Coronation Street role where he did indeed play a serial killer.
Then my mind wandered to the first ever episode on 9th December, 1960. I still remember it. My parents had gone to the doctors to have tetanus jabs and my grandmother was child minding or babysitting depending on how you look at it. The now famous theme tune struck up and we sat and watched it expecting it to be aone off episode. Now 53 years later it’s still going strong and serial killer John Stape and his partner Fizz had a girl which they named Hope.
But enough of these ramblings. I have just re-read this piece and it really is HOPELESS.
You see I have 500 words to write for writing group this evening and I can’t even remember what the subject is – so there’s no hope of me writing anything meaningful.
So what am I going to write about and how do I pretend I know exactly what the subject matter is? Isn’t hope a strange kind of word. It has so many meanings and can be used in an both an optimistic or pessimistic way depending on whether you are a glass half full or glass half empty sort of person.
So maybe I’ll make a few comments on the word hope and HOPE that everybody will forgive me for forgetting the subject. As they say hope springs eternal and so I may get away with it. Mind you they also say all hope is lost, so it’s difficult to know where to find hope in the first place.
Bob Hope, now he made me laugh occasionally in those old road movies. So he must have been full of Hope. But then there’s the Cape of Good Hope – a dangerous stretch of water off the coast of South Africa.
I have been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy and in particular the inferno section which has the chilling phrase Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", or "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
So it looks as if hope is something that can be abandoned, something to be warned about. Napoleon said “A leader is a dealer in hope” and that’s much more positive.
Hope can first be seen in ancient Greek mythology with the story of Zeus and Prometheus. Prometheus stole fire from the god Zeus, which infuriated the supreme god. In turn, Zeus created a box that contained all manners of evil, unbeknownst to the receiver of the box. Pandora opened the box after being warned not to, and those evils were released into the world; hope, which lay at the bottom of the box, remained.
This piece has become rather rambling almost a stream of consciousness and for that I apologise. I woke up in the night a few days ago thinking about hope – hoping it would be sunny the next day, hoping I wouldn’t have to do a number of things I had been putting off and thinking about Coronation Street.
That was because actor Graham Hawley had been on celebrity Mastermind in the evening, stating that it was more pleasurable to be a serial killer than appear on Mastermind. This was based on his Coronation Street role where he did indeed play a serial killer.
Then my mind wandered to the first ever episode on 9th December, 1960. I still remember it. My parents had gone to the doctors to have tetanus jabs and my grandmother was child minding or babysitting depending on how you look at it. The now famous theme tune struck up and we sat and watched it expecting it to be aone off episode. Now 53 years later it’s still going strong and serial killer John Stape and his partner Fizz had a girl which they named Hope.
But enough of these ramblings. I have just re-read this piece and it really is HOPELESS.