‘Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen,’ said a feature in the Daily Mail about Elizabeth II on the centenary of her birth. Yet perhaps that passion didn’t rage, hot as lava, through her veins, decade after decade. With Sir Keir, it has been football – ‘his only real passion and his one release from the tensions of office’, according to another source of the Daily Mail’s.
Every young person tries to convince their chosen ‘uni’ that they are passionate about law or sport science. ‘When you can turn your hobby and passion into your profession, then that is the best thing there is,’ observed Marie-Louise Eta, the football coach, as though it were a truth universally acknowledged.
This kind of passion is not quite the kind exhibited while playing croquet by the Queen of Hearts in Alice, who in a very short time was in ‘a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!”’ Nor is it the kind so usefully employed by Mystic Meg in the Sun when she predicts: ‘Passion waits near a display of flowers on Sunday.’
The earliest uses of passion in English, before the Norman Conquest, referred to the accounts in the Gospels of the sufferings and death of Jesus. Suffering, passio in Latin, seems the passive opposite in meaning to the active passions of anger or lust. But I think that in the medieval theory of the passions, deriving from Aristotle (as in his De Anima), passionate feelings are said to be moved passively by an agent, as when I feel a concupiscible desire (for my husband or a glass of whisky) or an irascible desire (to strangle my husband when he has had too much whisky). Reason was required to take command over the unruly bodily passions. In the language of schoolgirls a pash is a crush. The second world war brought the nickname passion-killers for service knickers issued to airwomen. Neither of these is held to invalidate the passionate enthusiasms without which, unfortunately, no CV is complete.
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