Not Quite Obsolete

 I picked up a new idiom this morning – well, new to me, but described in one online source as 'not quite obsolete', which is fine by me. Watching an episode of Frasier – still one of the smartest, funniest sitcoms ever made – in a hotel room in Chichester (don't ask), I caught Daphne, in the course of describing an over-ardent suitor, saying that he had 'a boardinghouse reach – and he wasn't reaching for the Colman's mustard'. The meaning of the phrase is instantly clear, as is the image it conjures up, of boardinghouse inmates seated at the communal table, each eager to get their hands on the condiments, and one of them lunging across everyone else's space with his 'boardinghouse reach' to grab them first. The phrase has particular resonance on this side of the pond, where boardinghouse landladies were notoriously stingy and inhospitable, and no doubt those condiments were in short supply. Though boardinghouses are now a thing of the past, the phrase deserves to live on. Nice work, Daphne (or rather those brilliant scriptwriters who made Frasier a classic). 

Ducks Revisited

 Walking by the river earlier today, I paused at a spot where the ducks (every one a Mallard usually) congregate to dabble, squabble and rest up in company in the shade of the trees. They are quite fearless of humans and barely bother to get out of the way of passersby. As I was watching the action on the water – all pretty placid on this occasion – I noticed a tiny coot chick was swimming about rather forlornly on its own. There was no sign of a parent bird nearby, and the chick looked horribly vulnerable – but maybe I've been conditioned to expect carnage by seeing too many episodes of Springwatch: the latest series seems to have contained an extraordinary amount of blood-curdling footage of animals blithely devouring other animals, often alive, usually smaller, sometimes their own offspring. Red in tooth and claw indeed, not to mention beak...
  Hoping the coot chick would be fine, I returned my attention to the ducks, birds that are always a pleasure to watch, though they certainly have their deplorable habits (gang rape for one). I had a vague memory of a rather good poem in praise of ducks, but I couldn't remember who wrote it, only that he was a friend of Ivor Gurney's, that he served in the Great War, and that there was an unusually engaging photograph of him in uniform – I remembered the photo clearly. I had, of course, written about him (back in 2016); his name was F.W. Harvey, and here is the link to his 'Ducks' and 'In Flanders', and to that engaging photograph...
  Later on this riverside walk I had a cheering encounter with a magnificent Red Admiral, fresh, bright and full of life – my first of the year and very late, but it's been that kind of year. 

Françoise Gilot

 I have only just heard that Françoise Gilot, a talented artist and remarkable woman doomed forever to be most famous for her relationship with Pablo Picasso, died the other day, at the magnificent age of 101. A graduate of Cambridge (Eng. Lit.) and the Sorbonne (Philosophy), she was already an accomplished painter and ceramicist when she had the misfortune to meet Picasso in 1943, when she was 21 and he 40 years older. He promptly dumped his current lover and muse, Dora Maar (the photographer), and soon he and Françoise were living together. They never married (Picasso was still legally married to Olga Khokhovla anyway), and in the course of their ten-year relationship, Françoise bore him two children, Claude and Paloma, believing Picasso's promises to love and care for them always. After she left him, having had enough of his tyrannical ways – the only woman ever to have left him, according to Picasso – he tried to stop galleries from buying her work, and did everything he could to block publication of her memoir, Life with Picasso. When it finally came out, in 1964, and became a huge bestseller, Picasso refused ever again to see Claude or Paloma. What a delightful little man he was. 

King Cole

 To mark the birthday of Cole Porter – born 1891 in a place confusingly called Peru, Indiana – let's treat ourselves to one of his greatest songs, nicely sung by Fred Astaire and sublimely danced by Fred and Ginger. I don't think this routine was ever bettered in any film musical, and I don't think any male human being ever moved with more grace than Fred Astaire. (The sequence, colorised here, is from The Gay Divorcee (1934), and that's supposedly a view of the English Channel outside.) Don't miss the sign-off at the end...

The Forgotten Artist

 What's this then? One of Turner's Venetian paintings? No, actually it's by James Holland, an artist I must admit I had never heard of until I noticed his biography, James Holland: The Forgotten Artist by Steve Bond, advertised in a book catalogue. 'Forgotten' seems to be about right, but in his day Holland was regarded as one of the leading lights of the English School of watercolorists, and had a high reputation as an accomplished and versatile painter of architecture, landscapes, flowers and marine subjects, in both oil and watercolour. 
  Holland was born in Burslem, Staffordshire, one of the Six Towns (Arnold Bennett made it five) of the Potteries. Starting out painting on pottery and porcelain, Holland came to London at the age of 20 and set up as a painter and teacher, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, the Society of British Artists and the Society of Painters in Watercolour until 1857, when he ceased to exhibit (some 13 years before his death). Much of his life was devoted to travel in search of suitable subjects, in Normandy, Portugal, Rotterdam, Milan, Geneva, North Wales and, of course, Venice. His Venetian paintings best showed what he could do with light and colour, and are still much sought after (the one above hangs in the Tate). 
  The painting above is, like most of Holland's work, quite 'finished', more so perhaps than a similar Turner would be. However, some of his surviving works are less finished, and the more attractive for it – to me, at least – as in the two sketches below, both painted in Rouen...

Many of Holland's pictures are on display at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. I must pay a visit some day. 

Pieces of the Sky

 While the abundance of, shall we say, less attractive insects continues – just now the leaves of every lime and sycamore tree around here are so covered with tiny whiteflies that the pavements below are sticky with their exuded 'honeydew' – there are disappointingly few butterflies to be seen, apart from the ubiquitous Holly Blue. However, I crossed the border into Derbyshire this last weekend, and in the glorious sunshine (at last!) I was delighted to find something more like early summer abundance. Fresh and bright Common Blues – those uncommon beauties – were flying, like pieces of the summer sky, and, at the more subdued end of the colour scale, I saw my first Dingy Skippers of the season (yes, the name fits rather well, but I love them), and two other firsts, both small, both beautiful: a solitary Small Copper (they're having a bad year in Derbyshire) and a single Brown Argus. My aurelian's heart rejoiced. 

A Mixed Bag of Anniversaries

 As well as being the 70th anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – a day I remember, just about – today is also the inauspicious birth date of the Marquis de Sade in 1740 and, exactly 100 years later, Thomas Hardy. And, 100 years after that, to the day, the birth date of Barney Fugleman, the Hardy-hating hero (if that's the word) of Peeping Tom, Howard Jacobson's 1984 comic novel, which I'm rereading many years on, something else having piqued my curiosity about the morbid psychology of Thomas Hardy. This is a subject explored in some depth and in an unfailingly destructive spirit in Peeping Tom – which, I have to report, is pretty filthy and often very funny. It's been an entertaining companion while I continue my struggle with this tediously tenacious postviral energy deficit. Next week I'm resorting to Chinese medicine...