Geoffrey Hill Explained

Many readers find Geoffrey Hill's poetry difficult. Well, fear not – here is Harold Bloom, in his Introduction to Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems 1952-1971, to explain. The key to Hill's poetry, he declares, is 'metaleptical reversal or transumption, the dominant trope of post-Romantic poetry in English ... Transumption is the trope of a trope, or technically the metonymy of a metonymy. That is, it tends to be a figure that substitutes an aspect of a previous figure for that figure. Imagistically, transumption from Milton through the Romantics to the present tends to manifest itself in terms of earliness substituting for lateness, and more often than not to be the figure that concludes poems. Translated into psychoanalytic terms, transumption is either the psychic defence of introjection (identification) or of projection (refusal of identity), just as metaphor translates into the defence of sublimation, or hyperbole into that of repression. The advantage of transumption as a concluding trope for belated poems is that it achieves a kind of fresh priority or earliness, but always at the expense of the presentness of the present or living moment.'
Got that? Me neither.

Laughter and Not Dying

Britain's oldest man, Bob Weighton of Alton, Hampshire, died today at the astonishing age of 112. Once, when asked about the secret of long life, he attributed his longevity to 'laughter and not dying'. What a wonderful phrase. A remarkable number of supercentenarians have also mentioned a regular tot of alcohol when asked the same question – I'll drink to that.

Loud Sing Cuckoo

Yesterday afternoon, walking with my son (conversing by megaphone from a safe social distance, of course) on Ashtead common, I had the rare pleasure of hearing a cuckoo. I haven't heard one in these parts for years, but there it was, loud and clear and unmistakable, calling about ten times, then falling silent. We didn't see the elusive bird ('No bird but an invisible thing, a voice, a mystery,' according to Wordsworth) and the call was some way off, but it was a wonderful thing to hear.
Traditionally May is the month when the cuckoo sings. As the summer advances, it loses its voice:

When summer from the forest starts
Its melody with silence lies,
And, like a bird from foreign parts,
It cannot sing for all it tries.
'Cuck cuck' it cries and mocking boys
Crie 'Cuck' and then it stutters more
Till quick forgot its own sweet voice
It seems to know itself no more.

Those are the closing lines of John Clare's The Cuckoo, a poem that begins 'The cuckoo, like a hawk in flight, With narrow pointed wings'. This resemblance to a hawk – specifically the sparrowhawk – led many to believe that cuckoos turn into sparrowhawks for the winter, then back into cuckoos for the summer. Since then, of course, science has exposed the real life of the cuckoo, and it is quite amazing enough. The bird shows extreme ingenuity in getting its eggs into another bird's nest and ensuring that the unwitting bird rears the gigantic chick that hatches from that egg. The cuckoo lurks nearby, watching the target nest and awaiting its opportunity, then nips in, tips any other eggs out of the nest, lays its own egg (marked to resemble the host bird's eggs) and flies off – all in about ten seconds. What is more, as it leaves it makes a call that sounds like a sparrowhawk, thereby warning the host bird to stay away. The wonders of Nature, eh?

It's an old chestnut, but Delius's On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring is still a very fine tone poem. This quintessentially English piece had its first performance in Leipzig (along with Summer Night on the River), and its second theme is taken from a Norwegian folk song...

Turner's Year Off

Good news about this year's Turner Prize: it's been cancelled. Instead, ten bursaries of £10,000 will be distributed to young artists. Turner would (probably) have approved: at least it gives him a year off from rolling in his grave. The prize, which began as a serious, almost safe, affair, recognising genuine artistic endeavour (Howard Hodgkin won in the second year, and even the shortlists were pretty impressive to begin with), started to go seriously wrong when the ineffable Damien Hirst won in 1995. Since then it has been all downhill, as the prize has routinely rewarded the most arid, meretricious and dreary trends in establishment art – notably, overwhelmingly, 'conceptual art'. Painting, except in its most garish and primitive forms, rarely gets a look-in. So yes, a year off will be most welcome – and when the Turner Prize resumes, let's hope it changes its name to something less insulting to the memory of one of our greatest painters.

