Terry

 I only learnt of the existence of Terry, the Stowe Pool terrapin, the other day, and hadn't expected to see him the first time I went looking – but there he was yesterday morning, basking in the May sun on an outwork of a big, messy coot's nest. The coots seemed entirely relaxed about his presence, and were carrying on with business as usual. Terry, according to Lichfield lore, has lived in Stowe Pool for years. He certainly looks as if he's been around a while, being about the size of a mature garden tortoise. He manages to hibernate and survive the winter – as do some 4,000 other 'feral' terrapins in the UK, most of them originally pets who, as they grew larger, proved too high-maintenance for their owners, who released them into the nearest expanse of water. 
  I was delighted to make Terry's acquaintance, and hope to see him again next time I'm passing Stowe Pool (which, by the way, is a reservoir, dating back to the 18th century in its present form, and full of impressive fish, including 25lb carp). And then, later in the day, I saw my first swifts – three of them, over a supermarket car park. Summer is here!
[The photo above is not mine, but captures Terry very well, I think.]

One Road to Tolerance

 A blog friend recently sent me a passage from a book by the American anthropologist and science writer Loren Eiseley, The Night City. Eiseley describes a visit to the ruins of Leptis Magna in the Libyan desert, where he meditates on time and its passing. 'There should be a kind of pity that comes with time', he writes, 'when one grows truly conscious and looks behind as well as forward, for nothing is more brutal than the man who is not aware he is a shadow. Nothing is more real than the real; and that is why it is well for men to hurt themselves with the past—it is one road to tolerance.' The last two phrases in particular struck me: I think a knowledge of the past is indeed a road to tolerance, and ignorance of it is surely a road to intolerance. Isn't this what we are seeing in today's vicious displays of intolerance by the new breed of unforgiving 'woke' activists? A quarter of a century ago, in The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hill wrote of  'these strange children, pitiless in their ignorance and contempt' – and now they're everywhere, dominating every university campus and loudly asserting themselves on the streets of our cities. And they are, I'm sure, massively ignorant of the past – how could they not be if they are accusing the Israelis of genocide? What unfathomable depths of ignorance does that imply? These people's idea of history will no doubt have been formed by the minimal and partial (in both senses) teaching of the subject in schools, where the subject itself is becoming increasingly marginal and the teaching of it is likely to leave a clear impression that our forebears were ethically deplorable and their achievements based on oppression and exploitation, best forgotten and disowned. This can only encourage a rejection of the past and our connection with it, leaving people with no sense of continuity with what came before – and without that sense, that perspective, an entire dimension of our human reality is lost.
  Every culture has told stories about its past, either in the form of factual history or, more often, myths and legends. Some knowledge of these stories was considered essential to becoming a fully conscious, fully functioning human. Without that knowledge, what are we? Well, we are beginning to find out, and it is not good...
  Zbigniew Herbert was a poet, living in the dangerous present of 20th-century Poland, whose imagination was steeped in the past, in history and the classics. In this poem he shows exactly why the classics matter, why history matters – 

Why the Classics
                         

                                 1
                         in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
                         Thucydides tells among other things
                         the story of his unsuccessful expedition

                         among long speeches of chiefs
                         battles sieges plague
                         dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
                         the episode is like a pin
                         in a forest

                         the Greek colony Amphipolis
                         fell into the hands of Brasidos
                         because Thucydides was late with relief

                         for this he paid his native city
                         with lifelong exile

                         exiles of all times
                         know what price that is

                                 2
                         generals of the most recent wars
                         if a similar affair happens to them
                         whine on their knees before posterity
                         praise their heroism and innocence

                         they accuse their subordinates
                         envious colleagues
                         unfavourable winds

                         Thucydides says only
                         that he had seven ships
                         it was winter
                         and he sailed quickly

                                 3
                         if art for its subject
                         will have a broken jar
                         a small broken soul
                         with a great self-pity

                         what will remain after us
                         will it be lovers' weeping
                         in a small dirty hotel
                         when wall-paper dawns

