Best Dog in Italy

 'Imagine if we won the World Cup,' said my seven-year-old grandson yesterday. 'Ah, my child,' I replied, laying a grandfatherly hand on his innocent head, 'we have won before – and I was there.' Actually, of course, I made no such reply, not least because my memories of the great victory are hazy, and I could hardly claim to have 'been there'. While the final played out, I was in fact in deep cover, in a patch of woodland in the local park, with my then girlfriend (I was sixteen, and we weren't botanising). We emerged later and stepped into a café, where the match commentary was playing on a radio. It was only that evening that I saw footage of England's dramatic victory. 
   What I do remember – and told my grandson – is that, at some point, the World Cup (i.e. the Jules Rimet trophy) was stolen, then dug up in woodland by a dog called... what was it? Of course – Pickles. All of thirteen years ago, I wrote about Pickles and his heroic excavation of the 'not very World Cuppy' World Cup, a feat that was once celebrated in a Picklefest event in South Norwood. Here's the link – 

               https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2013/03/south-norwoods-finest-son.html

Sadly, Pickles died just a year after playing his part in football history: his choke chain caught on a tree branch while he was chasing a cat. His collar is on display at the National Football Museum in Manchester. As for the trophy itself, lessons were learnt after its theft (from Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, where it was on display along with a stamp exhibition): it was replaced by a replica for public display. Then, in 1970, the original was presented in perpetuity to Brazil, that year's winners. Perpetuity, alas, lasted only until 1983, when it was stolen from the headquarters of the Brazilian Football Confederation, and most likely melted down. 

Wes

 Last night I found myself watching Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums again. I say 'again' but I hadn't seen it since I watched it, in a cinema, when it was released, all of 25 years ago. It was the first of his films I'd seen (I only caught up with Bottle Rocket and Rushmore later), and I remember being mightily impressed by the distinctive Wes Anderson style. Since then I've become more familiar with his tricks and mannerisms, that unmistakable look, but I still likes me a bit of Wes, and I greatly enjoyed watching The Royal Ts again, not least for its terrific ensemble cast – Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller, Owen and Luke Wilson, all at their best. Two things struck me this time, one being the bookishness of the enterprise – it's framed as the reading of a physical book (as in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and books are everywhere in the interior scenes (most noticeably Royal Tenenbaum's set of Encyclopaedia Britannica) – and the other being the music. The soundtrack is wonderful, featuring everything from Satie, Ravel and Enescu to the Beatles and Stones, Dylan, Paul Simon, Nick Drake, and – oh yes – Nico, a voice (if that is the word) that blasted me straight back to my youth. She features twice, with haunting songs written by the teenage Jackson Browne: 'The Fairest of the Season' and this... 

Time Well Spent

 Well, I am back, and it was a joy to see Gloucester cathedral again – if not the city of Gloucester, which is now, sadly, the very model of English urban degeneration, dereliction and decay. A sorry fate for a once fine town, and one that is all too common, thanks to terrible urban planning, bad architecture, drugs and 'welfare' dependency, among other things. But the cathedral – and indeed its close – that is a very different matter. Not only is it a building of quite staggering beauty – especially for those of us who love the architecture of the 14th and 15th century – it is also unusually well presented and accessible, offering the hugely rewarding experience of walking around the triforium and viewing the building from a height of something over 30ft, looking down into the nave and transepts, up at the amazing vaulting, and around at the complex structure of piers, buttresses and braces that give the building a strength belied by its airy grace. 
   The cathedral is famous for its vast and beautiful east window, known as the Crécy window, which is as large as a tennis court and was made, amazingly, at the time of the Black Death. When the second world war broke out, it was dismantled and all its thousands of pieces of glass were individually labelled and taken into safe storage in the cathedral crypt. Alas, when the war was over, it was discovered that the paper labels had come adrift from the pieces of glass, so there was no clue as to how the window was to be put together again – or rather, there was one clue: a coloured postcard of the window in all its glory. With this as their only pictorial reference, the craftsmen managed to reassemble the window exactly as it was. Two thoughts: if it had been the Germans dismantling a window such as this, every piece would have been meticulously catalogued, photographed and numbered, and there would have been no chance of anything going wrong. And, if the window had to be taken apart today, it would likely take months just to get authorisation to put up the scaffolding. Another of the ever growing number of things that we could not do today. 
   Anyway, there was also some walking, this over the border in Herefordshire, where we walked (in the morning, before the heat became intolerable) uphill from Ross-on-Wye to Brampton Abbotts – locked church, wonderful panoramic views – then down to the river and back into town, where an old friend of mine joined us for lunch at a riverside pub and a stroll around the rather delightful town. This was all time well spent – and there were butterflies galore on the morning walk: abundance of peacocks and red admirals, meadow browns and gatekeepers, with commas and painted ladies, clouds of whites, and, near the end of the morning walk, a single clouded yellow, flying busily past, as they always do – my first (on this side of the channel) in several years.      

