A Foretaste

When I arrived at the station yesterday to take my train to Boxhill & Westhumble, I saw notices around the place about a cycle race that was taking place. The railway was expecting a surge in passenger numbers and was therefore laying on extra carriages and barring travellers from taking their bikes by rail. Expecting to have to fight my way on to the train, I was rather surprised to find that, when it drew in, it was all but empty. However, things were even stranger at the other end. At Boxhill & Westhumble (one of the prettiest stations in Surrey), just three of us stepped down from the train - to find the place swarming with jerkin-clad officials of one kind and another. Some were railway employees, some were 'race stewards', half a dozen or so were police (you never know when it's going to kick off in Westhumble). In all, they must have numbered at least two dozen, and none of them had anything to do. Indeed, the whole area was, if anything, even quieter than it would normally be on a reasonably clement Sunday morning. Meanwhile, however, across much of London and Surrey, chaos reigned. This is what it will be like during next year's Olympics - only far, far worse, and for weeks on end. Call it off now! It's not too late...

A Swift Recalculation, and Some Blues

Last evening, sitting in my son's garden, I looked up and saw... a solitary swift, flying purposefully overhead - this a full eight days after what I had taken to be the end of my swift summer. What was even more remarkable was that my cousin in Derbyshire also saw a swift last evening, followed by another lone straggler today. So there may yet be more. The end of the swift summer seems to be less abrupt and total this year than it usually is.
The swallows, of course, are still with us in numbers. I was watching them skimming a field earlier today as I took a much-needed walk in the Surrey Hills. It was a day of warm sun and dark cloud, and when the former predominated the butterflies were merrily flying in good numbers. Mostly they were the familiar Meadow Browns, dark Ringlets and jolly Gatekeepers, those butterflies that best seem to catch and embody the relaxed, easy-going mood of high summer. A little busier and harder to follow in flight were the Small Heaths, pale little beauties with bright eyespots on the underside of their forewings. And then, much livelier and easier to lose sight of, there were tiny Brown Arguses (also having a good year), which fly fast and erratically, then land very suddenly to bask. The mystifying thing about them is that they appear pale and silvery in flight, suggesting a very small Blue - yet when they land and open their wings, they turn out to be a rich dark brown, studded all round the margins with dots of bright orange. Why is it that they look so completely different in flight?
The great joy of my walk, though, was to find myself among Chalkhill Blues, my first this year, and they were flying in their dozens - more than I've seen in ages. These too are pale and silvery in flight, but that's because they are pale and silvery, for Blues - and also large, for Blues, so mercifully easy to identify. As a boy, when I first learnt to identify them, I used to think the name was descriptive of the colour, a chalky blue, rather than the habitat...
And just now I looked up (I'm in the garden) and saw - another swift! It's still summer.

'To apricot myself...'

'Just to sit in the Sun, to apricot myself like a fruit in its heat - this is one of my country recreations. And often I reflect what a thing after all it is, still to be alive and basking here, above all the buried people of the world, in the kind and famous sunshine...'
Thus Logan Pearsall Smith, beginning one of his Trivia pieces, Tu Quoque Fontium (which nimble-fingered Googlers will find is a quotation from Horace's Ode 3.13). 'To apricot myself' - how about that for a verb! It's surely a unique usage, though there's a related verb, to apricate, meaning to bask in the sun, which was once in use but has become obsolete. I intend to adopt them both - and, if the sun ever reappears in the remainder of this dismal summer, you may be sure that, circumstances permitting, I'll be out there apricoting myself.
'Kind and famous sunshine' is good too...

A Sermon for Slovenly Times

Maybe I'm spending too much time in Kensington - maybe? I'm definitely spending too much time in Kensington - but I keep noticing men with waxed moustaches (usually with beards attached). I wonder if this is a 'trend'? Perhaps Susan, who writes the indispensable Retroprogressive column in The Dabbler on Saturdays, might explore the subject... Anyway, trend or not, it is to be commended. If you're going to sport facial hair, the least you can do is take good care of it, introducing a little order - and a little raffish style - by bringing those moustachios to a neat point. It is all part of the great programme of making the best of ourselves, making sure we're well turned out. In these slovenly times, this, I believe, is a quasi-moral imperative. The way we dress and groom ourselves affects how we feel, how we move, how we carry ourselves and interact with the world - ultimately how we behave. It might be possible to behave decently while dressed in a shell suit, or in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie - but it will be an uphill struggle against powerful countervailing forces. Examine the pictures of those rioters who have lately been a feature of our urban streets. Not a waxed moustache among them. Nor, I'll warrant, a cravat. In dress as in prose, le style est l'homme meme. I rest my case.

It's Too Quiet, Sarge - I Don't Like It...

All was eerily calm last night as I made my way home - far fewer people than usual on the Tube, at Victoria, on the train... And then I got off at Carshalton - that suburban demi-paradise - and the place was in lockdown. The park locked, the shops closed and shuttered, the streets all but deserted - I could scarcely believe my eyes. But I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised - it's the classic pattern: massive overreaction when it's too late. Pile 16,000 cops onto the streets to fulfil their time-honoured role of standing around, close down shops and businesses and, hey presto, things quieten down. The stable door is most effectively locked, barred and triple-bolted - but, as Roy Campbell put it in another context, where's the bloody horse? Fled, in this case to return when the coast is clear.
In the meantime, though, there are at least hopeful signs that people - having had it so graphically demonstrated to them that they can't count on the police - are making their own ad-hoc security arrangements. They will surely be more effective than anything les flics currently have to offer.

On a happier note...

There's something by me about Marianne Moore on The Dabbler.

The New Jerusalem

Last night I was watching a BBC4 archive programme called Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words. There were Keynes and Beveridge and Attlee (spot the Great Thinker?) extolling the wonders of the impending New Jerusalem in which, thanks to benign state intervention, an age of peace and plenty would dawn and all social ills wither on the vine...Then came the News - and there, in our age of peace and plenty, were the grandchildren of the New Jerusalem ('these strange children, Pitiless in their ignorance and contempt', in Geoffrey Hill's phrase) rioting, looting, pillaging and burning their way across swathes of London.
Among the most saddening images was that of Reeves furniture store in Croydon - just a couple of miles down the road from me - ablaze, burning to the ground. Reeves Corner has been a local landmark, part of the geography, all my life - and for generations before (the company is 140 years old) - and now it's gone, for no reason at all. What makes it even worse is that it was - in its older, artsy-crafty parts - an attractive and interesting building, in a town that can ill afford to lose many of those.
The one upside of all this is that it's yet further proof that London is a city unfit to host a modern Olympic Games. Call it off now!