A Curious Case

 The first day of 'Meteorological Spring' at last – and it's St David's Day, and the birthday of Frederic Chopin (born on this day in 1810). Wouldn't it be good it Chopin had, like Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schubert and many another, written a piece of Spring-themed music? Alas, he didn't – but there is still the curious case of 'Chopin's Spring Waltz', a piece which, despite not being by Chopin, not sounding like Chopin, and not even being (for the most part) in waltz time, has had a huge internet success, and can still be found under that false flag. It first attracted attention – and 34 million views – when it turned up as an erroneously titled YouTube video. After that was taken down, it kept turning up again and again, in one iteration attracting over 160 million views. The piece known as 'Chopin's Spring Waltz' is actually 'Mariage d'Amour', written by Paul de Senneville in 1978, and popularised by Richard Clayderman, whose repertoire it fits perfectly. Here is the piece (arranged by George Davidson), on which I shall pass no further comment...

I remember buying my first Chopin record, in the local W.H. Smith's, when they still sold such things. The girl behind the counter had some difficulty with the word 'Chopin', which I had to write down on paper for her, but eventually I came out clutching a Music for Pleasure EP of the great Fantaisie-Impromptu, played, I think, by Benno Moiseiwitsch. Here he is (in another recording) showing how it's done...

Carlyle on India Paper

 I'd been eyeing it for months as it sat unpurchased on the shelves of my favourite local antiques shop – a single-volume, pocket-sized edition of Carlyle's The French Revolution, printed on India paper and published by Chapman & Hall in 1901. Finally, the other day, I actually bought it, and for the very fair price of £6 (it's in excellent condition for its age). But am I going to read it, after all these years of meaning to? Reader, I am (though perhaps in instalments – there are many, many pages in that India-paper volume). I have begun, and I'm loving it. It's history writing at its most exhlilarating and colourful, the work of a writer bursting with energy and ideas, with a brilliant, fervid style and a very definite philosophy of history. Every page is peppered with exclamation marks and question marks (the latter most often appended to rhetorical questions) and every page drives the narrative along with irresistible force. It could, indeed, hardly be more different from the way history is written today. Even though I cannot pretend to understand Carlyle's every reference and allusion (I don't know enough of the history of the period) I'm hugely enjoying being carried along on the great surging rollers of Carlyle's prose.  
  Here is a representative passage, about the 'decadent' age into which Louis XV was born. It has, I think, a certain contemporary relevance...
'But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms? When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become Pageantry; and the Creed of persons in authority has become one of two things: an Imbecility or a Macchiavelism? Alas, of these ages World-History can take no notice; they have to become compressed more and more, and finally suppressed in the Annals of Mankind; blotted out as spurious, – which indeed they are. Hapless ages: wherein, if ever in any, it is an unhappiness to be born. To be born, and to learn only, by every tradition and example, that God's Universe is Belial's and a Lie; and the 'Supreme Quack' the hierarch of men! In which mournfullest faith, nevertheless, do we not see whole generations (two, and sometimes even three successively) live, what they call living; and vanish, – without chance or reappearance?'
Phew.

Myra Hess and the Compton-Burnetts

The pianist (Julia) Myra Hess was born on this day in 1890. Dame Myra, as she became, is rightly remembered for her extraordinary achievement in staging lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery throughout the Second World War, when evening concerts were impossible. These performances undoubtedly did much to boost wartime morale, and gave a platform to promising newcomers as well as established artists. Dame Myra herself performed (for no fee) in 150 of them. But there was more to Myra Hess than the National Gallery concerts – including a surprising association with the family of Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Ivy herself deeply disapproved of music, as of so many things, but at least two of her sisters, Vera and Judy, were seriously talented, and Myra was their friend and teacher. The sisters chafed against the domestic tyranny imposed on the family by Ivy after their parents' death, and were desperate to escape and live independently. In the end, unlike so many of the victims in ICB's novels, all four sisters managed to get their way, and escaped to set up house in St John's Wood – with Myra Hess. The house was, as Ivy's biographer Hilary Spurling puts it, an 'art house ... with music, painting, modelling, eurhythmics, all activities that Ivy flatly deplored'. Vera and Judy thrived in this environment, took up Theosophy, and went on to become Steiner teachers, but it seems the other two sisters, Primrose and Topsy, became increasingly detached from reality, and ended up dead in their shared bedroom in an apparent suicide pact.
There is a passage in Samuel Butler's Notebooks that Ivy marked with no fewer than six heavy pencil lines in the margin: 
'The Family – I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than any other – I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily.' 