Gloucester and Gwynn

 Early tomorrow I'm heading for Gloucester for a couple of days' walking (or not) with my walking friends. Gloucester is very high on my list of favourite cathedrals, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again after too many years. I'm travelling by train, so, knowing my luck, I'll probably end up in Tamworth again...
   Meanwhile, here is another by R.S. Gwynn – a perfect Petrarchan sonnet about a woman with the most difficult job in the business.

God's Secretary

Her e-mail inbox always overflows.   

Her outbox doesn’t get much use at all.   

She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call   

As music oozes forth to placate those   

Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows,   

Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall   

Fluttering to a claw-catch on a wall.   

Will He be in today? God only knows.   

She hasn’t seen His face—He’s so aloof.   

She’s long resigned He’ll never know or love her   

But still can wish there were some call, some proof   

That He requires a greater service of her.   

Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof,   

Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.   

Unsuspected Kindness

 On today's Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp writes of the 'unsuspected kindness' of which, happily, the world still has abundant supply. He leads up to the subject by way of an anecdote about an exemplary act of kindness – of Christian charity – by that great poet and man, George Herbert, as recounted in Walton's life of Herbert, and turned into poetry by R.S. Gwynn, in a fine poem, 'Music at Midnight'. I must confess I had never heard of R.S. Gwynn, an American poet and anthologist who is, according to Wikipedia, 'associated with New Formalism', which is generally a good sign. He is, according to Dana Gioia, 'an effortless master of verse forms', and he seems to have a way with humorous and 'light verse'. Here is one, a paraphrase of Hopkins, that actually had me laughing out loud –

Fried Beauty

Glory be to God for breaded things—

   Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh,

         Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim

With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings,

    Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye,

            That in all oils, corn or canola, swim

Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth!);

    Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry

             On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim,

These greasy, battered bounties of the South:

                            Eat them.

   As for unsuspected kindness, Mrs Nige, who has similar mobility problems to Patrick, is often pleasantly surprised by the kindness of strangers, even in that wicked city, London. Here in the city of philosophers, of course, the milk of human kindness flows abundantly in every soul. 