Birthdays

My father would have turned 111 today – born under Edward VII and, as he used to claim, in uniform in both world wars (in the First, it was a sailor suit that he wore to wave a little flag at the passing troops).
Today is also the birthday (in 1888) of that fine character actor Miles Malleson, especially memorable as Dr Chasuble in the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest, and as the poetically inclined hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets (neither of which performances seems to be available on YouTube). I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia) that the mild-mannered, multi-chinned Malleson was a red-hot socialist and pacifist, and very much one for the ladies.
And a third birthday today: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, born on this day in 1803. I've written about him before, but the magnificently awful opening sentence of his Paul Clifford always bears requoting:

'It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.'

This was the sentence that inspired the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize for the worst opening sentence of the year. The 2019 winner was this, written by one Maxwell Archer:

'Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago.'

Not bad. Well yes, bad of course – a worthy winner.  

Burton Lives – On Radio 4!

As a lifelong radio lover, one-time radio critic and intermittent fan of Radio 4, despite its present all-pervasive wokeness, I am always happy when there is occasion to praise that potentially great network. So I was delighted to find a series of quarter-hour programmes running through the last couple of weeks called The New Anatomy of Melancholy. Yes, this was a series inspired by Robert Burton's great Anatomy of Melancholy, a masterpiece which, despite its massive size and relentless display of formidable classical learning, is, rather wonderfully, still read for pleasure and profit today. The Radio 4 series focused almost entirely on just one aspect of the mighty Anatomy – the one likeliest to attract present-day readers – its utility as a therapeutic self-help manual. Most of those contributing to the programme were therapists, psychologists and writers who had found Burton helpful in their struggles with depression (not quite the same thing as melancholia, but congruent). Much of Burton's advice on averting or overcoming melancholy is indeed sound commonsense stuff, and some of it chimes remarkably well with present-day therapeutic practice. Certainly the series offered a narrow and particular view of Burton's sprawling, encyclopaedic work, but that Radio 4 considered such a relatively obscure and daunting work by a long-dead white male worthy of a series is a heartening sign. And, although each programme consisted mainly of present-day voices, it was a joy to hear passages from the Anatomy beautifully read by the great Simon Russell Beale.
This link should take you to the Omnibus edition...

Finishing The Betrothed

I have now completed my big 'lockdown' reading project. Yes, I've finished reading Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed – and, as my occasional progress reports have made clear, it's been a pleasure. Indeed, I was enjoying it so much that as the end drew near I slowed down to make it last longer. This might seem odd when The Betrothed is, among other things, a 'plague novel', a tale of pestilence – hence its sudden unavailability on Amazon.
  The descriptions of the plague in Milan are indeed harrowing, but the ever present author is at pains to spare us from too much horror, and he maintains his tone of lightly inflected irony through everything. Manzoni is less interested in the horrific scenes he paints than in the range of human responses to the plague, all the way from saintly self-abnegation to depraved criminality – and in the folly let loose by the plague. The most striking instance of the latter (and something that was new to me) was the mass hysteria over 'anointing'. From the excitable masses to the most learned and rational in the land, all were firmly convinced that the pestilence was being deliberately spread by individuals painting walls, streets or healthy people's clothing with a noxious concoction that infallibly passed on the plague to all who came in contact with it. Some kind of toxic powders were also purportedly used to the same end. In response the masses administered summary justice, killing many innocent people on suspicion of 'anointing'. At least we haven't experienced anything like that in the course of the great Covid panic – nor, as will surely be clear to anyone who reads The Betrothed (or Journal of the Plague Year or La Peste or any other plague fiction) is Covid anything like as terrifying, as deadly or as infectious as the bubonic plague, which could strike anyone of any age at any time and, usually, kill them in double quick time. This is quite a useful perspective to have in these crazed times.
  But never mind the plague. Though memorably vivid and brilliantly written, the plague chapters only account for a small portion of Manzoni's huge novel, which, despite its size, is essentially about just one thing: the fate of the sundered lovers, Renzo and Lucia. We keep on reading because we want to discover their fate; it's as simple as that. This is not a panoramic, cast-of-thousands historical epic; indeed, it has a surprisingly small cast of characters. As I've said before, it's the manner of Manzoni's telling of the tale, and his unique, engaging tone of voice, that keeps us reading.
  And what does become of Renzo and Lucia? I'd better not give that away, but just urge anyone who's looking for a hefty classic that they might actually enjoy reading to give The Betrothed a try. If you can find a copy (and do get the Bruce Penman translation – it's brilliant).
  Surprisingly for such a naturally gifted storyteller, Manzoni wrote no other sustained fiction. The Betrothed was instantly hailed as the first great novel of modern Italy, and Manzoni became a hero of the newly unified nation. Verdi's mighty Requiem was written to honour his memory. Has any other writer had such a grand musical memorial? I can't think of one – over to you, Mahlerman?