[The image above is of Myra Hess in her youth, looking very different from the Dame Myra of later years.]

'Remembering the ocean, So calm, so lately crossed'

 The tribe continues to increase, the latest addition being a great-niece (bringing the tally of great-nephews and nieces to nine, by my calculations). The baby was born rather late, though not as late as the one addressed in Donald Justice's beautiful poem, To A Ten-Months' Child (this is the long version; often the first two triplets only are printed)...

Late arrival, no
One would think of blaming you
For hesitating so.

Who, setting his hand to knock
At a door so strange as this one,
Might not draw back?

Certainly, once admitted,
You will be made to feel
Like one of the invited.

Still, because you come
From so remote a kingdom,
You may feel out of place,

Tongue-tied and shy among
So many strangers, all
Babbling with a strange tongue.

Well, that’s no disgrace.
So might any person
So recently displaced,

Remembering the ocean,
So calm, so lately crossed.

'The only drink you want after it is more of it'

 In the supermarket yesterday morning I found myself talking whisky and Kingsley Amis with the chap behind the till, which was a pleasant surprise. I'd bought a bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old (vulgar, I know, but very drinkable – and, more to the point, on offer), and somehow we (the chap and I) got onto whisky brands you don't see any more – Haig, Vat 69 – and he came up with the MacAllan 10-year-old, a whisky that enjoyed a big vogue in the 1970s but was way beyond my means at the time. It was, he told me, the favourite whisky of toper supreme Kingsley Amis, who apparently slipped references to it into all his novels – I hadn't noticed, but will keep my eyes open in future. At least he didn't do any adverts for it  – unlike Sanderson (remember 'Very Kingsley Amis, Very Sanderson'?) – but it was clearly a drink he loved from the moment he discovered it, on tour of Speyside distilleries. The MacAllan 10-year-old, matured in sherry casks, was 'widely regarded in the trade as the king of malts,' Amis declared. 'The flavour's rich, even powerful, but completely smooth, as smooth as that of a fine Cognac, and immediately enjoyable ... The only drink you want after it is more of it.' 'No spirit known to me,' he raved, 'can touch it for sheer quantity of flavour, for smoothness and for – what would you call it? – duration, lastingness, the ability to go on hanging round the mouth and nose.' High praise, and from someone with unparalleled experience in the field. Despite Sir Kingsley's heartfelt endorsements, MacAllan discontinued this particular malt more than a decade ago, and bottles are only available at eye-watering prices. I think I'll be sticking to Chivas, or whatever else is going cheap. 

'I listen to money singing'

 On this day in 1973, Philip Larkin's mind was on money, that most concrete of abstractions. He wrote, or completed to his satisfaction, this poem, which was published in the collection High Windows. The last stanza is beautiful, I think...

Money

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

    ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

I am all you never had of goods and sex.

    You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:   

    They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.

By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:

    Clearly money has something to do with life

—In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:

