Happy New Year!

A very happy 2013 to all who browse here. May it be another year of wonders, great and small...

Looking Back at 2012

Well, what a year it's been... No, really - it has. Consider:
It was the year of the London Olympics, an event greeted here on Nigeness with, I must confess, something less than wholehearted enthusiasm - and which turned out to confound all the dismal predictions herein passim by being an unmitigated triumph. (The thing is, you see, I have to call one wrong every now and then to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities...)
And it was the year of the Diamond Jubilee. Who will ever forget the BBC's coverage of the great river pageant,  as comprehensive a shambles as has ever been seen on the nation's screens? The man in charge, one George Entwistle, was duly rewarded with the Director Generalship (after several hundred thousands of pounds had been spent on 'headhunters') and walked the plank after 56 days in office.
But let's talk about the weather. 2012 began with drought - and a glorious early spring - but by May had switched to rainy mode and has seldom relented since, ending up as the wettest year on record. The result was the worst butterfly summer I can remember, following hard on the heels of one of the best and earliest springs. But I enjoyed a few golden days on the Surrey hills and in the Derbyshire dales - and a magical encounter with a Valezina - and when the rain did ease off briefly in late summer, it turned out to be a prodigious year for Chalk-hill Blues, which I hadn't seen in such quantities since boyhood. And talking of magical encounters, this was the year of my very first meeting with that legendary rarity the Camberwell Beauty. Yes, it was in another country (where it is known as the Mourning Cloak and is surprisingly common), but it was still one of the butterfly experiences of a lifetime...
On the book front, much of my most enjoyable reading has been rereading, as usual, and it's not been a year of great discoveries. I've spent a while exploring the extraordinary life and work of Ivy Compton-Burnett, belatedly discovered Willa Cather and read my first collection of Alice Munro - I'll be back for more of both of them, I'm sure. Reading Byron Rogers's two classic biographies, of J.L. Carr and R.S. Thomas, gave me (and, I trust, blog readers) much harmless pleasure. And I finally read Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond and was not disappointed.
Among the various joys of a year blessed with an abundance of them were the golden spider silk cape in the V&A, and some glorious churches visited in Herefordshire and Norfolk. And, topping it all - this was the year I became a grandfather, with the birth of the auspiciously named Sam.
Even despite the Lost Summer, this was a vintage year.

A Sick Man Writes

Apologies for my unwontedly long absence from the Blog; I've been knocked out of action by what we doctors call a full-on stonking megabastard cold-flu type virus, from which I am only now beginning to recover. Mrs Nige had it first, and then, with perfect timing for the Festive Season, I succumbed last Saturday - and of course it's a proven scientific fact [citation needed] that we men are hit far harder by this kind of thing. Suffice to say that by Christmas Eve, simply thumbing a text message was a major challenge, and attempting anything on a computer keyboard not to be thought of - so I couldn't even manage my traditional Christmas Wishes to all followers of Nigeness. So, after the event, I hope you all had a great Christmas. With luck, I'll manage a New Year message - perhaps even a look back over the year. Meanwhile I shall concentrate on getting better...

Today's the Day

'Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.'
[Robert Frost]
And some say that the world will end in a mighty cosmic collision some time today, as predicted (hem hem) by the Mayans. Hundreds of hacks and a few dozen wackjobs have descended on the French village of Bugarach, where extraterrestrials will emerge from a nearby mountain (which doubles as a UFO launch pad) to save those humans who happen to be in the vicinity. So, the end population of planet Earth will consist of a miscellaneous collection of hacks, nutters and seriously disgruntled Pyrenean villagers. This might make an interesting sitcom (Only Fools and Journos?), but I can't help feeling it has something of an air of anticlimax about it.
Oh, and in case the Mayans turn out to to be right - Cheerio everybody, it's been a lot of fun.

Alma-Tad of the Royal Acad

I've written before about Lawrence Alma-Tadema,'the worst painter of the 19th century' (according to Ruskin, never one to mince his words). Sir Lawrence I should say, for the doughty fellow was knighted in 1899, joining the distinguished list of foreign-born artist to be so honoured - Rubens, Van Dyck, Kneller, etc. A celebratory banquet, attended by the giants of the artistic world, was duly laid on at the Royal Academy, and great was the rejoicing; the genial Alma-Tadema seems to have been as popular with his fellow artists as with the public. The proceedings became positively uproarious when a song, the Carmen Tademare - specially written by the dramatist, critic, gallery owner and impresario Joseph Comyns Carr, with music by George Henschel (also present) - was sung, with everyone joining in on the chorus with gusto:

'Who knows him well he best can tell
That a stouter friend hath no man
Than this lusty Knight who for our delight
Hath painted Greek and Roman.
Then here let every citizen
Who holds a brush or wields a pen
Drink deep as his Zuyder Zee
To Alma-Tad - of the Royal Acad -
Of the Royal Academee!'

Happy days!
Still reading Victorian Olympus then? you inquire wearily. I am. Although it's a short book, my reading time has been even shorter - but I shall be finishing it today and moving on...

Olympics again

Over on The Dabbler, my piece on the Cotswold Olympics has been posted. For reasons of space, my prophetic words on the then forthcoming London Games - "the joyless hypertrophied big-money fascistic spectacle about to be inflicted on the unfortunate city of London" - have been omitted.

Piltdown: Giving the Scientists What They Wanted

When I was a boy I had an old encyclopaedia with an illustration of the reconstructed Piltdown Man skull in it, presented as the key 'missing link' in the transition from ape to man. On the centenary of this famous hoax, it's worth recalling that such a version of human evolution was the received scientific wisdom for four decades (though, to be fair, there were always doubters). It's a classic case of scientists persuading themselves, for scant reason, that X is the case, then seeking out proof that they are right. Many palaeontologists had convinced themselves that the brain led the way in human evolution, so they were looking for a big brain in an otherwise ape-like skull; and the British ones were determined that there must be major finds waiting to be discovered in Britain as they had been on the Continent. Indeed it would be only right and fitting, wouldn't it, if humanity had made its crucial evolutionary breakthrough in England's green and pleasant land, that the first humans were free-born Englishmen. In such a climate of belief, it was no wonder an ingenious hoaxer came along and gave the scientists what they wanted.
Who was the hoaxer? I like the idea that it might have been that man of many parts Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - philosopher, Jesuit priest, palaeontologist, hoaxer? However, Teilhard came to believe that there probably were no 'missing links' to be found, owing to what he charmingly called the 'suppression of the peduncles'. The big breakthroughs in evolution happened, he concluded, rather suddenly, thus appearing in the fossil record fully formed. Piltdown Man, then, was a redundant peduncle.