Birthday Boy

As his alleged living spit, I feel I cannot let this day pass without marking the birthday of that great film actor and good man, James Stewart, born May 20th, 1908. With actors of his generation, it is always interesting – and, I think, an index of character – to see whether they 'had a good war'. Jimmy Stewart certainly did: the first major Hollywood star to enlist, he served in the Air Corps, rising from Private to Colonel in only four years. After a year spent training pilots, he insisted on being sent to the front line to do his bit, and flew B-24 Liberators from England on bombing missions over Germany. Stewart was awarded the DFC, the French Croix de Guerre with palm and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. When, after the war, he was promoted to Brigadier-General, he became the highest-ranking actor in American military history.
  When Stewart returned from the war, he was uncertain whether to continue with his movie career, but he signed a contract with MCA, and Frank Capra cast him in his first postwar movie. That movie was It's a Wonderful Life...

Approximate Botany

The dog roses are in flower again. This species (Rosa canina) is certainly Rupert Brooke's 'English unofficial rose' – but is it also 'mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose', as described in Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'? It seems that Keats's 'musk rose' is certainly not the flower generally known as a musk rose (Rosa moschata), which is purely a garden plant. In context, Keats is clearly describing a wild rose:

'I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.'

Does he perhaps mean the sweet-briar (Rosa rubiginosa)? No, he can't, as that is the 'pastoral eglantine'.
There's at least one other wild 'musk-rose' in Keats's verse. Here is his sonnet 'To a Friend Who Sent Me some Roses' –

'As late I rambled in the happy fields,
What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew
From his lush clover covert;—when anew
Adventurous knights take up their dinted shields;
I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields,
A fresh-blown musk-rose; 'twas the first that threw
Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew
As is the wand that Queen Titania wields.
And, as I feasted on its fragrancy,
I thought the garden-rose it far excelled;
But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me,
My sense with their deliciousness was spelled:
Soft voices had they, that with tender plea
Whispered of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquelled.'

That's quite a thank-you letter. (Its recipient was Charles Wells, one of whose sons was to take up the career of professional gambler and fraudster and become famous as 'the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo'). Keats had a genius for friendship as well as for poetry (and letter writing), but in botany it seems he was – like most of us – what might be called an approximate botanist. He probably went for 'musk-rose' because it sounds so much better than the faintly derogatory 'dog-rose'.

Anyway, all this talk of roses calls for another Schubert song...

A Discovery

It has been widely remarked that retail sales of booze have risen sharply under lockdown. This is hardly surprising: if there are no pubs and restaurants to drink in, home will have to do. Me, I've been tidying things up by drinking the remnants left in various bottles – our glass recycling must be raising eyebrows among the bin men. Also, addressing the current situation, I have been pursuing my researches into the prophylactic effects of alcohol. Not any old alcohol, but only certain forms: good whisky obviously fends off disease, as does, I'm pretty sure, pastis (especially M. Bardouin's elixir) and very probably Benedictine. And I once killed a flu stone dead with two glasses of grappa. What else? I think the wonderful world of bitters looks promising, but it's hard to find anything very interesting in that line, so my researches have been limited – until, that is, I found this Vermut Lustau rosé winking at me seductively from the bottom shelf in my local (but not local enough) Waitrose.
  Lustau vermouths are made in Jerez from a variety of sherries (already fortified, so no raw alcohol added) plus a range of fine botanicals – in the case of the rosé, chamomile, nutmeg, vanilla, cardamom and the all important wormwood. The result is something vastly better than your standard vermouth: a lovely mix of bitter and sweet, fruity and herbal, spicy and floral – the works. It's a pleasure to drink on its own with ice and a slice of orange or, to make it go further, a good squirt of soda. Highly recommended. Salud!

