Cold

Here's a thing I don't recommend - having your central heating pack up just as the temperature starts plunging towards zero. Having behaved eccentrically for some while, our system finally gave up in the middle of last week, and (I'll spare you the details of the ensuing saga) was still out of action yesterday. Only one room of the house could be effectively heated, by means of a ferociously effective Chinese log-effect fire, and the rest of the draughty old place was probably a touch colder than the inside of the fridge. As the laptop lives in a now unheated room, there was no question of blogging or any such activity yesterday - not only were my fingers not working, but my brain too seemed to have succumbed. I had forgotten how numbing in every way deep, persistent cold is - it makes everything, physical and mental, fainter, more distant, more sluggish, so that the mind barely functions, and can think of little but the quest for warmth. The only cure - as to so many things - was to take a walk. A brisk march out to a local bird reserve in the making - gravel pits which are not yet worked out - got the chi, as well as the blood, flowing, and temporarily restored my spirits with its glimpses of watery, wintry beauty - the sky in the water, the distant trees, the crows mustering to roost as the light faded. I returned to the icebox house heartened and cheered and indeed feeling properly warm for the first time. Sadly, this did not last... However, the good news is that today, at last, the heating has been fixed. I'll never take it for granted again. Well, I shall of course, but I know I shouldn't.

Mr James Puts Us All to Rights

Another fine Point of View talk by Clive James this week (why do they ever give that slot to anyone else?). I had forgotten about the 'futurologist' Herman Kahn (said to be one of the models for Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove), who was at one time taken very seriously indeed and was always pontificating away to reverential interviewers. (Futurology eh? Presentology is impossible enough, and even Pastology is fraught with difficulties...) On the matter of the warmist 'consensus', James thinks, or hopes, that the debate will now begin. Others, in the wake of Climategate (the East Anglia email scandal), are talking of a 'paradigm shift' (that's from Kuhn not Kahn) - which looks like an overstatement. I think what is happening - despite the Copenhagen juggernaut rolling on regardless - is a marked change of mood, detectable even in such once unbreachable bastions of consensus warmism as the BBC, towards a more open-minded attitude. If the media are heading that way, the politicians will surely follow - and the public, if opinion polls are to be believed, are already there. Being something of a futurologist myself, I, of course, saw this coming (hem hem). And here's another glimpse of the future from Nige's crystal ball: eventually whichever government is in power is going to inflate that deficit away - it's simply too huge to be got rid of by any other means. Mark my words, it's only a matter of time...

Victor McLaglen

I somehow missed the anniversary of Victor McLaglen (b 1886) the other day. My father, who'd been a bit of a boxer in his youth, always had a soft spot for the old pugilist turned actor. Here's McLaglen in action in John Ford's classic She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. They don't make them like that any more - either the films or the actors.

1975 - A Vintage Year?

It is a truth universally acknowledged by music journalists of the rockular variety (as parodied brilliantly here by Brit) that 1975 was the pits, the year the music all but died in a welter of guitar noodling, before Punk came along in 1976, applied the electrodes and restored rock to life. Well, I have a friend who believes that, au contraire, 1975 was the greatest year ever (never mind that she was only 10 at the time and is a Led Zep fan). I decided to examine the evidence - and what do you know, she could be right! 1975 was the year in which Dylan released what many regard as his greatest album, Blood on the Tracks, and Patti Smith produced the still astounding Horses. Emmylou Harris released not one but two great albums, Pieces of the Sky and Elite Hotel. Paul Simon came up with Still Crazy After All These Years, Tom Waits released Nighthawks at the Diner, John Cale treated us to Slow Dazzle (the one with his version of Heartbreak Hotel on it)... There must be more in the way of great 1975 albums - but what clinches it for the year is that this song reached number 2 in the singles charts. There - now you'll be humming it all day. But you'll be smiling...

The Sound of the Suburbs

I slipped out to Kensington Gardens earlier today, to enjoy a 'quiet' baguette on a bench outside the orangery. I use the inverted commas advisedly, as, while I sat there, the air was rent every few minutes by the raucous shrieks of squadrons of ring-necked parakeets chasing each other at speed across the sky. I never dreamt that in my lifetime the dominant - indeed the overwhelming - sound of most open spaces in London and its suburbs should be this alien shrieking. It was fun - exciting indeed - to see these exotic creatures at first, but once their numbers started to grow, it was a different matter... And it's not just the parakeets. Rather too many of the changes in birdlife in my time have had a deleterious effect on the soundscape. While the most beautiful of garden singers, the song thrush, has declined steeply, the magpies and crows have come into town, and their unlovely shouts and caws are the only sounds that can match the parakeets. Even the collared dove (another one I never dreamt would become common), a lovely bird and a delight to see, has a strange, unmusical, quite undovelike call. Generally, the more musical birds that have increased in numbers are the ones with the weakest voices - the goldfinch with its beautiful soft liquid burbling, the longtailed tit with its thin piping whistle. On the other hand, there are more blackcaps around, and they're overwintering now - but that's a fact that might lead us to another, less agreeable subject...

Scepticism Is Conservative (since you ask)

Over at the Yard, our man is asking why opposition to warmism is 'such a right-wing thing'. No doubt I've said it before (and no doubt many others will), but I'll say it again. Conservatives (never mind 'neocons', who are mostly mutated Marxists) are bound to be sceptical about all large claims made by 'experts', governments and international bodies, if only because of their dismal record on such things, and the dubious purity of their motives. Warmism looks to us like apocalyptic projection, which is both a spillover from religion (answering to emotion rather than science) and a reverse form of Utopianism, about which conservatives too are deeply sceptical, for the best of historical reasons. It is also perfectly obvious that the enthusiasm of governments for the warmist scenario is driven by the possibilities it opens up for massive exactions of revenue from the public and considerable extension of state control over individuals and enterprises. What's not to be sceptical about? 'The science'? There is no (scientifically respectable) way on earth that such large claims and precise projections can be made about such a vast and complex web of systems. It reeks of human arrogance - overestimating our importance to the planet (as to everything else) - whereas conservatives (and indeed Christians) veer towards humility in regard to man's place in the scheme of things, and mistrust fierce conviction ('enthusiasm', in the old sense) in anything. The best, after all, lack all conviction...

Any Excuse for a Venetian Drawing

And the excuse is that a drawing by Raphael has sold for a very high price. That kind of money is meaningless of course, but if it's going to be paid for anything, then better a Raphael drawing than, say, an Andy Warhol screen print. Raphael's drawings are among the greatest ever drawn, and, being less finished, they seem to tell us more than the paintings, under their reflective sheen of ultraperfection. It is good, then, that the worth of the drawings should be recognised in the market. An artist whose drawings were, in his lifetime, valued as highly as his paintings was the great (and underrated) Venetian, G.B. Piazzetta, who specialised in highly finished, large-scale drawings, whose delicacy of touch and tonality is quite wonderful. That's one of his above. Enjoy... And from that brief encounter with art and beauty I return to the eye of the workstorm.