Six Men on One Ukulele

It's probably just my yoghurt brain, but I did enjoy this extraordinary performance.  Watch the chap third from the left...

Home-grown Rampagers

'Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.'

Thus Edward Thomas in the lovely short poem Tall Nettles. Even in Thomas's time nettles were spreading across the land, invigorated by the nitrogen-rich fertilisers that were coming into heavy use, and by the breaking of ground for building development. Nettles were one of the subjects of an interesting edition of Radio 4's Costing the Earth that I caught the other day. Its thesis was that, while we've been obsessed with the threat from alien invasive plants - Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed and the like - our own home-grown rampagers have been quietly engulfing more and more land, and at an accelerating rate. Nettles, brambles, ivy and other long-established invasive species are spreading as never before, encouraged by the decline in grazing and in woodland management. Ever increasing areas of land are 'scrubbing up' as they are taken over by birch and thorn, alder and elder. 

Seeing photographs or paintings of familiar landscapes a century and more ago, it is often striking how relatively bare and orderly they are, compared to the scrub-covered present. In my own lifetime I have seen large areas of local chalk downland revert to scrub.  It's a reminder of how important human intervention is to the creation and maintenance of habitats, and what would happen if we were not around - what might yet happen across much of the land as we increasingly retreat from it. It will not be pretty - but it might have a certain primeval beauty, and it might still be possible to trace the human past through the covering of vegetation. A ghost of the railway network, for example, would subsist in great closed-over avenues of buddleia, from Penzance to Inverness. But buddleia is an alien invader, and that's another subject...
The butterflies would enjoy it though.

'... chiefly it is intended for xenophobes and anglophobes'

Born 101 years ago today was the Hungarian-born British writer George Mikes, best known (if he is remembered at all) for his gently humorous foreigner's-eye view of the English, How to Be an Alien. First published in 1946, it went into innumerable printings (my copy is the 23rd impression, from March 1957). 'This book,' says Mikes on the dust-jacket flap, 'is meant for those who see the funny side of life and to help those who can't see it, but chiefly it is intended for xenophobes and anglophobes. The author, Mr Mikes (pronounced "me-cash"), has been a keen observer of the behaviour and misbehaviour of foreigners and natives in this country and is happy to give all and sundry the benefit of his research. Chapters on hypocrisy, language, sex, tea, the soul, the weather, rudeness and simple joys are just a few results of his vast investigations.'
The chapter on Sex is the shortest: 'Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.'
Soul is something foreigners have and the English don't need: 'The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.' Mikes is very good on English understatement - a form of expression that is in retreat in today's more emotionally incontinent times - but he acknowledges that 'Overstatement, too, plays a considerable part in English social life. This takes mostly the form of someone remarking: "I say..." and then keeping silent for three days on end.'
As a portrait of English life it is, of course, very much of its time; this is a lost England of stiff upper lips, scrupulous politeness and strong social codes. In a few places, though, it is strangely prescient, as when Mikes advises foreigners who wish to fit in to 'start eating porridge for breakfast and allege that you like it.' Nowadays everybody seems to eat porridge and claims to enjoy the experience.
The best thing about How to Be an Alien, though - as with so many other titles - is that 'Nicolas Bentley drew the pictures'. This brilliant illustrator makes any book embellished by him well worth a look - and he was on top form with How to Be an Alien.

Low Church

 They say that having a baby around turns the adult brain to yoghurt. It's certainly true of one's own babies, and it seems also to apply to Frankly Adorable Sam, the baby grandson who is staying with us for a few precious weeks. Yesterday, while he and his mother went out visiting, I headed straight for Cork Street and for Browse & Darby to see the Patrick George exhibition. It was only on arriving at the door that I realised I hadn't checked the start date - it opens today. Not yesterday, today.
Smiting my forehead and very probably uttering a 'D'oh!' I rapidly rethought my itinerary. First to the Royal Academy to look at the queues outside the Manet exhibition; they were impressive in scale and in their dogged, cold-defying fortitude. I did not join them. Having used the facilities and visited the shop, I yielded to the gravitational pull of the National Gallery. Despite the yoghurty brain, I managed to make my way there on foot - and, once there, I found that Room 1 was again hosting one of those mini-exhibitions I like so much. This was (and is) Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch - a selection (as the title suggests) of landscape oil sketches by Frederic Church. This leading light of the Hudson River school I knew only for his vast canvases of Nature at its grandest and most sublime. There is one of these - a grand-scale Niagara painting - in the exhibition, but otherwise it is all oil sketches of landscape scenes from his native land and farther afield: Jamaica, Austria, the Middle East. This, you might say, is Low Church rather than High Church.
The sketches are wonderfully deft work, for the most part sufficiently finished to make perfectly satisfactory paintings - you'd sooner have one of these in your house than a full-scale Church any day.  There are beautiful sunrises and sunsets, mountain scenes, cloud studies, and a fine suite of iceberg sketches. All of them show Church's skilled brushwork and draughtsmanship, close observation and great gift for painting effects of light, both subtle and blatant - and, of course, his eye for a picture. It's an enjoyable and rewarding exhibition, well worth a visit.
As for Patrick George, I plan to try again - on a day when the gallery's actually open.

Birthday Beckmann

Born on this day in 1884 was the German artist Max Beckmann. Resolutely unclassifiable and unflaggingly productive, Beckmann is, IMHO, one of the underrated greats of 20th-century art. I knew little of him before the 2003 Tate Modern exhibition, but I remember emerging from that display stunned by the impact of his best work, and hugely impressed by the power of his imaginative vision and the prodigious skill with which he conveyed it. It was one of the most memorable exhibitions of my life - and one of the few times that I've actually enjoyed a visit to the ghastly Tate Modern.

Beautiful?

Floppy-fringed physicist Professor Brian Cox is a man of many gifts - not least the rare ability to talk through a permanent broad grin (I wonder if he's ever tried ventriloquism?). Last night he was telling us again about The Wonders of Life. This is a series in which he explains how the whole of life was produced and is maintained by the operation of certain basic physical laws - a physicist's-eye view of nature, if you like. Last night's episode took its title from Darwin - Endless Forms Most Beautiful - and it seemed that every time Cox opened his mouth (or rather grinned) out would come the word 'beautiful'. Here was a man on a mission to show us how 'beautiful' is the operation of the laws of physics in a Darwinian world. 

I am always suspicious when scientists use the word 'beautiful'. I can accept that, for those with the mental equipment to appreciate such things, certain equations and formulas might seem beautiful. But the Darwinian vision of nature? Surely that's a stretch. Yes, Darwin himself used the word, but he was entitled to - then his vision was new, and strands of an earlier, more consoling, romantic world view still clung to it. By now, those who claim to accept natural selection as a full and sufficient account of how the natural world works should have internalised Darwinism and all its grim, far from 'beautiful' implications. But, as John Gray pointed out in Straw Dogs, almost nobody - including, or especially, its most ardent advocates - has truly come to terms with the Darwinian vision of a world in which everything, including ourselves and everything we think and do, is the product of blind and meaningless forces, and we are no more than just another species that has come and will go in due course. Talk of 'beauty' (or any other values) in such a context is little more than whistling Dixie, is it not? Yes, nature can indeed be made to look beautiful - as it was in Cox's programme, which came across at times like a pop video for a new single called Nature, or indeed Endless Forms Most Beautiful - but it is also brutal and ugly, as many a wildlife documentary shows (not to mention the ultra-bloody outtakes), and, to a true Darwinian, none of these adjectives should be applicable to nature. It just is. 

Review alert

I see I have a review of Charles Portis's The Dog of the South over on The Dabbler today...