'Not as an eye Servant'

In these locked-down times, I find myself frequenting the churchyard even more than I did before. This morning I was treated to the grisly spectacle of a jay snatching a juvenile robin – its beak still wide, its breast not yet red – from the headstone where it was vulnerably perched. There was a great commotion from the robin parents, from a couple of watching magpies and a blackbird catching the mood of momentary terror. And then, as the jay flew off casually with its prey in its beak, it all died down as suddenly as it had begun, and the birds resumed whatever business of survival they were about, the hapless young victim already forgotten.

A happier discovery was a headstone I had noticed before but whose inscription I had never fully read. The stone commemorates one Edward Taylor, a 'servant out of livery' (a senior servant of high status) who was in the service of a 19th-century rector, the Rev. E.T. Beynon. Taylor, the inscription reads, 'discharged the duties of his Station not as an eye Servant but with attention regularity and Fidelity'. 'Not as an eye servant'? This striking phrase was new to me. What did it mean?
Thanks to the internet, I soon found out: an eye servant is a servant who attends to his duties only when watched, when under the eye of his master or mistress – the kind of servant Edward Taylor was not. The phrase derives from the Bible, appropriately enough – from Ephesians 6: 'Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.'
You live, and learn.

'Sleep, "in a reverent attitude of attention"'

The other day I found Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics still lurking among my bedside books. I thought I'd read it all, but I'd missed one of the (more or less relevant) Appendices – and it's a gem. Titled 'Serious Circles', it offers a vignette from the early life of Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and a lively sketch of a more familiar subject – the home life of the Carlyles.
  Sitwell depicts the 22-year-old Mary Ann getting 'her first experience of intellectual society' at a high-toned garden party on the outskirts of Coventry, hosted by a Mr Bray. The future George Eliot was at this time 'a positive glutton for boredom – devouring, with apparent enthusiasm, such works as Scrope's Deer-stalking in the Highlands,  Mrs Jameson's Winter Scenes and Summer Rambles in Canada (although the book aroused in her grave doubts of Mrs Jameson's religious principles), Professor Hooper's work on the subject of Schism, Milner's Church History and W. Gresley's Portrait of an English Churchman.'
  When her brother took her to London for the first time, 'she was "not at all delighted with the stir of the Great Babel"; and, having unwisely allowed some flippant friends ... to take her to an Oratorio, she could not help asking herself: "Can it be desirable and would it be consistent with millennial holiness for a human being to devote the time and energies that are barely sufficient for real exigencies, in acquiring trills, cadences, etc., etc."
  'But in after years, it must be admitted that she was so weak as to be seduced by Handel's oratorio The Messiah; and it is recorded of her that even in girlhood she was so overcome by the religious feeling of some Oratorio to which, again, she had allowed herself to be taken, that she burst into a loud howling, the bassoon-like notes of which persisted throughout the work, gravely disturbing the rest of the audience.'
  Mr Bray was a devotee of phrenology, having discovered the subject when a bookseller sent him George Combe's Phrenology by mistake, instead of Andrew Combe's Physiology. Opening the book, he was immediately 'seized with wild excitement':
'A prey to this ungovernable excitement, he dashed up to London and into the first hairdresser's shop he saw, and demanded that his head be shaved completely bare. A cast of his head was then made, and Mr Bray rushed back to Coventry to inquire, from Mr Combe's book, if his mind was of the order that he supposed.'
  It seems it was, and Mr Bray became a fanatically convinced phrenologist –  'regarding himself as a missionary, he rode through the countryside, distributing casts to the villagers, who, attracted by the sight of his gleaming cranium, gathered around him.'
  He married soon after this, and, on honeymoon with his new wife, 'made the breath-taking announcement to her that he had renounced Unitarianism for ever. Then, producing from his luggage Holbach's System of Nature and Volnay's Ruin of Empires, he called upon his bride to read these and follow his example.'
 Serious circles indeed.
 At the intellectual garden party, George Combe himself was the guest of honour, holding forth at length to the assembled company. His monologues, Mr Bray recalled, 'made his presence a wholesome sedative to our spirits. It did not surprise us, sometimes, when his devoted wife dropped asleep in the middle of his discourses, her head inclined towards him in a reverent attitude of attention.'
 Sitwell adds sardonically, 'Sleep, "in a reverent attitude of attention", was the keynote of life with the Brays...'

