Derbyshire in Three Drinks: If Johnson were a beer...

Returning from a few days in Derbyshire, I find my piece on a monument in Ashbourne church reprinted on today's Dabbler.
 Ashbourne was not on the itinerary this time, and we were based in Derby, a potentially very fine city hideously marred by Seventies-style ring road-based 'planning'. The skyline is dominated not by the cathedral tower but by skyscraper hotels and office blocks, and vast, curiously blank and opaque boxes of various shapes and colours occupy far too much of the understorey. Many of these no doubt looked wonderful on the drawing-board and duly won awards, but they sit in the Georgian-medieval-Victorian townscape like alien obtrusions. Happily, however, Derby has its river - the wondrous and lovely Derwent, a 'world heritage site' in itself - and enough of the city has survived the planners' attentions to afford some enjoyable urban rambling. But enough of Derby...

 Farther along the Derwent, in Belper, I came across a thoroughly delicious bottle of Falanghina in an Italian restaurant. This distinctive Italian was a few years ago expected to become the discerning budget drinker's alternative to Pinot Grigio and the all-conquering Sauvignon Blanc - but somehow it never happened, and that crown went rather to Picpoul de Pinet. Which was no bad thing, but if you come across a bottle of Falanghina do try it - you might well be in for a pleasant surprise.

In a pub near the vast man-made Carsington Water, I was delighted to spot a beer pump with the unmistakable features of Samuel Johnson (from the Reynolds portrait) on the handle. This was Dr Johnson bitter, brewed by the Leatherbritches brewery - not, alas, of Lichfield (or Ashbourne), but of Smisby in Leicestershire. I had never seen this beer before and had to have a pint - followed by another. I can report that, if Johnson were a beer, this is the beer he would be. It is described as 'a rich juicy malty beer with a nutty taste, a little fizziness on the tongue, with bitterness and a fresh clean taste'. We raised a glass to the Great Englishman.

The Barley Mow in Kirk Ireton, part of a fine 17th-century house, is one of the least 'improved' pubs I've ever set foot in - essentially a front parlour and a couple of rooms off, one of them upstairs, all sparsely furnished and looking virtually unchanged since the house was built. The 'bar' is a counter behind which are ranged four barrels of guest ales, the till is a wooden drawer, ale is drawn in jugs, and there are absolutely none of the trappings of a modern pub. Three of the tables are topped with sections of the slate bed of a billiards table. But the place is positively modernistic and go-ahead compared to what it was under the previous landlady, who refused even to take decimal money. The present landlady and her husband bought the house and pub nearly 40 years ago. The husband was a very distinguished local architect - but happily he was not responsible for any of Derby's architectural eyesores.

Flatt Day

I missed the centenary last year, so today let's mark the 101st birthday of the great bluegrass guitarist, mandolin player and rich-voiced vocalist Lester Flatt (d. 1979). Here he is in action on the Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs TV show. Bluegrass doesn't get much better than this -  enjoy...

Ekphrastic Porter

A Portrait by Giulio Romano
by Peter Porter

Dear long-dead lady,
what was it like in the world
of Aretine's postures?
The highlights of your beauty
are a blond tombeau
but you are in a cage.

Your white skin and your red
velvet dress - the uniform of love!
They have shaken out boxes
before your eyes, they have formed
letters on your lips, and held
your legs apart for the state.

We are wrecked on red dreams.
Eloquence is quickness,
the flying to extremes -
your pose and prettiness
are to keep off endings,
the highmindedness of hell.

The portrait of Dona Isabel de Requesens, vicereine of Naples, was formerly attributed to Raphael, who did indeed have a hand in it. It's a portrait rich is sensuous textures and colours, and the pose is extraordinarily provocative, not least in the placing of the hands and the fact that the knees are parted and the gaze unflinchingly fixed on the spectator. Yet it has an air of intense melancholy, a sense of a doomed situation in which the beautiful sitter is imprisoned. Porter's fine short poem, I think, captures all that and more.
['Aretine' is Pietro Aretino, pioneer of literary pornography.]