    You can’t put off being young until you retire,

And however you bank your screw, the money you save

    Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

    From long french windows at a provincial town,   

The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

    In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

The Feeder Dilemma

 Back home after a weekend over the border in Derbyshire, I am, as usual, keeping an eye on the bird feeder action out there in the garden. It's been a disappointing winter, with the house sparrows doing their best to monopolise the big feeder (yes, we're lucky to have them – many towns and cities have none) and the starlings muscling in from time to time, no one having told them they're on the Red List of endangered species. Great tits and, to a slightly lesser extent, blue tits come and go, and the odd coal tit nips in from time to time (their long-tailed cousins prefer to feed in the trees). The goldfinches that were so abundant last year have hardly shown up, even at the nyger seed feeders I put up especially for them, the ingrates, and I've seen very few chaffinches and even fewer greenfinches, one of the dominant feeder-habitués last year. Of course, like practically everyone else, I enjoy watching the garden birds – and, in my case, the squirrels which are still trying to foil the squirrel-proof feeder, and failing ignominiously. Watching the birds gives us all great pleasure, it feels good, and it surely does us good – even Science tells us so (measurable benefits to mental and physical wellbeing, etc.) But does it do the birds good? Probably not. I keep reading and hearing unarguable evidence that feeding birds in the garden encourages the bullies and predators at the expense of more timid and vulnerable species which are already having enough trouble hanging on. The bold, aggressive species thrive on our largesse, which makes them still bolder and more aggressive, and that is bad news for many of the rest  – and, sadly, feeders can spread avian diseases, one of which recently had an all but exterminating effect on greenfinches. Bird feeders also act as an all-day buffet for sparrowhawks, but that's fine by me – I'm always excited to see one of them in the garden. 
Am I going to carry on feeding the birds? I expect I am, but probably in a more limited way. The birds, or most of them, will still come to the garden. And I'm going to clean the feeders thoroughly to make sure they don't spread disease among my feathered friends. 

'And everywhere that spacious blue...'

 Valentine's Day again, so I guess a love poem is called for. Very few modern poets, I think, can write anything very convincing in this line. However, one who can is Dick Davis. Here is his great love poem, Uxor Vivamus...

The first night that I slept with you

And slept, I dreamt (these lines are true):

Now newly married we had moved

Into an unkempt house we loved –

The rooms were large, the floors of stone,

The garden gently overgrown

With sunflowers, phlox, and mignonette –

All as we would have wished and yet

There was a shabby something there

Tainting the mild and windless air.

Where did it lurk?  Alarmed we saw

The walls about us held the flaw –

They were of plaster, like grey chalk,

Porous and dead:  it seemed our talk,

Our glances, even love, would die

With such indifference standing by.

Then, scarcely thinking what I did,

I chipped the plaster and it slid

In easy pieces to the floor;

It crumbed cleanly, more and more

Fell unresistingly away –

And there, beneath that deadening grey,

A fresco stood revealed:  sky-blue

Predominated, for the view

Was of an ebullient country scene,

The crowning of some pageant queen

Whose dress shone blue, and over all

The summer sky filled half the wall.

And so it was in every room,

The plaster’s undistinguished gloom

Gave way to dances, festivals,

Processions, muted pastorals –

And everywhere that spacious blue:

I woke, and lying next to you

Knew all that I had dreamt was true.

Those Eyes...

 This haunting image is the so-called Mona Lisa of the Depths, a daguerrotype of an unknown woman that was found in the wreck of the SS Central America, lying on the ocean bed off the coast of South Carolina. The ship sank in a hurricane in September 1857, with the loss of 425 lives and some 30,000lb of gold. The wreck was located in 1988, with the aid of Bayesian search theory (whatever that is – more than once I've had a brief sense of understanding Bayesian statistics, but it soon passes), and gold to the value of $100-150 million was salvaged. And so was the Mona Lisa of the Depths, an extraordinary survival and a portrait of rare intensity and directness. She seems, truly, a 'living likeness'. Those eyes...

'the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped...'

 In April 1817 Charles Ollier, Keats's first publisher, wrote thus to the poet's brother George: 

'Sir, – We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. We are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connexion with it which we must have done, as we think the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped. – By far the greater number of Persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offer'd to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been shower'd on it...'

The book was Poems (1817), Keats's first publication, a volume which contains one of the greatest sonnets in the language – this:

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Poems did initially attract a couple of good reviews, but was duly shot down by Blackwood's Magazine, largely because of Keats's association with  the enemy, i.e. Leigh Hunt. Hunt himself declared that the Chapman's Homer sonnet 'completely announced the new poet taking possession'. He was right. 
By the way, if anyone fancies owning the first edition of Poems, in its original boards, there's one on the market now for just shy of £50,000.

