In Locked Church Country

I was back in Kent yesterday, church crawling again - which isn't easy in a part of the county where the churches are all locked. Too quiet it is, and too near the main roads - once pilgrim routes, once Roman roads... But I struck lucky at one church when, after my mobile calls to two key holders proved abortive, I crossed the road to the rectory - as usual not The Rectory but a nondescript Sixties house hard by it - and found the rector by chance briefly at home between calls. She - again as usual a she: nice woman, friendly, northerner - took me back over the road, opened the church and left me to it. To a little gem of a church - plain white interior, chunky Norman nave with massive piers, later arcade to North chapel, chancel rejigged in 1689, as a boldly painted date over the arch declares. In the North chapel some beautiful stone carving, including a piscina set at an angle in a pier between chapel and chancel - and above the chapel altar the faded afterimage of a lovely, graceful Crucifixion group painted around 1300. And in the nave and chancel odd remnants of Baroque murals. And the main altar by Pugin the younger. And, displayed in a little wooden case, a mammoth's tooth - a tooth originally found by one of the builders of the Norman church and set in a pier near the font (also Pugin the younger) as a curiosity. Oh, the inexhaustible wonders of the English parish church...
 Heck, let's make this a competition: a prize of a punnet of finest Kent cherries* to the first person to Name That Church. Clue: it's quite close to this one.

[* subject to availability]

Bloomsbury, Gloomsbury

Hoping for a good laugh, I tuned in last night to BBC2's new Bloomsbury Group drama, Life In Squares. Disappointingly, there weren't many laughs, even for a confirmed anti-Bloomsburyite like me, and there were moments when it was almost possible to care about these ridiculous people - well, one or two of them. After all, they were young (except in an alarming flashforward near the end) and much foolishness can be forgiven the young. And of course the cast were by and large a whole heap prettier than the original Bloomsberries... Happily, Sue Limb's gloriously daft Bloomsbury sitcom, Gloomsbury, is still available on the BBC iPlayer. Plenty of good laughs there.

Wayne Carson, belatedly

I missed last week's sad news of the death of Wayne Carson, who wrote that great pop song Always On My Mind. The intense emotional drama of Elvis's performance (he was thinking, they say, of his mother) and the electro pomp of the Pet Shop Boys' recording both go all out to magnify and exalt the song, whereas Willie Nelson (typically) strips it down to its core and his version is, I think, definitively wondrous. It's a song that could have been written for Willie's unique styling, and it's no wonder it became one of his signature songs. Here he is in the 'official video' version, playing an unusually swanky guitar.
 Carson also wrote at least one other great pop song - The Letter, which gave Alex Chilton's band The Box Tops their breakthrough hit. Hard to believe that Chilton - something of a lost genius of pop (who died five years ago) - was just 16 when he recorded that... The Box Tops were also the first to record Carson's Neon Rainbow and Soul Deep. That's quite a legacy. RIP.

Young Betjeman: 'Wanting to be up to date but really preferring all centuries to my own'

