'Well, sir...'

 The weather has cooled off at last, and there was even a little rain last night, creating the first puddles I've seen in weeks – a welcome sight. With memories of the July-August heatwaves still fresh, here is an apposite Wodehouse quote that I came across today: 

'Do you know what Jeeves said when I asked him why, during a spell hotter than Bobbie Wickham's hosiery, I had never seen the man sweat? He replied, "Well, sir. From a personal standpoint I've never seen the need for it."'

[Bobbie Wickham is the fun-loving hottie, described by Aunt Dahlia as a 'one-woman beauty chorus', who recurs in various Jeeves and Mulliner stories,]

An Eliot Centenary

 Born 100 years ago today was Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher), the second wife of the poet, and apparently the one who made him happy. The couple lived in Kensington, just around the corner from Ivy Compton-Burnett, and their paths crossed from time to time. On one occasion, the three of them shared a taxi back from a party in Knightsbridge, and in the course of the journey Ivy talked of nothing but the forthcoming Rent Act, cake shops, fishmongers, greengrocers on the Gloucester Road, where to get the best fillet steak, and the iniquity of having to pay her porter five shillings to bring up her coals. Quite the feast of reason and flow of soul...
  Ivy found the phenomenon of 'Mr Eliot's bride' quite fascinating. 'Apparently she's always adored him,' she told Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist), 'although she was his secretary for years. I am sure if I had been his secretary for a fortnight I should have wanted to poison him, not marry him... Yes, I should have run round to the chemist's for three pennyworth of poison after a very short time.'

Tennyson's Painted Tongue

 Last night's Gardeners' World included a report from Farringford, Tennyson's estate on the Isle of Wight, where the garden, which had been entirely lost, has been restored to something very like its original appearance – much like an English cottage garden in style, but quite grand in scale. It looks delightful, and the gardeners responsible have done a great job. From them I learned that Tennyson's favourite flower was no native, but the somewhat exotic Salpiglossis or Painted Tongue (that's one of its many varieties pictured above). Perhaps unsurprisingly, he never celebrated the Salpiglossis in verse, but the little flower poem below can be found on a plaque under Watts's imposing statue of the poet that stands outside Lincoln cathedral. The statue shows him with his dog – a Siberian wolfhound called Karenina – at his side and a flower (presumably from the crannied wall) in his hand. 

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

('Crannies', 'man is' – quite the rhyme.)

Eclipse

 Well, here in Lichfield, we had a typically English eclipse – which is to say that a magnificent bank of cloud (something scarcely seen in the past three weeks) rolled into place bang on time, right in front of the eclipsing sun, and in an otherwise largely blue sky. 'The world is disgracefully managed,' as Ronald Firbank's Mrs Shamefoot puts it. 'One hardly knows to whom to complain.' We had a couple of glimpses of the sun, so knew roughly what was going on, but the eclipse-viewing pinhole cameras lovingly constructed for the occasion were barely needed. And actually it didn't seem to get notably darker at any point – nothing like the total eclipse I remember from 1999, when darkness fell in the middle of the day and the birds ceased to sing. Could it be that the whole thing had been somewhat overhyped, what with this being the Silly Season and everyone liking these dramas in the skies, such as they are? There seems to be a very marked difference between 90 percent and 100 percent when it comes to eclipses. But never mind: it was, with all that illuminated cloud and, radiating from behind it, wide rays of light, a spectacular, dramatic sky – and, when I looked up into the blue overhead, there, unbelievably, was a single swift flying over. So the evening's sky-watching paid off in a quite unexpected way. And later there were many bats flitting around in the garden.

Johnson and The Vicar

 Last night I strayed from my usual listening home on Radio 3 to my former home, Radio 4, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the current Book at Bedtime is Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one of those classics that these days hardly anybody actually reads – including, in this case, me, despite having taken a passing interest in the 18th-century sentimental novel. (Radio 4 has done this before, I seem to remember, with The Ingoldsby Legends and Annals of the Parish among others, and it's surely good that such titles are being kept alive. They're certainly an improvement on most of the contemporary fiction that gets broadcast on Radio 4.) 
  Samuel Johnson played an important, even dramatic part in getting The Vicar of Wakefield published. Here is his own account:

'I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion: I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds [to Francis Newbery, nephew of the published John Newbery, who sat on it for nearly two years before publishing it]. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.'

[The painting above, depicting the scene, is attributed to Edward Matthew Ward, and hangs in Dr Johnson's House on Gough Square.] 

'Surely rather a striking tribute'

 I've been reading Wodehouse at bedtime – actually dipping into this volume – and this morning, browsing on Facebook, I came across a Wodehouse anecdote.  
  It seems that someone signing themselves 'Indignant' wrote a letter to the press attacking Wodehouse for being a vastly overrated writer. In his 1957 collection Over Seventy, Wodehouse responded to 'Indignant' by drawing his attention to a letter in the Times from a Mr Verrier Elwin of Patangarth, India, telling how a cow wandered into his home and, after due consideration, ate a copy of Carry On, Jeeves, selected from a shelf containing works by John Galsworthy, Jane Austen and T.S. Eliot. 'Surely rather a striking tribute,' Wodehouse remarks.

Hardy's Nocturnal Visitors

 Here is a little August nocturne by Thomas Hardy, a man who has been strangely present to me since my recent reading of Max Gate (in which he is, for the most part, strangely absent). Hardy's nocturnal visitors are a daddy-longlegs or crane fly (of which, fact fans, there are more species than there are of birds), an unspecified moth, and a dor beetle, an earth-boring dung beetle that takes to the air, clumsily and noisily, on warm summer evenings. 

An August Midnight

I

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ’mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands ...

II

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.