This and That, Not Including London

 Well, I didn't make it to London on Friday. The Euston train got no further than Milton Keynes (of largely evil memory), where damage to overhead cables up ahead had ended all serious possibility of getting to London, short of limping in very late, packed into a cattle-truck train and with no guarantee of a smooth return. After almost an hour amid milling crowds on that depressing station, I found an escape route – northwards, back the way I had come. I would get off at Tamworth, a stop before Lichfield, and take a look around the newly reopened castle. This should have been straightforward, but at Rugby (of entirely evil memory), the train ground to a halt for half an hour and more, thanks to a broken-down train ahead. By the time I 'alighted at' Tamworth, I was fast losing the will to live, but I made my way to the castle, paid the entrance fee, and climbed to the entrance (the castle was built on a pretty impressive motte). From Norman to Victorian, with something of every period between, the building – or rather buildings – has plenty of architectural interest, and the interiors, more or less convincingly reconstructed, reflect the range of periods. It's a castle that was lived in continuously from medieval to Victorian times, so is a good deal more interesting than some castles I have dutifully trudged around. The whole thing is, as one would expect these days, very child-friendly and interactive, but I made my studious way along the prescribed tour route, unmoved by the opportunity to dress up as a Marmion knight or test the weight of a broadsword. I even made it to the top of the tower, from where the views are impressively wide. This experience, followed by a stroll around the more agreeable parts of Tamworth, almost made up for the earlier ordeal by railway. 
  The upside of all those hours on trains and stations was the opportunity it afforded of getting on with my reading. I had with me a volume I'd picked up on the bookstall outside the Samuel Johnson House – a novel called Max Gate, by a New Zealand writer I'd never heard of, Damien Wilkins. As the title suggests, the action is set in the hideous house that Thomas Hardy built for himself in Dorchester. The narrator is a housemaid, Nellie Titterington, looking back on her time at Max Gate in the winter of 1928, when the great man lay dying. It's a fascinating and convincing reconstruction of the gloomy, claustrophobic Hardy ménage, and I'm looking forward to reading on. No doubt I shall return to this one. Meanwhile, having finally done with Carlyle's French Revolution, I have new bedside reading, in the form of a book recommended by a friend, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets by Donald Hall. The first essay, on Robert Frost, is a splendidly incisive, but sympathetic and fair, portrait of that deeply flawed, often deeply unpleasant genius. The title of the book, by the way, comes from Yeats's Lapis Lazuli:
There, on the mountains and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient glittering eyes, are gay.

Sanders

 I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...

Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was the actor George Sanders. With his good looks and crisp, sonorous upper-crust voice, he became the man for playing debonair, louche, more or less depraved English aristo types – most memorably Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jack Favell in Rebecca and Addison deWitt in All About Eve. He was a commanding presence on screen, even if he was mostly doing little more than playing himself (though he can hardly be accused of that in his classic voicing of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book).
  The tenor of Sanders's personal life may be judged from the fact that he called his autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad, and suggested the title A Dreadful Man for his biography (written by his friend Brian Aherne). He managed to marry not only the ineffable Zsa Zsa Gabor but also, some years later, her sister Magda – a marriage that lasted just six weeks and drove Sanders even further into drink. His end was sad. Threatened by dementia and failing health, Sanders decided to give up the unequal struggle, finally killing himself with a massive overdose of Nembutal in a hotel room in a small coastal town near Barcelona. He left behind a message addressed to 'Dear World': 'I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good Luck.' He was 65 – the precise age at which, according to his pal David Niven, he predicted that he would kill himself.
  But what of the real George Sanders? As ever, we turn to the authoritative Me Cheeta, where the index entries are not promising, all listed under 'Sanders, George, caddishness of'. However, Cheeta's few encounters with Sanders seem to have left a reasonably favourable impression. The two were introduced at a notably starry private screening of Tarzan and His Mate (the one in which Maureen O'Sullivan takes a very saucy swim). 'Cheetah, my deah,' says George. 'If you're anything like me, you'll find it absolutely excruciating to watch yourself on screen. I should leave before those terrible monstahs turn against you and skin you alive. It's not going to shit on me, is it, Maureen?'
  Hmm. On a more exalted level, it's an intriguing thought that the boy Sanders would have been walking the streets of St Petersburg at the same time as the teenage Nabokov*. I wonder if their paths ever crossed – either then or later, when both lived in Switzerland. Sanders might have made rather a good job of Clare Quilty in the Lolita film...

* and the young Eric Knight, author of Lassie Come Home, whose mother was a governess to the Imperial family.
  

O Canada

 July already, and my late mother's birthday (she'd have been 105 today) – and it's Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, formed on this day in 1867.
It was on Canada Day in 1980 that 'O Canada' became the country's official national anthem (and one of the best). Here is the one and only k d lang performing it –

And here she is again, referencing 'O Canada' in one of the most beautiful recordings she ever made – her cover of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case of You'...

The Say-But-the-Word Centurion

 It isn't often that a sermon turns up in my inbox, but today – the 4th Sunday after Pentecost – one did, and it's rather good. Here's a link...

https://www.rememberingsion.com/p/foundation-faith-sermon-4th-sunday-pentecost

And of course this led me straight back to Les Murray's great poem of faith, 'The Say-But-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary'...