Keep On Punning

 I see that the UK Pun Championships are taking place this evening, as part of the Leicester Comedy Festival. Good to know that this much maligned form of wit – not the lowest but potentially one of the highest – is being celebrated in this annual event. 
In literature, the pun has a distinguished history – Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are full of puns – and perhaps achieved its most evolved form, much later, in Flann O'Brien's tales of Keats and Chapman, each beautifully detailed anecdote crafted to end in a fantastically ingenious punning pay-off line. Here is a fine example: 

'Around the time that Chapman was becoming disillusioned with his friend Keats’s flock of dotterels, acquired for seven and six from a man in the Dandelion Market and put out to roost in their back garden, the birds redeemed themselves by showing an unexpected talent as gentlemen’s outfitters. Picking up the large quantities of thread and fabric that Keats liked to keep lying around the place in the garden, God only knows why, the birds would get to work and several hours later would have produced a dazzling array of formal neckwear. The products of their labours, it must be said, were not in the best of taste. The colour schemes were gaudy and the patterns in the ‘novelty’ genre beloved of salesmen on their way to office Christmas parties and other such occasions. Yet the public went wild for their designs, especially a garish green number known as the ‘Happy Leprechaun’. Why, even Eamon de Valera was spotted wearing one. Sitting in their kitchen one day, our heroes discussed these changes in gentlemen’s fashions. ‘All is changed, changed dotterelly’, observed Keats. ‘A terrible bow-tie is born’, agreed Chapman.'

But for sheer pun firepower, surely no one ever equalled the Victorian poet Thomas Hood, as in this virtuoso performance, Faithless Nelly Gray: A Pathetic Ballad –

'Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war's alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.

Now, as they bore him off the field,
Said he, "Let others shoot;
For here I leave my second leg,
And the Forty-second Foot!"

The army-surgeons made him limbs:
Said he, "They're only pegs;
But there's as wooden members quite
As represent my legs!"

Now, Ben he loved a pretty maid,
Her name was Nelly Gray;
So he went to pay his devours,
When he devoured his pay!

But when he called on Nelly Gray,
She made him quite a scoff;
And when she saw his wooden legs,
Began to take them off!

"O, Nelly Gray! O, Nelly Gray!
Is this your love so warm?
The love that loves a scarlet coat
Should be more uniform!"

Said she, "I loved a soldier once
For he was blithe and brave;
But I will never have a man
With both legs in the grave!

"Before you had those timber toes,
Your love I did allow;
But then, you know, you stand upon
Another footing now!"

"O, Nelly Gray! O, Nelly Gray!
For all your jeering speeches,
At duty's call I left my legs
In Badajos's breaches !"

"Why then," said she, "you've lost the feet
Of legs in war's alarms,
And now you cannot wear your shoes
Upon your feats of arms!"

"O, false and fickle Nelly Gray!
I know why you refuse: –
Though I've no feet – some other man
Is standing in my shoes!

"I wish I ne'er had seen your face;
But, now, a long farewell!
For you will be my death; – alas
You will not be my Nell!"

Now, when he went from Nelly Gray,
His heart so heavy got,
And life was such a burden grown,
It made him take a knot!

So round his melancholy neck
A rope he did entwine,
And, for his second time in life,
Enlisted in the Line.

One end he tied around a beam,
And then removed his pegs,
And, as his legs were off – of course
He soon was off his legs!

And there he hung, till he was dead
As any nail in town –
For, though distress had cut him up,
It could not cut him down!

A dozen men sat on his corpse,
To find out why he died –
And they buried Ben in four cross-roads
With a stake in his inside!'


It is, I suppose, possible to have too many puns...

An 'Incident'

 Browsing in the Lichfield & Burntwood Independent, I came across the headline 'Police seek to reassure residents after incident'. Oh dear, I thought, what could that have been?
It was this: on Market Street the other day, a group of 'around six males' had chased another group 'for no reason'. Admittedly they appeared to have their faces covered, which must have looked slightly alarming, but no one was injured and no threats were made. The police were quick off the mark in responding, and are now busy 'working proactively in the area to reassure residents' and 'taking steps to address concerns proactively across the city'. It's things like this that make me so glad to be living in Lichfield rather than London. Even in the leafy suburb (the Demiparadise) where I lived, an 'incident' like this would never have made page 8 of the local paper; it wouldn't have made the paper at all, nor would the police be 'proactively' reassuring residents. Those days are long gone. Now, even a stabbing would most likely be a small story on an inside page. 
Also in the L & B Independent, I see that the excellent local history group Lichfield Discovered is setting up a heritage 'hub' – in the Schoolmaster's House (dating back to 1682) of Lichfield grammar school, where Samuel Johnson and David Garrick were pupils. Ah, Lichfield...

