Galorious Abundance

Well, what a difference a change in the weather can make. A few weeks ago, I was lamenting how few butterflies were on the wing, despite mostly dry and sunny weather through May and June - dry and sunny but simply not warm enough. Now, however, we have had a few mostly warm/hot weeks - and oh the difference... Down in Sussex at the weekend, I took a morning stroll around a former meadow that is now edged with brambles, ragwort and drifts of purple thistles, and the sheer abundance of butterflies was quite wonderful to behold. Huge numbers of Skippers (Small and Large), Gatekeepers, Meadow Browns and Ringlets galore were flying, along with Tortoiseshells, Commas, Peacocks, Painted Ladies, Red Admirals, Small Coppers (my first of the year), Marbled Whites (plus [the unrelated] Large, Small and Green-Veined), Common Blues - and, as a glorious surprise, a passing White Admiral gliding majestically over the scene. This was more like it - this was butterfly abundance on the kind of scale I remember from boyhood summers. All thanks to warm sun - and the benign neglect of a meadow. As the Met Office has just issued a dire forecast of grim weather coming our way, I'm sure we can look forward to this glorious sun continuing to shine.

A James Centenary

It was on this day 100 years ago that Henry James, in a rare affirmative foray into the world beyond the personal (as he might have put it), became a British citizen.
Carl Van Doren in The American Novel describes the moment thus:

'The war shattered his peace beyond repair. This lover of art who had not taken the trouble to form an opinion concerning the Dreyfus case, who had little more to say of the Boer War than that it doubled his income tax, who had vaguely hoped that the war with Spain might educate Americans as imperialism had educated the English, who had looked with candid contempt upon the Irish aspirations for freedom, now woke to the crisis of the world with a passion which ceased only with his death in 1916. There was nothing complicated in his loyalty, nothing critical in his attitude toward the drama being enacted. His “Europe”—France, England, Italy—had been assailed in utter wantonness; the barbarians were pounding at the gates and might at any moment break in to befoul the pavements and violate the shrines of his sacred city. His own distant country looked on without lifting a helping hand, and he saw no better way to signify his protest and his allegiance than by becoming a British citizen in 1915, declaring “civis Britannicus sum” with a Roman boast, and ending his career, as he had begun it, on the note of romance.'

Missing the Wonks

Hugely relieved though I am to be shot of office life, I must admit it had some advantages - notably that much-maligned entity known as 'technical support'. For all their shortcomings (in the matter of speaking comprehensibly, for example), the little army of asocial wonks with dubious dress sense certainly had their uses. Whenever there was a breakdown in the technology on which my work - like most people's - was totally dependent, these useful chaps (and they were nearly all chaps) could usually be relied upon to turn up, work their incomprehensible magic and quickly fix whatever it was that had gone wrong.
 Now that I'm retired, it's down to me to take care of these things - and  as someone who is to tech-savviness what Stephen Hawking is to ballroom dancing, this is not a happy prospect. I work on Apple Mac rather than PC - which limits the potential for catastrophe - but still things need to be done from time to time, and I am the last man on Earth to do them. For the past few days, I have been attempting a couple of what you might think were pretty straightforward jobs: installing Microsoft Word (for Mac) so that I have some word processing ability, and setting up the printer I bought some while ago so as to have a printer at my disposal that will, er, print things.
 My first attempt to acquire Word fell at an early hurdle - attempting to install something called Yosemite, which I was told I'd need in order to run Word. Yosemite took an unconscionable long time a-loading, before crashing somewhere along the way, losing me my internet connection and leaving me with what seems to be a half-loaded Yosemite - and, of course, no Word. The printer project began promisingly, inasmuch as I assembled, loaded and fired up the printer without any problems, inserted the disc, followed the instructions all the way up to 'ready to print' - and then found myself unable to print as the printer 'could not be found'. Somewhere along the way, I must have missed something - something rather crucial...
 All this is of course immensely frustrating - not least because I haven't a clue how this apparently magical box of tricks called a computer works. I am reliant on the priesthood of techies - and of course the young, who seem to take this stuff in with mother's milk (maybe it's time to let my three-year-old grandson have a go?). Meanwhile, however, a breakthrough: this morning I managed to install Word after all, by the simple expedient of going for the earlier version (ignoring the discouraging onscreen messages). It loaded up a treat, much to my surprise and delight. I guess there's a lesson in this... Yes of course - go retro, back to the future!

A Monument

Over the weekend I enjoyed an afternoon's walking in Kent.
 'Kent, sir - everybody knows Kent - apples, cherries, hops and women' (as Mr Jingle so succinctly put it) - and indeed a providential punnet of fresh-picked cherries from a roadside stall was one of the highlights of this walk, through gently rolling orchard and arable country west of Faversham. But the grand climax came, fittingly, at the end, in the picturesque village of Lynsted. The parish church of St Peter and St Paul is an imposing, rather muddled flint building - a patchwork of various periods - that happens to contain one of England's greatest church monuments.
  The monument to Christopher Roper, 2nd Lord Teynham (died 1622), is a rare example of a signed work by that elusive genius Epiphanius Evesham. It stands in the South chapel of the church, and it's apparent at a glance that this is a work of startling originality, displaying a level of craftsmanship infinitely superior to the provincial Jacobean monuments around it. The composition is quite extraordinary, combining two standard monumental forms of the period - the reclining effigy and the kneeling mourner at prayer - and breathing dramatic life into them. These are entirely convincing naturalistic likenesses of individual human beings, not emblematic figures frozen in conventional hieratic gestures.

