The Sheriff's Ride

 

Today was the day of the Sheriff's Ride, a grand Lichfield tradition, in pursuit of which the Sheriff, riding on horseback and followed by a train of other riders – these days including many on bicycles – perambulates the city (in former times county) boundary, in a less hands-on version of 'beating the bounds'.  I was up too late, and with too much to do, to see this year's procession, but I am heartily glad the tradition survives: 'How but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?' (as Yeats put it). 
  Samuel Johnson's father, Michael, happened to be Sheriff in the year of his son's birth, and led the ceremonial ride – presumably on a sturdy mount, as Michael was built on much the same generous lines as Sam; indeed Mrs Piozzi described him as 'a man of still larger size and greater strength than his son'.  After the ride, Johnson recalled, his father 'feasted the citizens with uncommon magnificence'. Michael Johnson was at that point approaching the apogee of his career as bookseller, businessman and widely respected local worthy. Sadly, in the years to come, he declined into genteel poverty, largely as a result of his lax business habits, a falling-off in the book trade, and the expenses of a growing family. Johnson, who spoke little of his parents, recalled that 'My father had much vanity, which his adversity hindered from being fully exerted.' Both his father and his mother are buried in St Michael's church, Lichfield, where a memorial stone in the nave floor carries a long Latin epitaph composed by their son in 1784, the year of his death and of his last visit to Lichfield. 

A Wealden Walk

   I've been off gallivanting again, but am now back home. This gallivant was a two-day walk (rather little of which was spent actually walking) down in Sussex, with my brother and the doughty remnants of the walking group. We spent the first day and night in Chichester, that fine town, where my brother, an expert on the subject, gave us an exhaustive tour of the cathedral – the site of the Arundel monument that inspired Larkin's famous poem, and of a touching memorial to William Collins, not to mention a fine statue of Sir William Huskisson, the first person to be run over by a railway engine, and some superb modern artworks commissioned by the art-loving Dean Hussey (whose own collection is now housed in Chichester's excellent Pallant House gallery). 
  The next day – only yesterday, but it seems longer ago – we drove north to walk in the Rother valley, beginning and ending in heather-and-gorse-clad heathland, but mostly in the lush, well-wooded river valley (the picture above shows Stedham bridge) – beautiful Wealden countryside, with glorious views of the South Downs. There had been much rain overnight and we had to shelter from a couple of morning downpours, but most of the time we had sun, and walking in such surroundings at the turn of summer/autumn was a delight. Even better, the walk route took in four lovely little Sussex churches, tucked away amid trees, all but one quite unspoilt by Victorian restoration. The undoubted gem was St George's, Trotton, home to some spectacular medieval wall paintings – below are the Seven Works of  Mercy from the west wall – and two very impressive brasses to members of the Camoys family (one commemorating the commander of the left flank at Agincourt and his wife, the widow of Harry Hotspur). There were butterflies too – Whites and Speckled Woods in abundance, with a Humming-Bird Hawk Moth thrown in. All of this, and we'd barely walked five miles. The riches of the English countryside are truly  inexhaustible.

Country Scenes

 Walking in Monsal Dale (one of the glorious dales of Derbyshire) on a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see large numbers of undoubtedly brown-skinned people walking the trails, frolicking in the water, and clearly having a high old time. At Monsal Head there was a group of decidedly Salafist appearance – heavily bearded man in grey jellabiya with a bevy of covered women – and even they were giving every appearance of enjoying the view, like everyone else. This is surely a good thing, people from other cultures and backgrounds tasting the traditional pleasures of English life. Ah yes, but do these people not know that the countryside is 'overwhelmingly white' and that hostility, cold shoulders and covert racism await any brown-skinned person who braves a country outing? Have they not read the latest report from the University of Leicester's Centre for Hate Studies (yes, there is such a thing)? It would seem not – but then these reports are not intended to be read by such 'minoritised communities' but to wring the withers of bien-pensant liberals. A funny old world. 

Diana

A melancholy anniversary today – that of the death, in 1997, of Diana, Princess of Wales. I remember lying in bed that night, dozing and following the barely believable story as it unfolded on the BBC World Service. It was clear from the start that the BBC had got their response wrong and had hugely underestimated the impact of this death on so many 'ordinary people'. Travelling in to work that morning, hours after the death had been confirmed, I could tell that something very big and strange was already under way – spontaneous, unrestrained public mourning on a scale we hadn't seen in our lifetimes. People were already making their way to Kensington Palace with sheaves of flowers, at the beginning of what was to become an ever more febrile, ever more extravagant round-the-clock display of grief, one result of which was a mountain of festering flowers, many of them rotting away in their cellophane sheaths. But that was all to come. When I arrived at work that morning – yes, at the Daily Mail – the shock and grief were palpable, and there were ashen faces (something you rarely see in real life) all around. Diana had been 'one of theirs' and they (unlike the BBC) knew just how big this death was, how hard it was going to hit, and what an extraordinary outpouring of grief it was going to provoke. 
   Diana, alas, has no fitting memorial – and her posthumous fate reflects a general decline to somewhere near rock bottom in the art of memorialising the dead. When the popular Queen Mary II, who shared the throne with William III, died, her death was marked by Purcell's sublimely beautiful funeral music. Diana's musical memorial was Elton John's mawkish update of 'Candle in the Wind' – 'Goodbye England's Rose'. When, in 1817, the much loved Princess Charlotte died, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn son, the nation was plunged into Diana-scale grief, and that feeling found artistic form in a grand, heaven-aspiring monument by M.C Wyatt – 

Diana's best memorial is probably the much derided water feature in Kensington Gardens – at least it has some life, unlike her sculptural memorial. When this was eventually unveiled, 24 years after her death, it turned out to be an absolute horror. Who is this creepy transvestite social worker rounding up waifs and strays? Diana? What? Really?!

Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. An age that routinely denies death, sweeps it away out of sight, and increasingly rejects even the very idea of a funeral is not going to be much good at producing memorials, especially as the art of figurative sculpture is also in decline. Just another sign of a culture that has lost its bearings and is withering on the vine.   
   
  

An Arty Jaunt

 I'm back from a two-day, two-gallery London jaunt, taking in two lunches, visits to Tate Britain and the National Gallery and, between them, an overnight stay with an old friend. At Tate Britain (still 'the Tate' to me) there are two concurrent exhibitions: one devoted to Edward Burra, which I was keen to see, and one to Ithell Colquhoun, which my friend wanted to see. I dutifully trailed around the latter, finding little to enjoy in the works of an artist who pursued every modish dead end available – notably surrealism and occultism – with results that are rarely very interesting or attractive. She seem to have had some talent for composition and a good colour sense, but that is hardly enough to carry a full-scale retrospective. Burra, on the other hand, had more than enough going on to sustain a big retrospective – the first in forty-odd years. There was plenty to enjoy here,  especially in his lively jazzy scenes of Paris and Harlem low life, and the pleasure only flagged when his darker, more monumental work from the war years (Spanish and World) took over. For me, the best of this exhibition, by far, came towards the end, with Burra's wonderful watercolour landscapes from the 1970s, towards the end of his life. I've written before about Burra and these extraordinary late watercolours, which I only learned about from Christopher Neve's classic Unquiet Landscape.  Among those on display at the Tate are Valley and River, Northumberland –

Near Whitby – 

And Landscape, Dartmoor – 

As Neve says, these paintings really have to be seen in the original, and I was delighted to have the opportunity.
   The next day's visit to the National Gallery, with an even older friend, was a joy. Seeing more of the great rehang only confirmed my initial impression that this has been extraordinarily effective in bringing a great collection alive, and making a great gallery even greater. I'll be back. 

'When summer's end is nighing'

 Another warm and sunny day today – on a Bank Holiday, for a wonder – but there is no mistaking the end of summer feeling in the air. It's been a (mostly) glorious season, and, for a butterfly lover, one that has gone on giving and giving. I thought that Clouded Yellow in Worthing was going to be the last surprise of my butterfly year – but no, this morning, wandering in one of my Lichfield haunts, I was delighted to spot a late (second brood) Brown Argus, a lovely little butterfly that I thought I'd missed, not having seen one in the spring. What a summer it has been... There is a certain melancholy about its ending, but at least it has been a proper summer with proper summer weather – and the beauties of autumn are still to come. 
    The element of melancholy was inevitably very much to the fore when A.E. Housman turned his mind to the end of summer in this beautiful poem. Its five-line stanzas lend it a different energy from the more usual quatrains – and (spoiler alert) the last line is a killer. 

XXXIX (from Last Poems)

When summer's end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
  In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
  And darkness hard at hand,
  And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
  The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
  Breathed from beyond the snows,
  And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
  And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
  That ever can ensue
  Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer's parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.

'A perfect association of splendour and intimacy'

 I've been staying the weekend with my Derbyshire cousin, and on Friday we crossed the border back into Staffordshire to check out a building I'd been meaning to visit for some while – the Church of the Holy Angels at Hoar Cross. I knew of its reputation as one of the great Victorian churches of England, the masterpiece of its architect G.F. Bodley – but the impact of the building, especially the interior, was still stunning (my photograph does it no justice). Built on an almost cathedral-like scale and in Bodley's favourite medieval style, Decorated, this tall cruciform church with an almost too massive central tower, has a powerful presence, and it is obvious even from the exterior that no expense has been spared. Inside, that impression is only strengthened, especially towards the liturgical East end (actually South, ensuring a blaze of noonday light through the great East window). The nave is relatively plain, and the whole building is quite dark, having virtually no clear glass – but a coin in the slot (shades of Venice!) bathes it all in light. Everything in this richly detailed church is of the highest quality, and as you wander round you notice more and more, and marvel more and more at the skill and verve of those who made it. It is a deeply satisfying aesthetic experience, and Hoar Cross is certainly one of the finest, most memorable Victorian churches I have ever seen. 
   The Church of the Holy Angels is set in a small village, amid gentle rolling countryside, and a little way from the church is Hoar Cross Hall (now a hotel, with a health spa attached), which was the home of the lady who commissioned Bodley and his partner Garner to build the church – the Hon. Emily Charlotte Meynell Ingram, who intended it to be a memorial to her late husband (whose fine medieval-style monument stands in the chantry). No budget was set for the work, and no effort or expense was spared in achieving exactly what Mrs Meynell Ingram and her architects intended. The church was commissioned in 1871, and building continued until 1876, with further additions being made at the West End after Bodley's work was done. It is no wonder that Bodley wrote afterwards (somewhat ungrammatically) 'Oh that one had more opportunities as was granted at Hoar Cross'. I'll leave the last word to John Betjeman, who wrote of Hoar Cross: 'The stalwart pink sandstone tower dominates the leafy hilltop. The tall nave, choir and transepts, so chaste and regular outside, make the stately interior all the more imposing because of its rich contrast with the exterior. It is ... a perfect association of splendour and intimacy architecturally expressed. This is because the green, blue and gold stained glass, the carved oak benches and screens, paved floors and sandstone walls blend into a perfect church interior of late Victorian vigour and hope.'