And here he is writing as a Roman in dangerous times, pondering his return to a court not unlike that ruled over by Stalin:

 The Return of the Proconsul

I’ve decided to return to the emperor’s court
once more I shall see if it’s possible to live there
I could stay here in this remote province
under the full sweet leaves of sycamores
under the rule of sickly nepotists

when I return I don’t intend to commend myself
I shall applaud in measured portions
smile in ounces frown discreetly
for that they will not give me a golden chain
this iron one will suffice

I’ve decided to return tomorrow or the next day
I cannot live among vineyards nothing here is mine
trees have no roots houses no foundations the rain is glassy flowers smell of wax
a dry cloud rattles against the empty sky
so I shall return tomorrow the next day in any case I shall return

I must come to terms with my face again
with my lower lip so it knows how to check scorn
with my eyes so they remain ideally empty
and with that miserable chin the hare of my face
which trembles when the chief of guards walks in

of one thing I am sure I will not drink wine with him
when he brings his goblet nearer I will lower my eyes
and pretend I’m picking bits of food from between my teeth
besides the emperor likes courage of convictions
to a certain extent to a certain reasonable extent
he is after all a man like everyone
and already tired by all those tricks with poison
he cannot drink his fill incessant chess
this left cup is for Drusus from the right one pretend to sip
then drink only water never lose sight of Tacitus

take a walk in the garden and return when the corpse has been removed
I’ve decided to return to the emperor’s court
I really hope that things will work out somehow

'To go home and wear shorts forever...'

 Warmth in the air today – at last – and no rain, even the sun shining off and on. With the sun, inevitably, come the first sightings of men in shorts. For myself, I have never knowingly worn shorts since boyhood, but live and let live, I say (when not denouncing shorts as an offence against man, God and nature, not to mention taste). At least the wearers of shorts have one great poet – Les Murray, Australia's finest – on their side. Here is his tour de force, 'The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever'...

To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah;

If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass?

They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma's cotton dhoti;

archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America.

Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi*,

likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligee
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy.

More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers' rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;
are sailors' and branch bankers' rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume.

Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals.

Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.

The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less.

To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.

 Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,

the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts of similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.

Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,

shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!

Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind's Sabine acres
for product and subsistence.

Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,

to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,

to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further tropics.

* 'Tat tvam asi' is one of the 'Great Sayings' of the Upanishads, and means 'That thou art', expressing the relationship of the individual to the Absolute – as do shorts, in their own small way...

Half an Hour to Justify the Licence Fee?

 Waking (for the third time, dammit) just after 6.30 this morning and tuning to Radio 3, I found Petroc Trelawny marking a musical anniversary – the first performance, in 1692, of The Fairy-Queen, Purcell's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream (which actually has rather little to do with the play itself). Petroc played a strikingly beautiful plaint, 'O Let Me Weep', which I don't remember hearing before. This was followed by the great Maurizio Pollini playing a Chopin nocturne (No 2 in E flat), and by then it was time for Bach Before 7: this morning a fragment of a multi-instrumental concerto (three trumpets for starters) that was probably intended as the introductory Sinfonia of a lost cantata. (And talking of lost music, the score of The Fairy-Queen was lost after Purcell's death, and only recovered in the early 20th century)...
 Some time after 7, I drifted off to sleep again, with the comfortable feeling that half hours like that one almost justify the licence fee. Almost. Actually I'd happily pay a licence fee just for Radio 3 – especially as it would only be a few quid.
   Here is 'O Let Me Weep', wonderfully simple and wonderfully profound, like so much of Purcell..