 Lord Teynham reclines as if asleep, his beautifully moulded right hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword, his open but unseeing eyes turned to a point somewhere between the altar and the expected Heaven. His widow (who commissioned the monument) kneels behind and above him, praying at a priedieu - and grieving. This is no conventional 'mourning figure' but a woman of flesh and blood and soul, bravely enduring the agony of loss. The face is quite startling, even unsettling, in its lifelike expressiveness. It is hard to turn away from her.

 Those two figures alone would be enough to make this a most remarkable monument, but there are wonders below, in the form of two exquisitely carved alabaster panels depicting Lord Teynham's offspring. On most Jacobean monuments these are little more than a row of kneeling ninepins distinguished from each other only by conventional emblems of status. But here Evesham has carved individual, naturalistic portraits of each - the two sons on the right, turning their backs on hawk and hound to mourn their father, and the five daughters on the left, openly grieving (while still attended by their lapdogs). Each panel is beautifully composed and carved with quite extraordinary delicacy and skill, and each figure lives.

It is surely one of the great wonders of England that an obscure parish church can contain such a masterpiece.

Over there...

On The Dabbler, something on Cicadas.

It's Not a Bank, It's a Horse

I haven't been watching much television lately - and yet somehow I keep coming across this utterly nauseating ad for Lloyds Bank. It really has everything, hasn't it - apart from any content, that is, least of all any content suggesting that it is a bank commercial (it seems to be about, er, horses, if anything).
 Like most people, I have stuck with the bank I opened my first account with (such is our banking system that it's too hard, and anyway pretty pointless, to change) - and that first bank happened to be Lloyds. In the 40-plus years that Lloyds has been 'by my side', our 'relationship' has been characterised by sullen indifference punctuated with bouts of annoyance, from mild to raging - and I suspect that is true of most account holders and their banks. Which, no doubt, is why their advertising 'people' urge the banks to forge a heartstring-tugging emotional narrative that entirely ignores the dismal realities. Still, it's good to know that the banks - despite having by their reckless stupidity crashed the economy, and despite being in the process of paying billions in fines for having played fast and loose with their customers' money - can still afford to make glossy megabudget commercials to tell us how much they care, and always have done. Pshaw!

Visiting London

Having lived in and around London all my life, Visiting London is something I don't often do - visiting, that is, in the sense that a visitor, keen to see the sights, visits. Yesterday we had a visitor with us, in the shape of a three-year-old Wellington-raised grandson who has long been fascinated by the great London icons - the Tower, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge, the Eye - and was eager to see them for himself. He'd already ticked off a few on this visit, and we thought we'd take him for a ride on the Eye as a post-birthday treat. Here's what happened, with a few handy tips for visitors - not necessarily three-year-olds.
 First we thought it might be a good idea to take the open-top bus tour, hopping off at the Eye. After ten minutes or more waiting in a shambolic quasi-queue (at Victoria) while the sales staff struggled to get their card readers to work, I found myself at last in a position to ask for three tickets. This, I was informed, would cost £90 - yes, £30 a head. You can take the wonderful Circle Line cruise around Manhattan Island (a journey that can reduce a man - well me anyway - to tears) for little more than half that. Welcome to London.
 Deciding against paying 30 sovs to enjoy the snarled-up London traffic and inhale the city's distinctive blend of particulates, we sped by Tube to the Embankment, crossed the rather beautiful footbridge to the South Bank, and took it from there. Here's a tip for three-year-olds: the London Eye looks fine in a view but, close to, it's too big to take in, the queues are epic, and the wheel turns way too slowly (also, at this time of year, once you're up there, most of what you see is trees - this is a wonderfully green city). Sam did not need to be told this; an icecream, a run around and a spot of lunch were clearly a much better idea.
 After that, we took to the water, taking a cruise boat from Festival Pier downriver to St Katherine's and then back to Westminster Pier (total cost for three: just over £30). This is the way to see London - from the river (especially on a warm summer's day) - and it was a novelty for us long-term Londoners too, as the city has only recently woken up to the possibilities of its river. In my childhood the London Thames was a toxic industrial drain, on which the city - then soot-black and skyscraper-free - understandably turned its back. Now, increasingly, it is the glory of London - and certainly the best way to get around. If only that skyline weren't so sorely disfigured by some of the most stupidly ugly buildings in the world. But, sitting happily near the prow of our boat, we took in the dome of St Paul's, the Globe Theatre, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, the Monument... And, walking back through Westminster, the Abbey and Big Ben. All that was missing were bobbies on bicycles two by two, and the rosy red cheeks of the little chil-dren.