Sweet Mediocrity

One of the functions of our national church is to keep us amused, to add to the gaiety of the nation - and on that score, it's been doing a great job lately by making such a complete horlicks of dealing with the 'Occupy London' protest outside St Paul's. Heaven knows what will happen next - the proposed Ring of Prayer sounds like fun - but no doubt the situation will continue to be managed with the professionalism and finesse (hem hem) we've come to expect from the dear old C of E. For myself, I'm happy to live in a country where the church is so well-meaningly hopeless, so shambolic, so paralysed by its internal contradictions and a fatal impulse to niceness; it expresses something rather attractive in the national character, and is greatly preferable to the alternative. Imagine a briskly efficient, sure-footed, ruthlessly effective national church - a horrible thought, and most unEnglish. We should surely cherish what George Herbert called 'the sweet mediocrity of our native church'.

Canaletto

The Venetian artist known as Canaletto was born on this day in 1697. His beautiful early painting, A Stonemason's Yard (above) is one of the lesser delights of the National Gallery. But for myself - speaking as an ardent lover of Venice - I find most of his later, more developed view paintings oddly unexpressive of what is so magically different about that city; Canaletto - unlike the bolder, freer Guardi - could be painting anywhere. Indeed the Canaletto style proved equally applicable to London and other English scenes when he came over here (having long been popular with English milords and Grand Tourists). It wasn't so much that he made London look like Venice, or Venice look like London - more that he made everywhere look like a Canaletto painting. During his English years his style became so tired and mechanical that the connoisseur George Vertue accused him of being an impostor. So poor Canaletto had to stage public painting demonstrations to prove that he was indeed Canaletto. He had come a long way from the Stonemason's Yard.

Too Boring and Complicated

Today the Eurozone leaders seem to have fooled the markets into thinking they've cracked it this time, so let's hope things quieten down on the crisis front for a while now. In all the vast sea of media coverage and comment that has spread like an oilslick around this slow-motion catastrophe, one piece - which I came across yesterday - stands out in its refreshing candour. He's right, but I don't suppose it will stop the commentariat continuing to mystify and stupefy us on a grand scale until the whole ghastly business finally unravels.

I Am Not A Number! Hang On, Maybe I Am...

Thanks to this fine little timewaster, I now 'know' that I was the 2,518,495,377th person on Earth when I was born, and the 75,635,268,976th person to have lived 'since history began'. Thank you, BBC - and thank you too for the wonderful report on last night's TV news in which a very excited man revealed, with the aid of the snazziest CGI graphics, effects and holograms, that the UN reckons the world population is about to hit seven billion, and by the end of the century (cue 3-D graph) could hit 16 billion - though, on the other hand (cue another 3-D graph), it could fall to six billion. At which point the studio began to fill with computer-generated 'people' and my will to live drained quietly away...

And....

Talking of death, I'm at it again in The Dabbler.

RIP The Indestructible Cat

Sadly, I have to report that Scruffy, the Indestructible Cat, who earlier this year staged a miraculous comeback from presumed death, is no more. Last weekend her epilepsy worsened, with a succession of terrible fits (nightmarish to witness, but from which she bounced back with admirable aplomb) against which her medication proved powerless. We were forced to take the hard decision and take her to the vet for that last injection. She had a happy, mercifully fit-free, last morning in the sun - it was the very end of the great Indian Summer - and a wonderfully peaceful end.
I warned her the last time I wrote her obit, that I wasn't going to do it again - so I shall simply 'reprint' it here:

'Scruffy - a name initially apt but quite inappropriate for the sleek svelte creature she became - was a small black cat with a ludicrously long tail. She made her first appearance in our lives 10 or 11 years ago, yowling piteously from the side return of our then house. How she got there we never knew, but she was clearly hungry, distressed and very frightened of all human contact. After a while desperation drove her to take food from us, but she was still extremely wary, and remained very highly strung long after we took her in, taking fright at the slightest thing and dashing away to her hiding places. The vet reckoned she was already three or four years old, and had clearly been someone's pet, before presumably being abandoned.

When, a few years later, we moved house to our present home, this proved altogether too traumatic an upheaval for Scruffy, who took off for several days, before being spotted, bedraggled and forlorn, hanging around the old house. My son and I managed to cajole her into a carrying box and took her, yowling and protesting, to her new home, where she spent the next few days mostly cowering in the cupboard under the stairs. However, as she got to know the new house, she became at last a much more relaxed cat. With a smaller garden to patrol, no enemies among the local cats, and a house full of cosy nooks and corners, she began to give every appearance of contentment - and to be much more relaxing company. She was also good comedy value, with her strange outbursts of kittenish skittering and her way of mistiming a jump onto a chair arm or a lap and being left dangling by one paw - she never quite mastered the art of retracting her claws. She and I would have many fine conversations, though admittedly I supplied all the words...

And now she has gone, and how we miss her... Every time I walk into the kitchen, I instinctively glance towards that octagonal window, still half expecting to see her familiar shape on the sill. I think I hear her plaintive miaow or the faint tinkle of her bell or the soft thud as she jumps down from basking on a warm radiator shelf. Or I fancy I glimpse her just on the edge of sight. In the morning she is no longer there waiting at the top of the stairs when I get up, stretching herself for a good long head-to-tail stroke from me, before skittering down the stairs ahead, with breakfast on her mind...'

It was written in an infinitely sadder context, but Jon Silkin's line perfectly describes the sense of loss: 'Something has ceased to come along with me.'

Sun and Rain

Earlier today, I was munching a thoughtful sandwich in the shelter of a cherry tree while a few spots of rain fell unthreateningly and the sun fitfully shone. As I stood to brush the crumbs from my coat and go on my way, I spotted a tiny bird, unconcernedly foraging in the near branches, an arm's length from me - a goldcrest! Something very like this happened to me two years ago, to similar cheering effect. What followed completed the sense of something special having happened. The rain strengthened, and simultaneously the sun came fully out. Suddenly, for a moment, every passer-by was smiling, taking pleasure in the fine rain and sunlight and the prospect of a rainbow - and there it was, low and flat, just above the roofline. And then it really started raining...