The Private of the Buffs

I've mentioned before that boyhood exposure to my father's morning recitations of stirring narrative verse has laid down some curious vintages in the cobwebbed cellars of my memory. Thus it was that, as soon as I heard this story on the news this morning, the opening lines of Sir Francis Hastings Doyle's The Private of the Buffs sprang unbidden into my head. Here it is in its entirety:

LAST night, among his fellow roughs,
He jested, quaff’d, and swore:
A drunken private of the Buffs,
Who never look’d before.
To-day, beneath the foeman’s frown,
He stands in Elgin’s place,
Ambassador from Britain’s crown,
And type of all her race.
Poor, reckless, rude, lowborn, untaught,
Bewilder’d, and alone,
A heart, with English instinct fraught,
He yet can call his own.
Ay, tear his body limb from limb,
Bring cord, or axe, or flame:
He only knows, that not through him
Shall England come to shame.
Far Kentish hop-fields round him seem’d,
Like dreams, to come and go;
Bright leagues of cherry-blossom gleam’d,
One sheet of living snow;
The smoke, above his father’s door,
In gray soft eddyings hung:
Must he then watch it rise no more,
Doom’d by himself, so young?
Yes, honor calls!—with strength like steel
He put the vision by.
Let dusky Indians whine and kneel;
An English lad must die.
And thus, with eyes that would not shrink,
With knee to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink,
To his red grave he went.
Vain, mightiest fleets, of iron fram’d;
Vain, those all-shattering guns;
Unless proud England keep, untam’d,
The strong heart of her sons.
So, let his name through Europe ring—
A man of mean estate,
Who died, as firm as Sparta’s king,
Because his soul was great.

Phew. The point being, I suppose, that the very qualities that make the off-duty soldier a troublesome presence - a drunken rough - are those that on the battlefield make him a steadfast fighter and potential hero. Kipling hammers home much the same point in his poem Tommy, contrasting civilians' contempt for the soldier in peacetime with their sentimental, hypocritical fawning on him when his services are needed.
There is a lot in Johnson's saying that 'Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.'

Moore Music

The great accompanist Gerald Moore - born on this day in 1899 - had a slow and tortuous start in music. In boyhood, his mother had to drag him to the piano, 'an unwilling, snivelling child - I did not absorb music into my being until my middle twenties'. At one time, while living with his family in Toronto, he found himself working as a cinema organist, accompanying silent films. He characterised the cinema organ as 'an instrument of torture, sharing pride of place for sheer horror with the saxophone, the harmonica and the concertina'. No bagpipes? Perhaps they don't qualify as a musical instrument - no reason why they should... As for the harmonica, I'm inclined to agree, but this morning I had a listen to Vaughan Williams's Romance for Harmonica, Strings and Piano - and it's really rather good, using the harmonica's strange sound qualities to produce some very pleasing textures. Here's a link...
As for the concertina - here's a concertina band playing Vaughan Williams.
But back to Moore - here he is with Fischer-Dieskau and Schubert. At his farewell concert in 1967, Moore ended, solo, with a piano arrangement of An Die Musik. What better swansong?

Enter the Escalator

Ever since the BBC News website's exhaustive treatment of the cardboard box  ('We've all been there...') set the gold standard for spinning a lengthy feature article out of the thinnest filament of substance, I've been on the look-out for something that might bear comparison with it. Today I think I've found it, in the attenuated shape of this piece on Escalator Etiquette.
Moments to cherish, as you scroll wearily down (much like a footsore commuter on the down escalator), include the factoid finding that in Shanghai only 2.4 per cent walk on an escalator, and there is no preferred side to walk on.  In Australia, the preferred side is the right, rather than the left (has the world gone mad?). Good to know too that the state of Wyoming has only two escalators, both of them in a bank.
The views of both walkers and standers are given more than ample space, as are the possible origins of the preference for a left-side standing rule. Questions of safety are explored with similar thoroughness, culminating in this eloquent paragraph:
'A spokesman for the Toronto Transit Commission said he could not recall any escalator accidents in Toronto.'
Yes indeed. And cutting her way through all these Escalator Etiquette dilemmas with a single image is 'San Francisco artist Helen Tseng'. It is a picture that repays - nay, demands - close attention. The Don'ts appear to include Sapphic affection, wearing a beard - not to mention face mask and glove - and taking a dump on the escalator (who'd have guessed). Among the Do's are, apparently, going up on the down escalator and going down facing backwards.
Ah well, we've all been there. On an escalator.

