'It was always weather'

 In Lichfield, that 'city of philosophers', the talk often turns to weather. Indeed, the weather might well be the number one topic of conversation, and lately there has been plenty to talk about, what with the heatwave and the dramatic downpours that broke it. I have no problem with this, as I find weather as interesting a topic as any, and one that is far more than merely the small change of everyday conversation. In the end there is little that is more basic to our life on earth than the weather – as it has a habit of reminding us whenever it gets extreme, and if we happen to find ourselves out of doors, in the thick of it, on a day of heavy weather. It affects our mood, our emotions, our physical health, and indeed our brain function, as that recent heatwave reminded us. Because of its potentially devastating, famine-inducing impact on farming and food production, weather was surely a central preoccupation of every agrarian society, and is still of huge importance to farmers, even in countries with the most highly developed agriculture. And of course this preoccupation, this lively fear of adverse weather, fed into early forms of religion – and more evolved ones: there were impassioned prayers for rain and for fair weather in the first Book of Common Prayer, and even the 1928 edition contains a prayer for 'seasonable' weather ('Send us, we beseech thee, such seasonable weather that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort, and thy honour.'). Here is R.S. Thomas's take on it all...

Meteorological

It was always weather. 
The reason for our being
was to record it, telling it
how it was hot, cold, wet
to the pointlessness of saturation.
It was a disposition
of the impersonal, an expression
on what could have been
blank space. It repeated itself
in a way we were never tired
of listening to. 'Do that again,'
we implored it on the morrow
of a fine day. When it was grey
you could have described it
as sullen. On sparkling mornings
it flashed us smile after smile so
we became familiar with it.
It breathed then into our very being
refrigerating us. To curse it
was to have it regard us
out of the mildest of skies,
fondling us with the wind's
tapering fingers. They say
it was like this before 
our arrival. How could it
have been without us
to convince it? What, when we
have gone, will become 
of it, endlessly occurring
over our vocabulary's Sahara?

'I can't recall how I spent my time before Google...'

 It was ten years ago today that the sweet-voiced singer Scott McKenzie died, at the age of 73. He was never a natural fit with the biz we call show, and not long after the blazing success of the hippie anthem San Francisco, he retreated from the spotlight and largely retired from the business in favour of living a life. Not long before his death, he described himself thus: 'Reclusive septuagenarian. I live with a 15 year old cat named Spider in Silverlake, which is in Los Angeles. I spend lots of time on the internet, mainly researching all sorts of things – I can't recall how I spent my time before Google. I was a professional singer for years, had a 1967 hit called "If You're Going to San Francisco, Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair". I sang at The Monterey Pop Festival. I've lived In New York City; Laurel Canyon; San Francisco; Virginia Beach. I cherish my friends, many of whom have passed on. This trend shows no signs of abating.'
A short post I wrote about McKenzie (born Philip Wallach Blondheim III, fact fans) on his 70th birthday scored more hits than any other post on this blog. I've no idea why, but it's worth trying again – here's the link...