That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox has died a slave’s death. We were manoeuvered into it by priests and by the man himself. To complete his poem.

He was certainly dead. The pilum guaranteed it. His message, unwritten except on his body, like anyone’s, was wrapped like a scroll and despatched to our liberated selves, the gods.

If he has now risen, as our infiltrators gibber, he has outdone Orpheus, who went alive to the Shades. Solitude may be stronger than embraces. Inventor of the mustard tree,

he mourned one death, perhaps all, before he reversed it. He forgave the sick to health, disregarded the sex of the Furies when expelling them from minds. And he never speculated.

If he is risen, all are children of a most real high God or something even stranger called by that name who knew to come and be punished for the world.

To have knowledge of right, after that, is to be in the wrong. Death came through the sight of law. His people’s oldest wisdom. If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable

in the language of death’s era, there will be wars about religion as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians. Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has died

for you before you ever met it, may seem colder than the favours of gods who are our poems, good and bad. But there never was a bad baby. Half his worship will be grinding his face in the dirt

then lifting it to beg, in private. The low will rule, and curse by him. Divine bastard, soul-usurer, eros-frightener, he is out to monopolise hatred. Whole philosophies will be devised for their brief snubbings of him.

But regained excels kept, he taught. Thus he has done the impossible to show us it is there. To ask it of us. It seems we are to be the poem and live the impossible. As each time we have, with mixed cries.

JR, B-P, MB

 In Eminent Edwardians (which I'm still reading, with great enjoyment), Piers Brendon tells of a curious connection between John Ruskin and the young Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, known to his family as 'Stephe'. B-P's formidably well connected mother consulted Ruskin about 'Stephe's vexatious habit of painting with both hands (on occasion with both feet)'. Happily the great man approved of the boy's ambidexterity and encouraged it, and B-P was to put it to good use in his military career, taking notes with either hand and making sketches with both simultaneously, drawing with one hand while shading with the other. Brendon also tells of an occasion when Thackeray came to dinner with the Baden-Powells and, 'when young Stephe attempted to join the party, paid him a shilling to go away – the earliest recorded instance of bob-a-jobbery.' 
   There is also one thing – and surely only one – that B-P had in common with Max Beerbohm: they were both educated at Charterhouse under Dr William Haig Brown, the headmaster who had moved the school out of the city and re-established it on a Surrey hilltop. This was just the school for young Stephe, offering 'few impediments to Stalkyish independence, to the practice of Spartan chivalry and Machiavellian chicanery. As for intellectual impedimenta of the kind provided by modern culture and ideas, the school was disinclined to clutter fledgling minds with such stuff.' All his life, B-P, the eternal schoolboy, was a keen and loyal Old Carthusian, and 'one of his sharpest disappointments during the siege of Mafeking was that he could find no other Carthusian with whom to celebrate Founder's Day'. He was, in Max Beerbohm's phrase, 'of the straitest sect'. In Old Carthusian Memories (1920), Max writes that 'the straitest sect is never happy. It simply can't bear the thought of having left Charterhouse. After-life for it is one long anticlimax' – which was certainly not the case for Beerbohm, though he writes quite affectionately about the old place, and is glad he spent five years there. 'The main thing that I had learnt there, and have not yet forgotten,' he writes, 'was a knack of understanding my fellow-creatures, of living in amity with them and not being rubbed the wrong way by their faults, and not rubbing them the wrong way with mine.' A very useful thing to learn; we could do with more of it in the world.
   Max continues: 'It is often complained that public schools tend to repress individuality in a child. Charterhouse in the eighteen-eighties did not at all tend that way ... Its traditions left plenty of latitude. I was a queer child. I didn't care a brass farthing for games. What I liked was Latin prose, Lain verse, and drawing caricatures. Nobody bothered me to play games. Boys and masters alike ... encouraged me to draw as many and as impudent caricatures as possible. I ought to have been very happy. But––oh, how I always longed to be grown-up! Boys are mostly not cursed with a strong instinct towards independence; nor men mostly, for the matter of that. I, alas, was.' Max went his own way – and so, along a very different path, did Baden-Powell. 

