I Agree with Tony

Having been disappointed by Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land, I've been reading The Memory Chalet, which definitely didn't disappoint. It's an extraordinary collection of essays and memories - elegant, sharp-witted, warm, often funny and/or poignant - written in the last months of his life and suffused with the awareness that his life was ending. Happily, in this volume, Judt rarely strays into politics, but there is one occasion when he does and - for a wonder - writes not like a leftist but like a true conservative. This is when he - a state-educated grammar school boy who got into King's College Cambridge - considers the present state of the education system:
'Intent upon destroying the selective state schools that afforded my generation a first-rate education at public expense, politicians have foisted upon the state sector a system of enforced downward uniformity. The result, predicted from the outset, was that the selective private schools have flourished. Desperate parents pay substantial fees to exempt their children from dysfunctional state schools; universities are under inordinate pressure to admit underqualified candidates from the latter and have lowered their admission standards accordingly... Today, when the British government mandates that 50 per cent of high school graduates should attend university, the gap separating the quality of education received by the privately schooled minority from that of everyone else is greater than at any time since the 1940s... Meanwhile, we now have more private school graduates in the British cabinet than for decades past - and the first old Etonian prime minister since 1964. Perhaps we should have stuck with meritocracy.'
Indeed. And we also have entirely predictable news stories such as today's latest on university admissions. And, in the absence of the grammar schools, social mobility has all but ground to a halt. I was also a state-educated grammar school boy who got into King's (Judt's essay on 'bedders' rang some painful bells, though my habits were so irregular I rarely saw mine), and I can only say that, when it comes to education, I agree with Tony.

Out of the night...

I see I've popped up again on the Dabbler with Invictus...

Born on This Day...

... in 1935, the distinctively featured actor Ronald Lacey, most famous now for having played the Nazi villain Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a more villainous version of Herr Flick in 'Allo 'Allo (and no I'm not posting anything about David Croft , the sitcom genius who died yesterday - the press and web are full of well deserved tributes). Scanning Lacey's Wikipedia entry, I came across this remarkable sentence: 'He was known for his generosity and warmth to fans but equally known in the London theatre scene for his smoking and drinking habits.' Drinking habits I can understand - but smoking habits? What did he do? Smoke three at a time? Shove them up his nostrils? Blow smoke rings out of his ears? I'm intrigued...

Coffee

Coffee is surely one of the great blessings - or consolations, according to point of view - of life. It smells good, it tastes good - and, by golly, it does you good. Not so long ago coffee used to get a decidedly negative press, but nowadays the good news just keeps on coming - here's the latest. And note, these findings show that it's not all about caffeine, it's about coffee; other caffeine sources did not yield similar results. It was always a mistake to equate coffee with caffeine - coffee is no more caffeine than wine is alcohol. Drinking a cup of good coffee is nothing like taking caffeine; still less is drinking a glass of decent wine anything like knocking back a slug of alcohol. Coffee and wine are fantastically complex substances with very deep roots in human culture and husbandry, and their effects border on the magical. The same goes for tea and whisky, and quite possibly tobacco (though the bad news there rather outweighs the good).
I knew coffee was the drink for me when I first smelt the real thing - is there anything to touch the smell of freshly ground coffee? My father used to make filter coffee from time to time, even grinding the beans himself - pretty damned exotic in those days - but alas, most of the time, like most of my generation, I was obliged to drink the instant version, usually as a 'milky drink' (ugh). In my late teens I discovered the heady delight of espresso and never looked back... I also knew that beer was the drink for me when I first smelt the hoppy head on my father's Double Diamond - but that is another story.

News from the Infinite Monkey Cage

I've just stumbled on this story - and really don't know what to say, except that the world of science seems more and more to resemble Swift's Academy of Laputa.

'A dark Vanessa...'

A morning of glorious mellow sun - Indian summer! At Box Hill abundant crops of berries, hips and haws, and the first leaves turning - and a few butterflies still flying: several Speckled Woods still full of vim and vigour, floppy Large Whites, a couple of lazy Meadow Browns, and - in a brilliant set piece - three Red Admirals all basking in the same corner of a sunny bramble patch, each half a dozen leaves away from the next, all bright and fresh and startlingly beautiful. They never disappoint...
The Red Admiral is 'Nabokov's butterfly', the one that turns up most often and most recognisably in his works. It has, or so he claimed, a special resonance for Russians, who once called it the Butterfly of Doom, because it was particularly abundant across Russia in 1881, the year Tsar Alexander II was assassinated - and the figures '1881' can be read across the spread underwings. Take a close look at the picture - can you make out the '81' that would match the '18' on the other underwing? Look among the patterns in the lower half of the lower wing. It takes a bit of wishful thinking, but it's just about there, quite large, the curved '1' more obvious than the smaller '8'...
The Red Admiral flies unforgettably into the final lines of Nabokov's/ John Shade's Pale Fire, a poem haunted by Vanessa Atalanta. John Shade, unknowingly about to die, notices that
'A dark Vanessa with a crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white...'
For John Shade it was indeed the Butterfly of Doom.

'Too awful to think about'

While the Large Hadron Collider boffins scratch their pointy heads over the Big Doughnut's failure to deliver a Higgs Boson, a related experiment at CERN seems to have overturned Einstein's special theory of relativity. This is causing shock and dismay among physicists, which is all to the good. Maybe we're on the verge of a paradigm shift, maybe we're not (do I look as if I care?). Nobody understood relativity, let alone internalised it, so let's hope the next model of the universe is something a whole lot simpler. Malty's Egg Timer would fit the bill - or maybe something involving giant turtles..