Closed Down

To me, one of the most depressing aspects of the Great Lockdown has been the Church of England's craven response to orders from above (no, not the Above their orders once came from) that churches should not only be closed down – a wholly unprecedented measure – but also sealed off from all human presence, including even that of the minister. There might have been some sense in suspending communal services (though social distancing wouldn't be much of a problem at evensong), but why could not churches have been kept open for private prayer? And why, in a spirit of crazed supererogation, has the C of E banned its own ministers from entering their own churches for private prayer, and forbidden them from performing services in an empty (or socially distanced) church and livestreaming them to their flock? Do they no longer have any belief in the value or efficacy of religious observance, or are they now content to be a branch of the social services with rather unusual and inconvenient accommodation? Why, when supermarkets and garden centres are open to the public, can parish churches not open their doors to anyone? Is this the final capitulation of the old religion to the new one of consumerism? If ever there was a time when churches should be open, at least for private prayer, it is this – but no, the C of E seems happy to embrace its irrelevance and fade away politely. At least its churches will remain to remind us of what it once was, to recall a time when 'always, even in winter in the cold of a stone church, on his knees someone is praying'...

The Belfry by R.S. Thomas

I have seen it standing up grey,
Gaunt, as though no sunlight
Could ever thaw out the music
Of its great bell; terrible
In its own way, for religion
Is like that. There are times
When a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.

But who is to know? Always,
Even in winter in the cold
Of a stone church, on his knees
Someone is praying, whose prayers fall
Steadily through the hard spell
Of weather that is between God
And himself. Perhaps they are warm rain
That brings the sun and afterwards flowers
On the raw graves and throbbing of bells.

The Father of British Rock

Here's a centenary worth marking: born 100 years ago today, in East Ham, was guitar legend Bert Weedon. His legendary status has less to do with his playing than with his hugely influential guitar tutorial, Play in a Day (first published in 1957). Every would-be guitarist in the land seized on this book, and among them were some of the future giants of rock – Eric Clapton, Brian May, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Mark Knopfler, Jimmy Page, Dave Davies, even Robert Smith. Thanks to Play in a Day, Bert Weedon can be seen as the father of British rock. And yet there was nothing remotely cool about Weedon: he was an excellent guitarist, but his approach and his musical style were never, even in the Fifties, at the cutting edge. He was an old-fashioned entertainer with no pretensions. Here he is, having fun and giving his audience a good time, with an old favourite that will surely bring a smile to the straightest face...

Keyes

A bank holiday today to celebrate the 75th anniversary of that happy day when the Germans finally surrendered and, after terrible privations and loss of life, Europe was saved from an unspeakably dreadful future. As ever, when these increasingly sentimentalised and unreal anniversaries and commemorations come around, I cannot help but think of Geoffrey Hill's disenchanted lines from The Triumph of Love –

By what right did Keyes, or my cousin's
Lancaster, or the trapped below-decks watch
of Peter's clangorous old destroyer-escort,
serve to enfranchise these strange children
pitiless in their ignorance and contempt?