Calamity!

 This, believe it or not, is Thomas Carlyle, having a bit of a meltdown. As the caption explains, 'A dog knocked over the lamp on the table which held Carlyle's important papers on which he had worked for many years. His manuscript caught fire, turned to ash, and Carlyle became sick from depression. In the end, everything still turned out great.' 
  The picture is one of a series of prints produced by the Japanese Department of Education in the 1870s, when Japan was westernising and introducing its population to those crazy westerners and their wacky ways. Each of the prints shows a western innovator suffering some kind of setback, which would in due course be overcome by persistence and hard work, so that 'in the end, everything still turned out great'.  
 The question is: did a dog-related incident result in any of Carlyle's papers being burnt? The Carlyles certainly had a dog, called Nero, who appears in a famous portrait of the unhappy couple at home – A Chelsea Interior by Robert Scott Tait – but he bears no resemblance to the beast in the Japanese print:

And there is no record of Nero causing any fires. However, Carlyle did suffer a manuscript-burning catastrophe when he gave a first draft of his magnum opus The French Revolution to John Stuart Mill and a housemaid mistook it for waste paper and threw it on the fire. A hysterical Mill rushed to Carlyle's house to tell the terrible tale and witness the great man's reaction, which was volcanic. However, when the volcano had died down, Carlyle got down to work and rewrote the whole thing – and yes, in the end, everything still turned out great. 
  There is more on these remarkable educational prints on the wonderful Public Domain Review website. 

Happiness, and the Case for Verse

 Here is Dick Davis pondering happiness again, in a poem titled 'Can We?' –

Can we convincingly pretend,
And not to others but ourselves,
That we are happy? And if we could,
Would that mean that we were, pro tem,
Uncomplicatedly, just that,
Happy? And what would that be like?
The mind runs through its obvious
Loved carnal candidates... Well, maybe,
But probably it would resemble

Less some celestial debauch
With someone quite phenomenal
Than being in a symphony
By Haydn: having all of it – 
It doesn't matter much which one –
The whole ebullient edifice,
Just there, available and real,
Impossibly to hand, forever.

And here he is on poetry: 

Preferences

    To my surprise
I've come to realise
I don't like poetry

    (Dear, drunkly woozy,
Accommodating floozy
That she's obliged to be,

    Poor girl, these days).
No, what I love and praise
Is not damp poetry
    But her pert, terse,
Accomplished sibling: verse.
She's the right girl for me.

The opening of that one recalls Marianne Moore's famous poem, 'Poetry', which begins 'I, too, dislike it', but Davis's message is simpler: he prefers verse to 'poetry', as it is now understood. And it's hard no to agree: 'poetry', in an age that values self-expression and attitudinising over form and (yes) beauty,  has become such a sprawling mess, so 'damp' and shapeless, whereas verse demands some rigour, some tightness, some adherence to form, even some attention to attracting readers from outside the charmed (and charmless) circle of fellow practitioners. In fact, it might be useful to talk of the best contemporary poets (a dwindling band) as writers of verse rather than poetry. It could even come to be seen as a badge of honour... 

Déjà Vu Dru

 It's time for an anniversary, and today's is that of the pioneering English entomologist Dru Dury, born on this day in 1725. (A shame he wasn't a Doctor, then he'd have been Dr Dru Drury.) The illustration above, by the great Moses Harris, is from Drury's 'Opus entomologicus splendissimus', Illustrations of Natural History.
 Drury, a successful and wealthy goldsmith (and father of 17) with a royal warrant and a shop on the Strand, spent much of his spare time amassing and describing a huge collection of insects from around the world, including more than 2,000 species of Lepidoptera alone - this at a time when there were thought to be no more than 20,000 insect species in total. It is said that when the Danish entomologist Fabricius visited England, he inspected Drury's collection with 'as much glee as a lover of wine does the sight of his wine cellar well stocked with full casks and bottles'.
  As well as paying others to collect specimens for him from around the world - issuing precise instructions and paying a standard rate - Drury enjoyed collecting for himself, mostly in Middlesex and the still rural suburbs of north London, but with excursions into Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Epping Forest. His diaries speak of 'Swallowtails very plentiful' around Warnham in Surrey, and 'Black Veind white Butterfly [now extinct in Britain] plentiful and fine' in Epping Forest. A reminder of the wealth of butterfly life in England in the 18th century - a wealth that lasted well into the 20th century.
  Drury died at the ripe old age of 79 and was buried at St Martin's-in-the-Fields. When his mighty insect collection was sold a couple of years later, it fetched barely £600 - less than a sixth of what he spent on it. Ah well, it was never about the money...

