Richard Littledale
Richard Littledale
radio microphone
BBC Radio 2 Richard Allinson Show
Zoë Ball Show
Pause for Thought
Richard Littledale: Series 17, Number 3
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Saturday 24 September 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a pilgrimage. It wasn't a religious pilgrimage, but a literary one. On a sunny bank holiday Monday I climbed into the car, and made my way to the sleepy little village of Chawton in Hampshire. There I visited the cottage which Jane Austen shared with her sister, Cassandra, her mother, and their housekeeper. The house is bigger than you might expect, with lots of nooks and crannies, and the obligatory creaky staircases and low doorways.

The real highlight, though, was to stand in the parlour where Jane and her family had taken their meals, and to gaze down at the table where she wrote many of her most famous novels. Pushed up against the window is a small octagonal wooden table, with lots of dents and scratches, listing over slightly to one side. Sitting at that table, leaning towards the window to make the most of the light, Jane had carefully drawn her characters with words in a way that has entertained thousands of people for hundreds of years. I felt slightly overwhelmed looking down at that diminutive table - and slightly guilty too, as I had hated being made to read her novels at school.

Back outside, in the inevitable gift shop, I overheard a visitor asking at the till whether this was the house where the films of Jane Austen's books had been made. On hearing that it was not, he took one rather grudging photo and left. Wasn't he spectacularly missing the point, though? If Jane Austen had not sat at this little table in this little house then there would have been no books to make into films in the first place!

We all have a great capacity to miss the point, though, don't you think? When Jesus was performing miracles that no person could ever do - he still had people asking him for a sign. On one occasion, even after feeding 5000 people and walking across a lake - people still asked him to show them a sign as proof of his identity. A blind man once looked up into the face of Jesus who had healed him and asked who the Messiah might be. Sometimes we just don't see what's under our noses.

On the wall of Jane Austen's bedroom is a framed prayer, written in her own hand, which asks that we might not miss out on our blessings through "discontent or indifference" Maybe she had a point.

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© BBC 2011
This talk by Richard Littledale was first broadcast as BBC Radio 2's night time "Pause for Thought"
at about 04:30 during the Richard Allinson Show and at about 06:18 during the Zoë Ball Show.
It is reproduced here by permission of the BBC.