George Bernard Shaw's Exploding Shed

This from my local freesheet:
'Disaster was narrowly averted after 21 firefighters managed to stop a blaze from an exploding she spreading to neighbouring houses.
  The drama unfolded on Monday afternoon, when George Bernard Shaw discovered smoke coming from his garden shed.
  When he tried to douse the flames with water, the entire structure exploded in his face and proceeded to spread to the garden.
  Firefighters arrived in the nick of time before the flames could spread to a gas heater at the other end of the garden.
  Mr Shaw described how he and his mother were in the house at about 4.30pm when he smelt burning, initially thinking it was his daughter's hair straighteners.
  'I went to put it out with a bowl of water and as soon as I did this there was an almighty bang.
  Then the grass was on fire, causing my slippers to light up.
  By then I was panicking. The fire was several feet high at this point.
  Next thing I know, my neighbour is trying to put out the fire with his hose.'
  A fire spokesman said: 'We believe it was the aerosol cans that started it, with the amount of heat we have had.'
  Mr Shaw, however, insisted that there were no aerosols in the shed, which he said contained some alcohol, garden furniture and paint.'

Our Native Church

I'm rather enjoying this story - not, I hasten to add, for the embarrassment (he rates it 8 on a scale of 1 to 10) caused  to Welby, who is patently a decent man, whether one agrees with his Evangelical theology or not. No, what I relish - and find reassuring - is (a) that the Church of England should have come up with a really rather bold and brilliant practical idea, and (b) that it should so promptly have dissolved into a fuzzy mess of embarrassment and ethical compromise. This is what we expect of our dear old national church, and we wouldn't have it any other way, would we? Imagine if the  C of E was a thrusting, dynamic, efficient engine of social change - imagine if it was, Lord help us, popular, or fashionable... No, it wouldn't do. What we value - well, what I value - is 'the sweet mediocrity of our native church', the way it embodies something deep in the national psyche, a kind of good-natured, well-meaning, quiet decency, often more bumbling than efficient, liable to go wrong but somehow muddling through, distrustful of big ideas and aims, and all the time, at a mundane everyday level, doing good 'in minute particulars'. I fancy - or rather hope - that these apparently non-adaptive, anachronistic strains are in fact signs of deep strength, not weakness, and that they will endure.

The Peacock's Tail Explained

So that's sorted then - the scientists have explained why the peacock's tail is the way it is. They've come up with this explanation after tracking the eye movements of peahens and finding them easily distracted. Hmm... Have they tried that on other female birds, I wonder? Like most of us in London, I've spent many years involuntarily observing the indefatigable mating behaviour of our 'flying rats', the pigeons - and the females seem so easily distracted that they rarely pay any attention at all to the males. Yet all it takes is a little work with the chest feathers ('In the spring a livelier iris glistens on the burnished dove'), a bit of tail-fanning and bowing and scraping and - wham bam thankyou ma'am. And, by the way, why is it so important for the peahens to keep an eye out for predators but not for the peacocks, even though they'd have to get away while lugging their mighty tails after them.
  Anyway, talking of peacocks, the amazing (if late-starting) butterfly summer continues. The patch of parched flower meadow by Kensington Palace now has burnet moths in residence, meadow browns (as well as whites) visiting, and small skippers nectaring happily. Nearer to home, gatekeepers are everywhere, and this morning I counted five small skippers on the long grass beside the railway track - they seem to be having a bumper year. Heaven know what else I might find if I make it out to serious butterfly country this weekend, as I'm hoping to do...

John Newton: Amazing Life

Today is the 188th birthday of John Newton, a man whose life, even in outline, reads like fiction. Born into a family of merchants, he went to sea with his father at the age of 11, was later press-ganged into the Royal Navy, attempted to desert and was punished by a flogging of eight dozen lashes, after which he understandably contemplated killing the captain and then himself. But, amazingly, he recovered. Later he transferred to a slaving ship, on which he made such a nuisance of himself that he was dumped in West Africa in the care of a slave dealer. The dealer duly sold him into the service of an African princess, who mistreated her slaves on an equal-opportunities basis. Eventually rescued by a friend of his father's, he returned home, experiencing a spiritual conversion en route, married his childhood sweetheart and became an Evangelical Christian, while continuing for some years to be profitably active in the slave trade - though he later became a fervent abolitionist.
  While serving as curate at Olney in Buckinghamshire, his path crossed that of the troubled poet William Cowper, with whom he wrote the Olney Hymns, among which are Newton's Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken, How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds and, best of all, the great hymn for which he is best remembered today - Amazing Grace. Opinions differ as to whether the encounter with Newton's passionate Evangelicalism improved or worsened Cowper's fragile mental health, but it was certainly for some time a warm and sustaining friendship. Newton had a generous approach to his ministry, his mission being, as he saw it, 'to break a hard heart and heal a broken heart'. His door was open to all and he was popular figure, ever ready to help where he could. 'I see in this world,' he said, 'two heaps of human happiness and misery; now if I can take but the smallest bit from one heap and add to the other, I carry a point. If, as I go home, a child has dropped a half-penny, and if by giving it another I can wipe away its tears, I feel I have done something. I should be glad to do greater things, but I will not neglect this'. That sounds to me like a pretty good mission statement for a priest - or anyone.