A Fossil Butterfly

Yesterday to the Natural History Museum, Alfred Waterhouse's vast Germanic cathedral of Nature, presided over by the God-like figure of Charles Darwin enthroned atop the grand stairs that rise from the vast nave. Number One Grandson, who is very nearly three, was awed by the grand building (which he describes as a 'palace') and by the giant Brontosaurus (or whatever they're calling it now) and the Blue Whale; but the big successes of the visit were outside the museum itself: the beautifully designed garden of English wild flowers and trees, with ponds and curving paths, at the western corner of the grounds - and the butterfly house. Called Sensational Butterflies, this is a large, steamy heated marquee (complete with jungle sounds) where a dazzling array of spectacular tropical butterflies are flying free and feasting on nectar and a picnic of rather worse-for-wear oranges and bananas. Number One Grandson was entranced by it all - it looks as if there could be another butterfly fancier in the family. His great-grandfather - my father, who was the first - would be delighted...
 I also learnt about - but, alas, didn't see - the astonishing fossil butterfly, Lithopsyche antiqua, discovered on the Isle of Wight in the 1880s. Read about it here - and enjoy the magical image of a creature of the utmost delicacy somehow preserved by fossilisation. Most fossils leave me cold - they seem like alien roadkill - but the thought of this butterfly, still so clearly recognisable, fluttering around on what is now the Isle of Wight some 34 million years ago sends a tingle down my spine.

Picture of the Day

This fine fellow is Henry Cyril 'Toppy' Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, in costume for one of his notorious theatrical productions. Born on this day 140 years ago, the 'Dancing Marquess' is notable for having run through one of the largest fortunes in England, speeding from immense wealth to bankruptcy in the course of a short, decidedly flamboyant life. You can read the sorry saga, in outline, here. It's good to know that he was popular with the people of Bangor.

Here's how it might have happened:
I was strolling along by the river in a local park* when I chanced upon a rather spectacular orchid of a kind I'd never seen before - similar to the common Spotted Orchid but more intensely coloured and with differently shaped and marked flowers. Reaching for my trusty Fitter, Fitter and Blamey, I was delighted to discover that it was a Southern Marsh Orchid...

Here's how it did happen:
Having heard that there was a colony of Southern Marsh Orchids in a local park*, I headed for what I thought must be the location, an area of damp ground near the river. I searched for some while with no luck, and was thinking of giving up when I noticed that a few small, apparently random patches of land were cordoned off with red-and-white tape attached to traffic cones. Surely they hadn't decided to draw attention to the orchids by fencing them off, as if to - er - draw attention to them? Reader, they had! And that was how I found my Southern Marsh Orchids, each clump fenced off like a crime scene. I wish it had happened the other way, but at least it gave me a great forehead-slapping moment - D'Oh!

* Note for Malty: Beddington Park.

Stanley Elkin Again: More Is More

I've been reading Stanley Elkin again - this time, The Franchiser, which had been in my sights for a while. Published in 1976, five years after The Dick Gibson Show and nine years before The Magic Kingdom, The Franchiser is the story of Ben Flesh, buyer of franchises - or rather The Franchiser is Ben Flesh, Ben Flesh's mighty edifice of words, his tumultuous, all-embracing, unstoppable spiel. His backstory gets told early on - by Flesh, of course, to a hitch-hiker: how his godfather, who was his tailor father's business partner, went on to become extremely wealthy after the partnership broke up and, feeling somehow responsible for Ben, left him on his death the precious gift of access to capital at prime rate, with the full co-operation of his benefactor's family of, ahem, 14 children, all multiple births (here Elkin's taste for grotesquerie finds ample expression - each of the 14 has his/her own bizarre and improbable medical condition. And there's more...).
 With this helpful start, Flesh devotes his life to buying franchises - the franchises that make (or made) America look like America, link Anytown to Everytown: Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson's, Dairy Queen and Mister Softee, McDonald's and Colonel Sanders', Fred Astaire Dance Studios, Cinema I and II... Flesh's life is spent entirely in hotels and in his car as he criss-crosses the country from one franchise to the next. And all the time he talks - the spiel goes on and on, projecting his dreams and visions, his ecstatic love of the teeming abundance and variety of life, of material things, of America, of the endless possibilities... Along the way he meets a range of Elkinesque characters - including a Colonel Sanders who isn't - and maintains his various relationships with his various 'godcousins'. And along the way he also finds himself suffering the onset of Multiple Sclerosis and a series of deaths - events that force him to face realities that even his inexhaustible spiel cannot for ever keep at bay... Or can it?
 As ever, Elkin treads the fine line between comedy and tragedy here, but he remains a defiantly, exuberantly, inexhaustibly comic writer - like Joyce (as classified in Hugh Kenner's The Stoical Comedians) a 'comedian of the Inventory', in The Franchiser quite literally so. He is a 'putter-in', not a 'taker-out'. As he recalls in his Paris Review interview: 'My editor at Random House, Joe Fox, used to tell me: "Stanley, less is more."... I had to fight him tooth and nail in the better restaurants to maintain excess, because I don't believe that less is more. I believe that more is more.' Well, in his case it is. The Franchiser is an endlessly inventive, funny, touching and hugely readable novel by a writer who surely deserves to be remembered and read - and enjoyed.