If the above seems familiar, that's because I first posted it on January 4th nine years ago. I'm posting it again because butterflies have been much on my mind lately: not only am I missing them, as always at this time of year, and yearning for their vernal reappearance, but also I've just been giving my long-pupating butterfly book a final read-through before it goes to the printers. It looks as if it's still on schedule for publication in May, and I'll have more about it nearer the date...

A Trick of Sunlight

 Delighted to get my hands on another volume of Dick Davis's poems – A Trick of Sunlight: Poems 2001-2005 – at a reasonable price (and from an English bookseller). The first poem in the collection is this:

"The heart has its abandoned mines . . ."
Old workings masked by scrub and scree.
Sometimes, far, far beneath the surface
An empty chamber will collapse;
But to the passer-by the change
Is almost imperceptible:
A leaf's slight tremor, or a stone
Dislodged into the vacant shaft.

With its tight, concise form and vivid actualisation of metaphor, it reminded me of a poet I'd never before thought of in connection with Dick Davis – Kay Ryan, as in poems like 'Chinese Foot Chart' –

Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch. We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock.

Davis's collection takes its title from this rather beautiful little poem, on a theme (its possibility, its impossibility, its illusory nature, its fleetingness, its reality) that is close to the poet's heart – 

Happiness

The weirdest entry in our lexicon,
The word whose referent we never know –
A river valley from a Book of Hours
Somewhere in southern Europe long ago.

Or once, to someone walking by the Loire,
A trick of sunlight on a summer's day
Revealed the Virgin in rococo clouds:
The peasants in the fields knelt down to pray.

New Town, Old Roots

 What's this then? It's All Saints, the parish church of Milton Keynes – the original Milton Keynes, that is, the charming little village that gave the new town its name and is now surrounded by its sprawling namesake. I was there yesterday, in winter sunshine, and had a good look at the church, inside and out; it's very fine, in my favourite style, the one we call Decorated (and the French call 'Flamboyant' – flaming), characterised by flowing lines and curves, especially in the window tracery. The nearby old rectory is also rather wonderful, and, as with many areas of the MK footprint, you would hardly know you were anywhere near a modern new town (though the sound of traffic is hard to escape). In the churchyard of All Saints are buried the remains of a hundred or so late Saxons whose bones were excavated in a field nearby. Farther on in the walk we passed through – on a metalled path, incongruously – a fine deserted medieval village. This 'new town' has old and deep roots. It was a sunny, blue sky day, for a wonder, and I saw, as well as drifts of Snowdrops, my first Winter Aconites of the year.
   Of Worthing I have little to report except that it was extremely windy, and at one point I had the humbling experience of being very nearly blown off my feet by a gust that must have been at least gale force. I think I have probably exhausted the subject of Oscar Wilde in Worthing (see here and here), and, looking for further literary connections, I discovered that two of our greatest nature writers – W.H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies – are both buried in the same Worthing cemetery. I must look into this...

Memorial Day

 Just to say that Radio 3's breakfast programme today, live from Auschwitz, was a simply wonderful broadcast, one of the finest, most beautiful and moving I have ever heard. Presenter Petroc Trelawny is shaping up to be a truly great radio broadcaster – and the music, and the stories told... Sometimes it was almost unbearable, but it was a magnificent, memorable piece of radio. If you missed it, it should be possible to find it on BBC Sounds. 