Marriage and a Postcard

 Now I'm no longer paid to watch the stuff, I seldom look at anything new on television. Rashly tuning in to the new BBC1 drama Marriage last night reminded me how little I'm missing. Lord, it was dreadful, about as exciting as watching paint dry, and far less good for the soul. The dialogue, what there was of it, was often inaudible (as is the fashion these days), and vast oceans of time passed while nothing happened apart from someone tackling a sachet of tomato ketchup or mayonnaise with their teeth, or walking to or from a car, getting into or out of it, joining a queue, standing about, zzzz... And it was as mystifying as it was dreary – as is also the fashion, as if forcing us to work out what is going on somehow makes whatever it is intrinsically more interesting (it doesn't and it ain't). After about three quarters of an hour, a potentially interesting storyline finally hove into view when we met a young woman who we are asked to believe is the adopted daughter of the couple whose Marriage this is, though there was no chemistry whatsoever among the three of them. The daughter's new boyfriend is apparently a coercive controller, but I shan't be watching to find out how that, or anything else in this dreary drama, plays out. As usual, good actors (Nicola Walker, Sean Bean) were wasted in this, let down by a woefully inadequate script and a lifeless production. 
  As it happened, the night before I had caught Clive James: Postcard from Paris, a film he made in 1989. It was a reminder of how much fresher and faster and smarter this kind of thinking man's travelogue was in those days. No sooner had he arrived in Paris than Clive was being driven around the streets of Paris at suicidal speeds by Françoise Sagan, no less. It was edge-of-seat stuff, and it was hard to work out how on earth they managed to film it, let alone how it got past the lawyers. Things quietened down a bit after that, but there were none of the longueurs that punctuate similar films today, and none of the silly stunts that producers feel obliged to inflict on presenters (see Michael Palin, Portillo et al.). And of course, Clive James being Clive James, the script, if sometimes glib, was intelligent, insightful and funny. There'll never be another – and if there was, he wouldn't be allowed to make films like Postcard from Paris. 

Indulging a Maggot

 Talking of Tristram Shandy, yesterday Patrick Kurp quoted a bravura passage from that curious masterpiece, in which Sterne digresses on 'hobby-horses', a favourite subject of his and a major theme of the novel –

'Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest men of all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, – have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES; – their running horses, – their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,  – their maggots and their butterflies? –'

'Their maggots and their butterflies' was the phrase that caught my eye. 'Maggots' is here used in its generic sense, covering all kinds of larvae, not just those of house flies and bluebottles. Sterne will be thinking of the caterpillars which, after pupating, become butterflies. Both 'maggots' and 'butterflies' have connotations of the whimsical or frivolous (very much Sterne's own line), a maggot being in one early usage 'a whimsical fancy; a crotchet' (OED), and a butterfly 'a vain, gaudily attired person; a giddy trifler' (probably what Lear means when he speaks of laughing at 'gilded butterflies'). However, Sterne is surely alluding here to the enthusiasts then known as Aurelians, whose hobby-horse drove them to take a perhaps mildly obsessive interest in butterflies and indeed caterpillars. In Sterne's time, lavish and beautiful books of hand-coloured prints showing the life cycle of butterflies were in vogue. He might well have seen Benjamin Wilkes's English Moths and Butterflies (published 1749), and Moses Harris's glorious The Aurelian (frontispiece below) had been published the year before the final volume of Tristram Shandy. Isn't there something a little Sternean about the figure in the foreground (probably a self-portrait of Harris)? Or am I indulging a maggot?

Butterflies are, of course, my own hobby-horse, or one of them – one that I am riding rather hard at the moment as I wrestle with what might or might not become a book on the subject. It is a harmless enough pursuit: 'So long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, – pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?' Quite. 

Sternean Evolution?

 'To New Guinea I took an old edition of "Tristram Shandy" which I read about three times. It is an annoying & you will perhaps say a very gross book, but there are passages in it that have never been surpassed while the character of Uncle Toby has certainly never been equalled, except perhaps by that of Don Quixote...'
   Who is writing here? The clue is in the mention of New Guinea: it is the much travelled naturalist and collector Alfred Russel Wallace, he who independently of Darwin came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace is writing from Bacan in the Moluccas to his friend George Silk in London. The signature at the end of the letter is botched – 'PS A big spider fell close to my hand in the middle of my signature, which accounts for the hitch.' 
  The letter was written in the same year in which Wallace conceived his theory of natural selection – a theory that came to him in a flash when he combined the insights of a range of biologists (as we would now call them ) with Malthus's ideas on population growth. He was in the throes of the Genghis ague – malaria, as we now call it – and thrashing about on a sweat-soaked bed, his head splitting, his body racked with fever chills, when he had his light-bulb moment. Did his recent, repeated reading of "Tristram Shandy" play any part in its conception? The obvious answer is No, but there may be a Ph.D. thesis in it for someone...
  I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Russell, the 'nearly man' of evolutionary theory, the dauntless, prodigiously hard-working self-made commercial collector among all those gentlemen scientists (Darwin, Lyell, etc.), and I'm glad his star has risen again in recent years, thanks in part to the advocacy of that man of many parts Mr Bill Bailey. Wallace wrote a quite extraordinary account of an encounter with a butterfly – the one that came to be named Wallace's Golden Birdwing: 'The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.' Oh, I don't know...