I've been reading Ghastly Good Taste, or a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture, a little book written in 1933 by the young John Betjeman - reading it not, alas, in the original edition with its typographical extravaganza of a front cover, but in a 'National Trust Classics' reprint from the Eighties.
 The fun begins with the Preface, in which the author professes himself indebted to 'Mr C.S. Lewis, of Oxford, whose jolly personality and encouragement of the author in his youth have remained an unfading memory for the author's declining years'. In fact, Lewis showed undisguised contempt for the young Betjeman, regarding him as an 'idle prig' and effete socialite, and doing his bit to ensure Betjeman's ignominious (if well deserved) academic failure at Oxford.
 There follows Betjeman's introduction to the 1970 reprint of Ghastly Good Taste - An Aesthete's Apologia - which is arguably the best thing in the book. 'I wrote this book 38 years ago,' he begins. 'I was 26, in love, and about to be married. When Anthony Blond said he would like to reprint it, I thought I had better read it, and he kindly sent me a copy. I am appalled by its sententiousness, arrogance and the sweeping generalisations in which it abounds. The best things about it were the fancy cover, which I designed myself... ' and the Street of Taste, or the March of English Art Down the Ages, a deliberately old-fashioned pull-out drawn by Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh (and sadly absent from my reprint).
 By way of introduction, then, Betjeman  treats us to an entertaining 'aesthetic autobiography' up to the date when Ghastly Good Taste was published. This seems to him, he says, the only way to explain the state of mind that led him 'to dash out this book in something like a white-hot fury'. It was the product, he concludes, of a 'muddled state - wanting to be up to date but really preferring all centuries to my own'. And it is undeniably a muddle of a book, though an often rewarding and sometimes glorious muddle, and never less than fun.
 After an opening chapter, written in the form of an address to 'One of the Landed Gentry', Betjeman begins the second chapter thus: 'The first chapter of this book was in the nature of an apostrophe. Those who have understood it need go no further, for the succeeding chapters are but elaborations of the opening theme; those who did not understand it need go no further, since the elaborations will not help them. There is little reason for my continuing the rest of the book beyond pleasing my publisher, and indulging my own pleasure in writing and gaining that money which I cannot come by honestly.'
 It is also quite possible, though Betjeman doesn't point this out, to glean the argument of the book from the running commentary at the top of every right-hand page (another deliberately old-fashioned feature). Taken sequentially, they read:
 'The curse of the expert, the blind man in the street, the smug architect - and his awfully jolly assistants - but what is architecture? Oh! for a faith to work for wholly! The architecture of faith is characterised by logic and fearlessness, is liable to misinterpretation. The loss of faith and the growth of pedantry resulted in an incongruity of style properly called Jacobethan. The fine old English renaissance, this was hard and reasonable and fit for autocrats who will have no nonsense in freak styles from abroad but, instead, honest buildings at once impressive, dignified and original and, withal, Protestant. O natural and unaffected spacious days of the Regency, with your modest terraces, sound sense, no style being all styles and deceit being no style. Then, England knew how to build for the Hanoverians, for the Empire and the towns, and not only for the autocrat. The pride of the purse and the incipient snobbery of aristocrat and plutocrat caused a travesty of Regency styles and an uneducated, machine-made Gothic. But good old vulgarity is preferable to 'refeenment' - from which the great William Morris. In unity is strength.'
 For a short book, Ghastly Good Taste is surprisingly full of long quotations - some from architectural historians but most from miscellaneous literature and letters, including a long correspondence between Lord Ongley and his architect, Batty Langley (and a poem by Betjeman himself). There are also some amusing footnotes by the later Betjeman. A reference to 'hard logic' is footnoted 'About which I didn't then know anything, and still know nothing.' Mention of 'the sham classicism of Norman Shaw' inspires the note 'Who, I now realise, was our greatest architect since Wren, if not greater.'
 Ghastly Good Taste ends with one final flourish, listing the places in which it was written (in the manner of Joyce's 'Trieste, Dublin, Zurich' at the end of Portrait of the Artist):
 'Castlepollard - Capri - Heston-Hounslow - Wiesbaden.'
 Not bad for a book 'dashed out' in 'something like a white-hot fury'...

Tea

It was on this day 70 years ago that the result of the 1945 general election finally became known (it had been a very long drawn out count because so many voters were overseas with the armed forces). At 10 Downing Street, the Churchills listened in stunned disbelief as the full extent of the calamity became apparent - a Labour landslide. The loyal housekeeper rose to her feet and headed for the kitchen with words that sum up so much more than a mere election result: 'I don't know what the world's come to, but I'm going to make some tea.'

Sauce

Back home after a complicated family day (a vomiting bug on the rampage - though happily I seem to have escaped so far), I was cheered to find my post about vintage BBC-banned songs on The Dabbler...

The Iniquity of Oblivion

In a famous and beautiful paragraph in his Hydriotophia, Or Urne Buriall, Sir Thomas Browne writes:

'But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting register. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.'

As it happens, today is the anniversary of the infamous burning down in 356BC of the great temple of Artemis [Diana] at Ephesus, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. The name of the arsonist Herostratus lives on, yes, but despite the best efforts of the horrified Greeks, who decreed that it should never be mentioned again, under pain of death. The historian Theopompus ignored this, and so Herosrtatus's name has come down to us - as, incidentally, has that of the architect. He was a Cretan called Chersiphron, assisted by his son Metagenes. Like Herostratus, they are known for but one thing.