 

Another Magazine Gone

 I was sorry to learn that the UK edition of that old warhorse Reader's Digest is to close down, unable to stay afloat in today's magazine market. When I was a boy my parents, like almost everyone else, had Reader's Digest (and even a few of the books they published) in the house, and from an early age I would leaf through it, often mystified – especially by the 'humour' ('Laughter the Best Medicine', 'Humour in Uniform') – but finding plenty to interest me, sometimes in 'Towards More Picturesque Speech' or 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power', often  in the articles on science and medicine: in those days I wanted to be a doctor, a desire that left me as soon as I found out how much dreary science I'd have to do at school. Readers' Digest was a product of its time – aspirational, self-improving, decently conservative, unchallenging (though it campaigned hard to establish the link between smoking and lung cancer) – and was still in its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties when I first knew it. Not only was it in every home (or so it seemed) but in every doctor's or dentist's waiting room, along with the long since departed Punch.
   In my youth, of course, I had no time for it, but much later I did once have the curious experience of writing for it. The excellent Russell Twisk, the Listener editor who had bravely taken me on as radio critic in the course of a successful shake-up of the magazine, went on to be the UK editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest, so naturally I tried to get some work off him. I needed the money – and, by golly, the money turned out to be good. However, I had never had to work so hard to write a piece that amounted to little more than extended picture captions (it was to celebrate the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution that brought William and Mary to the throne). Then, when I thought I'd finally crossed the finishing line, I came up for the first time against American-style fact checking. For one who tended to rely on winging it, bluffing and improvising, this was a major shock to the system. I was quite relieved when a couple of further ideas I put to Reader's Digest were turned down.
  And now Reader's Digest is following Punch and indeed The Listener into the ever growing graveyard of defunct magazines. Many more will follow it, I fear.

Rudyard: Kiplings, Funambulists and Swallows

 Talking of public monuments, here, viewed from behind, is a tree sculpture that overlooks Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, which I visited at the weekend. I took the picture from behind because, frankly, it looks better: seen from the front, that tightrope walker has an unnerving look of the Monopoly Man about him. The sculpture, carved from a beech tree, overlooks the lake, and is intended to commemorate the feat of Carlos Trower, the 'African Blondin', who in 1864 (and again in 1878) walked across the lake on a tightrope 100ft above the water. He was not actually African but African-American, and I'm surprised he isn't better known in these days when 'black history' is so popular.  His feat was replicated in 2016 by funambulist Chris Bull, aka Bullzini, as the climax of a day of activities replicating Rudyard's heyday as a Victorian inland resort to which hundreds of thousands of day trippers and holidaymakers flocked, arriving on the North Staffordshire Railway. Among these visitors were John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald, who met there on a visit from Burslem, and were so taken with Rudyard Lake that they named their first son after it. 
  The lake was not intended as a tourist resort when it was created in 1799 as a canal reservoir, but such was its size – nearly two and a half miles long – and the beauty of its setting in a wooded valley that it was bound to become one, once the railways had reached it. It is still beautiful today, and visitors still come, though probably in smaller numbers than in its Victorian heyday – and they no longer arrive by train: there is now only a miniature railway, running in the summer months along the shore of the lake. When I was last at Rudyard, in 2016, I saw my first swallows of the year there, skimming the surface of the lake – and again this year my first swallows were waiting for me at Rudyard. They were two and a half weeks later than in 2016 – a testament to this year's cold wet April. I wonder if the swifts will be late too...

'The age of the statue is dead'

 The unveiling of the latest appalling public statue – of the late Queen and her (rather more lifelike) corgis, in Rutland, a delightful little county that doesn't deserve such an outrage – prompts an excellent piece by Ben Lawrence in the Telegraph. He's right that 'the biggest problem with modern statues is that they're awful' – think, if you can bear to, of the Diana statue in Kensington Gardens, or the giant Lovers looming over St Pancras station. However, there are exceptions – one, indeed, being the statue of John Betjeman that also stands at St Pancras, another the Larkin statue (also by Martin Jennings) in Hull. Only recently a pretty good statue of Coleridge (by Nicholas Dimbleby) was unveiled at Ottery St Mary. I should also mention that Lichfield has two good public statues – of Erasmus Darwin and St Chad, by Peter Walker. However, these are outliers, and Ben Lawrence is surely right that 'the age of the statue is dead' – the age, that is, of the naturalistic public monument, a statue that served a purpose, was skilfully made, and invoked a kind of grandeur that has become quite alien to our levelling, denigrating culture. Alas.