Every time we see Jonathan Van Tam at the daily coronavirus briefing, we have an answer to the question: 'Can anything good come from Lincolnshire?' He spent formative years at Boston Grammar School and is now a familiar person helping to guide us through a viral minefield.
Two women also have a place in the answer to this question. Anne Bradstreet went from Lincolnshire to the colonies on the east coast of what is now the USA in 1630. Her husband became governor of Massachusetts; she became known as the first English poet in America. In 1634 Anne Hutchinson left Lincolnshire for Boston, Massachusetts and upset the apple-cart of the settlers there by probing the limits of religious and female freedom. She set out on a road that was to become crowded with the followers of Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer.
But the crowning glory of all yellow-bellies (as denizens of Lincolnshire are commonly known) was of course Isaac Newton. Less famous for his dogged pursuit of meaning in the apocalyptic elements of the Scriptures than his eye-watering acquaintance with the nature of light and the laws governing the movements of the heavenly bodies, his understanding of these matters enlightened one generation after another.
Newton may have been the greatest man to come out of Lincolnshire but he had a proper sense of his own inadequacy. He said he was like a boy who inspects a pebble on the beach while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. It is fitting for us to declare our own ignorance and to be agnostic where that is appropriate.
It was Nathanael who posed the question: 'Can anything good come from Nazareth?' He and his contemporaries can be forgiven for under-estimating the possibilities in an obscure little town. We know better. A forgotten county on the east coast makes hay of such a question. Where would we be without our yellow-bellies?
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