The Throwout Bearing

 A dreary, sodden day of wind and rain, with more of the same threatened, so here is something to bring a little cheer. It's an anecdote from Joseph Epstein's Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life, which is still my bedtime reading, slow reader that I am. This made me laugh out loud...
[At this point Epstein, a man who has had many jobs in his life, is in Arkansas working for the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency, where all his colleagues are Southerners.]
'One among them, a genial man named Harold Russell, was currently building his own house on weekends. When I happened to mention to him that I needed to replace something called a "throwout bearing" in my used Corvair – the car, by the way, featured for its flaws in Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed – Harold told me that replacing it presented no real problem. "All you have to do is lift the engine and screw in the bearing underneath." Lift the engine? He told me that here all I needed was to get a #197 pulley, park the car between two strong trees, and with the aid of a the pulley lift up the engine and screw in the bearing. Simple enough, no? Had I attempted it, I could imagine the next day's headline in the Arkansas Gazette: "Jewish man found dead under Corvair Engine, Car Parked Between Two Trees in North Little Rock."
  For a few years afterward, whenever I brought one of my cars in for repair, I would casually mention that I had just installed a throwout bearing in it, suggesting that I had done it myself and thus was not a man for any mechanic to attempt to cheat. Much later I learned that only cars with manual transmissions, or clutches, had throwout bearings. Gotcha, Schmuckowitz! those various mechanics must have thought.'

  Which led me to read up about throwout bearings on the internet. Such is life. 
  And from tomorrow I'll most likely be out of action on the blog front for a few days, on family business in rain-lashed Worthing, then walking in rain-lashed Milton Keynes, or rather touring the historic villages that make up that much maligned New Town. 

'And that will be England gone'

 In 1972 the UK government participated in the UN Stockholm Conference on the Environment, submitting a number of papers, one of them titled How Do You Want to Live? Deciding that they wanted to commission a preface to set the tone of the report, they commissioned that notorious cock-eyed optimist Philip Larkin, and – surprise, surprise – they were not entirely satisfied with the result, publishing a bowdlerised version, under the plain title 'Prologue'. Larkin happily pocketed the fee, then reworked the poem, restored the cuts, changed the title to 'Going, Going' (completed on this day in 1972) and published it in High Windows. It's not one of his best poems, but, like so many of Larkin's, it ends beautifully, and contains some resonant phrases: 'I thought it would last my time', 'Things are tougher than we are', 'It seems, just now, to be happening so very fast', 'And that will be England gone', 'Most things are never meant', 'I just think it will happen, soon'...

Going, Going

I thought it would last my time –

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms

 

In the papers about old streets

And split level shopping, but some

Have always been left so far;

And when the old part retreats

As the bleak high-risers come

We can always escape in the car.

 

Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

– But what do I feel now? Doubt?

 

Or age, simply? The crowd

Is young in the M1 cafe;

Their kids are screaming for more –

More houses, more parking allowed,

More caravan sites, more pay.

On the Business Page, a score

 

Of spectacled grins approve

Some takeover bid that entails

Five per cent profit (and ten

Per cent more in the estuaries): move

Your works to the unspoilt dales

(Grey area grants)! And when

 

You try to get near the sea

In summer ...

It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,

 

That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts –

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.

 

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

 

Most things are never meant.

This won’t be, most likely; but greeds

And garbage are too thick-strewn

To be swept up now, or invent

Excuses that make them all needs.

I just think it will happen, soon.

Reading the poem today, it seems prophetic only in the sense that Larkin's England was indeed, as he sensed, going, going – but in all manner of ways, with changes that went far beyond the urban spread that is Larkin's preoccupation. If he had cast his net more widely, the results might well have been even more pessimistic, so perhaps it's just as well he didn't. His reflex pessimism was often, I think, quite shallow, half jocular, and frequently wrong. I recall that when he had his mother's ashes interred in St Michael's churchyard in Lichfield in 1977, the Rector told him that it was the last burial in the old churchyard, which also contained several earlier Larkin family graves. The churchyard would now, Larkin averred in a letter to Barbara Pym, be 'handed over to the Council to be landscaped into a vandals' playground or some such nonsense. I expect I shan't see all the old Larkin graves again ... as they will all be levelled and the stones taken away.' He was quite wrong, of course: the old churchyard of St Michael's is now a combination of well maintained historic burial ground and well managed nature reserve, and the old Larkin graves are still there, quite easily found. The one that eludes me, oddly, is that of Larkin's parents, which, having found it once (and photographed it), I have never been able to find again.