Are we of the present deserving of such sacrifice? Is this England, the England of today, what they died for? Well, it is a futile question, and we can only hope the answer is not too resounding a no. And at least we can give thanks and celebrate – and remember, among so many others, Keyes, Sidney Keyes, the youngest of the handful of poets who died in that war. Keyes had not yet reached his 21st birthday when he was killed in action in Tunisia. A private who served under him remembered that 'during my Army service I had a number of platoon commanders. Keyes was the best of them. His was the quieter, determined, non-blustering type of leadership. His manners were impeccable and he did not talk down to us, nor was he condescending to us, as so many officers were. He was a gallant Christian gentleman who sacrificed himself for the men under his command.'
  Keyes was born in the same year as Larkin, and was at Oxford with him, though Larkin kept his distance, partly because Keyes was overtly hostile to Auden, Larkin's guiding light, and embraced the influence of Yeats, which the young Larkin fiercely resisted in his own poetry. Keyes's own verse, as might be expected in any poet so young, was more potential than achievement – but that potential was considerable.
  His most famous poem, aptly enough, is 'War Poet' –

I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed.
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me;
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town.

Here is an earlier one, written before Keyes was called up –

Time will not grant the unlined page
Completion or the hand respite:
The Magi stray, the heavens rage,
The careful pilgrim stumbles in the night.

Take pen, take eye and etch
Your vision on this unpropitious time;
Faces are fluid, actions never reach
Perfection but in reflex or in rhyme.

Take now, not soon; your lost
Minutes roost home like curses.
Nicolo, Martin, every unhoused ghost
Proclaims time’s strange reverses.

Fear was Donne’s peace; to him,
Charted between the minstrel cherubim,
Terror was decent. Rilke tenderly
Accepted autumn like a rooted tree.
But I am frightened after every good day
That all my life must change and fall away.

That – especially the last stanza – is a quite extraordinary poem for a 19-year-old boy to have written. Heaven know what he might have achieved.

'Even in the greatest crises...'

'Even in the greatest crises public money can always be found for a really stupid purpose.'

That's Alessandro Manzoni in The Betrothed, writing about the Milanese authorities' mismanagement of a famine in the 1620s, but it's hard not to apply the observation to HM Government's ruinously expensive panic reaction to the Covid epidemic. However, I'm not going to go there. No, I think that at this time I can best serve the people of Turkmenistan – and that loyal band of readers in other lands who still look at this stuff – by maintaining Nigeness as a more or less Covid-free zone and, as it says on the tin, a hedonic resource.
  I am now more than three quarters of the way through The Betrothed and am still finding it a hugely enjoyable reading experience. In fact I haven't much to add to my initial assessment – certainly there is no falling-off in quality as the story unfolds. Some, I suppose, might find the dramatic religious conversion (of a dastardly brigand) on which much of the action turns a little implausible and exaggerated, but not me: Manzoni makes you (me) believe that whatever happens in his story could only ever have happened in this particular way. A lot of the book's allure is down to the narrator's tone of voice, and this is captured perfectly in the wonderfully fluent translation I'm reading – by Bruce Penman, whose introduction to the Penguin Classics edition I look forward to reading when I've finished the book (my preferred method) – and that shouldn't be long now. 

Lack's Swifts (and Ours)