On the Hill

 From the train this morning, the dip slope of Box Hill looked more like desert than grassland – as did most of the usually grassy open spaces I saw along the way. This drought is certainly having an impact (though I was pleased to find that the river Mole, though a bit low, is still flowing well, as is the upper Wandle), and it looks as if it will be with us a while yet, along with some pretty fierce heat. Anyway, I wasn't intending to walk up that parched slope. I took a taxi from the station to the famous viewpoint at the top of Box Hill (as featured, I believe, in Emma), and from there I walked down to one of my regular August haunts, where I hoped to find the Adonis Blue and Silver-Spotted Skipper, two of our loveliest, and latest-flying, butterflies.
  My first impression was of a drought-struck and desolate landscape, with barely a flower to be seen, and nothing flying but a few doughty Gatekeepers and Meadow Browns. However, as so often, when I had slowed my pace, often to a standstill, and got my attention focused, I discovered that there was green growth to be found, there were flowers – though nothing like as many as usual – and, praise be, there were butterflies. Soon I was seeing Chalkhill Blues everywhere, then my first Silver-Spotted Skipper – the first of many, as it turned out. The Adonis Blue was harder to find, but after a while, closing in on a slight fluttering I'd noticed in a tussock, I discovered that I had found not one, but two – a male and a female taking a breather in the midst of an epic courtship chase: they were off again as soon as I'd seen them, and were chasing around at speed for the rest of the time I was there. I saw a few more Adonises too, and another one on my way back down the hill, by way of the gentler and less exposed areas of the dip slope. As I also saw a couple more Silver-Spotted Skippers, in a place where I'd never seen them before, I returned home well satisfied: I had seen the heavenly blue of the male Adonis's wings, and more than once enjoyed the Silver-Spotted Skipper's beautiful green-and-silver underwings. My butterfly summer is complete (all bar the elusive Brown Hairstreak). What more could an aurelian ask? 

The Big One

The heatwave continues here in southern England, and spreading across much of the country, maybe even to Hull, to Coventry... How would the 'summer-born and summer-loving' Philip Larkin be enjoying it? 'Enjoying it'? It's Larkin we're talking about here, and he was too much his mother's son to simply enjoy it...

Mother, Summer, I

My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone.
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can't confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.

Today is the big one – the centenary of Larkin's birth. Already I've heard Larkin talking and reading his own poetry on Radio 3, and his biographer Andrew Motion being interviewed on Radio 4, and there's a string of Larkin-related documentaries lined up on BBC4 tonight – not to mention the various goings-on in Hull today and through much of the year. There will probably never be another poetical centenary celebrated so widely: Geoffrey Hill's, which falls in ten years' time, certainly won't be, though he is (IMHO) the only other candidate for greatness among postwar English poets. Larkin's reputation, and his popularity, have survived the publication of his letters and the shocking (to some) revelations in Motion's biography. One exam board recently dropped him from its GCSE syllabus, but that seems to have been nothing personal, just part of a general dumbing down. I can't help feeling that if some of those unfortunate revelations had come out in the past few years there would have been serious attempts to 'cancel' Larkin, but happily he has survived, and his work seems only to grow in stature with the passage of time; much of it has become classic. Perhaps, as Auden wrote, in In Memory of W.B. Yeats, 'Time that with this strange excuse/Pardons Kipling and his views,/And will pardon Paul Claudel,/Pardons him for writing well.' 
  I have written so often here on Larkin, and posted so many of his poems (try a search), that he has become a kind of tutelary deity of this blog. What can I add today? Only this perhaps – that if you haven't read his novel, A Girl in Winter, you really should. It is a revelation.