Hot

 These are not the dog days – they come in August when the dog star, Sirius, is rising – but, by heaven, they feel like it. It's proper hot, as we say around here, and more to come tomorrow. At least the butterflies are loving it – to the extent that a Silver-Washed Fritillary paid a fleeting visit to the garden the other day: they sometimes do this, flying far from their usual haunts, when the weather gets really hot. But talk of dog days inevitably leads me to this, one of Auden's best – so good it even impressed Randall Jarrell...

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:

The heather lies limp and dead

On the mountain, the baltering torrent

Shrunk to a soodling thread;

Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,

Vacant the scholar’s brain

Under his great hat,

Drug though She may, the Sybil utters

A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,

Lying in bed till noon,

Your bills unpaid, your much advertised

Epic not yet begun,

Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish

Some earthquake would astonish,

Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing

Unlock the prisons and translate

The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,

The hawthorn hedges in bloom,

When, serene in their ivory vessels,

The three wise Maries come,

Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in

By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:

Ah! how the cannons roar,

How jocular the bells as They

Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence,

Before it break and drown,

When the insurrected eagre hangs

Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt

Tombs of the sorcerers shatter

And their guardian megalopods

Come after you pitter-patter?

How will you answer when from their qualming spring

The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,

And out of the open sky

The pantocratic riddle breaks –

"Who are you and why?"

For when in a carol under the apple-trees

The reborn featly dance,

There will also, Fortunatus,

Be those who refused their chance,

Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,

And mawkish in their wits,

To whom these dull dog-days

Between event seemed crowned with olive

And golden with self-praise. 

Fortunatus was a sixth-century poet of the Merovingian court, who wrote in Latin and became a Christian bishop (and was venerated after his death).
'Soodling' means dawdling, 'baltering' tumbling along.
The 'three wise Maries' are three variously identified Maries from the Gospels who, according to medieval legend, made landfall in Provence after travelling from the Holy Land. 'Sossing' is simply onomatopoeic.
An 'eagre' is a kind of tidal wave, commonly known as a 'bore' – which would not have sounded quite as good: 'the insurrected bore'!

 

Ten Years Ago

 On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy Burnham)...

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/06/picture-of-day.html

Cometh the Hour...

 McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June
– Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –
That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation 
To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation.
His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham,
But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour party and indeed of the nation, the question many are asking is 'Can he turn 'em?'

'Lying flat in the bracken...'

Here's one for Father's Day, tangentially. A loose, joyful almost-sonnet, written by Gavin Ewart, sixty years ago this month...

June 1966

Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park
while the legs and voices of my children pass
seeking, seeking: I remember how on the
13th of June of that simmering 1940
I was conscripted into the East Surreys,
and, more than a quarter of a century
ago, when France had fallen,
we practised concealment in this very bracken.
The burnt stalks pricked through my denims.
Hitler is now one of the antiques of History,
I lurk like a monster in my hiding place.
He didn't get me. If there were a God
it would be only polite to thank him. 

Never Dull

 More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end, Chapter VIII of volume three, aptly titled Finis: 'Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself...' After a long, overheated passage of 'prophecy' from Alessandro Cagliostro, described by Carlyle himself as 'the Quack of Quacks', the author returns to take an elegant farewell: 
'And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together [you're not wrong, Tom]; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnate Word'. Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.'
   Well, it was quite a ride. This was a book that, as Carlyle put it, came 'direct and flamingly from the heart', and that is how it reads – impassioned, vivid, personal, written as if by an eye-witness who was in the thick of the action and now invites us to be there alongside him. Exclaiming, apostrophising, drawing the reader in with the first-person plural, he takes off into sometimes obscure flights of prose poetry, bringing in myths and scripture, scattering metaphors, references, personifications, archaisms and new-coined words left and right, always with an eye to bringing alive the extraordinary, often terrible events he chronicles. The effect at times is almost cinematic, wholly unlike any other history, and, God knows, it is never dull.