The swifts are back. I saw a couple yesterday, in the middle distance and flying away from me, and then today I spotted another one flying over the ponds, and, shortly after that, two over our road – two of 'our' swifts, back among us, flying low to inspect their old haunts.
  As it happens, the swifts returned just as I'd finished reading David Lack's classic study Swifts in a Tower, now available in a handsome and affordable new edition, published by Unicorn, with a new foreword by Prof. Christopher Perrins and an invaluable additional chapter by David Lack's son Andrew, Swifts in a Tower – Sixty-Two Years On. This updates his father's findings with the latest research – aided by technologies undreamt of in Lack serior's time – which has shed much new light on the life of the swift, though it is a bird that still retains its mystery.
  David Lack's research was truly pioneering: when he began his project of systematically observing swifts in 1946, the fullest account of these birds' habits was still that written by Gilbert White in 1774. Lack's observations were carried out in the tower of Oxford University's Museum of Science, 'a grand but useless ornament', rising 60ft above the rest of the building. Here Lack and his colleagues introduced nesting boxes into ventilation holes in the roof of the tower, set up observation platforms and kept watch on everything that went on in the boxes from the arrival of the first birds to the departure of the last – the comings and goings, fights and flights, nest building, egg laying, the rearing of young and preparations for migration. Lack's findings hugely enlarged understanding of the life of the swift, so Swifts in a Tower is an important scientific work – but, more to the point for the general reader, it is also an elegantly written and very readably book, a far cry from the dull, dry style of the standard monograph. 
  'The story begins on 20 June 1855, when a group of bearded and reverend scientists, a combination now, alas, unknown, joined to sing the Benedicite in the open air on the edge of Oxford, as the foundation stone was laid for a remarkable new building, Oxford University's Museum of Science. As they sang, "O all ye fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord" there came, it may be supposed, an answering scream from the circling swifts, for in the top of the new building these birds would find their home in the years to come.' That's the opening paragraph of Chapter Two – and here are the last words of the book, concluding a reflective chapter on The Meaning of Adaptation:
'Many reject the supernatural, and either accept goodness as inexplicable, in which case there is no strong reason for following it, or, if they press the point, suppose man's beliefs and actions wholly determined, his free-will an illusion and truth and goodness of no ultimate significance, which seems in theory to be self-destructive and in practice to lead to evil acts. But this unpleasant consequence gives no good ground for rejecting natural selection, as various humanists have done. Could, then, man have evolved from the beasts by natural selection and yet apprehend truth and goodness through a supernatural gift? On this view there is a great gap in knowledge, but one which appears to involve no greater intellectual difficulty than those implicit, and often overlooked, in the alternative theories of man's nature. This is a grave matter with which to end a bird-book, but the tower where our swifts live was built by those who held that the study of nature should lead us, through a truer understanding, to a fuller worship of the Creator, and the times urgently require us to search out the basis of our lives.'
  As I remarked apropos of Lack's The Life of The Robin, scientists don't write like that any more...

Birthday

It's Mrs Nige's birthday today – the one on which she joins me on the dip slope of senility. It will be a lockdown birthday, alas, but happily we'll be celebrating with the local family (first time we've seen them in the flesh since this madness began – don't tell the hygiene police).
This date was also the birthday, in 1929, of Audrey Hepburn – yes, that's her in the picture, not Mrs N (the cigarette holder's the giveaway). Givenchy created L'Interdit specially for Audrey Hepburn, and, as it happens, it was for a long time one of Mrs N's favourite fragrances. And then they reformulated it and it was ruined. Audrey would not have been pleased. Nor was Mrs Nige.

Be of Good Cheer

Cometh the hour, cometh the man* – and that man is, of course, Monty Don. What surer balm for the soul is there in these troubled times than an hour of Gardeners' World? The soothing sound of Monty's voice, and the sight of him ambling around his Longmeadow garden with my canine namesake at his heels (and Nellie and the new yorkie) are proof that somehow all is still well with the world, or at least with England: Monty's GW is a quintessence of Englishness, a microcosm of Platonic England. And, it must be added, Gardeners' World in lockdown is a technical triumph, filmed entirely by remotely controlled cameras (and you'd never guess). Monty and Nigel will get us through this – whatever this is, and I'm still far from sure...
  By happy chance, it was possible to switch straight from last night's Gardeners' World on BBC2 to Peter Kay's Comedy Shuffle on BBC1. Like Monty, Kay is a tonic to the nation, one of the few contemporary comics whose sole aim is to make people laugh and feel happy, to spread the joy. In this, though his style is very different, he is the natural heir to Ken Dodd (himself the subject of an excellent documentary profile that was repeated the other day). And Kay has the advantage of being just about the most talented – multi-talented – comedian in the business. Last night's show was a compilation of his various charity singles, and it was an index of Kay's astonishing ability that he made even these usually lame affairs actually funny, laugh-aloud funny (and sometimes oddly moving).
  And as if that wasn't enough for one night, there was the last ever episode of Friday Night Dinner on Channel 4. I know this is a comedy that divides opinion sharply – and it doesn't help that the occasional episode just doesn't work – but at it best Robert Popper's character-based Jewish family sitcom was, for my money, a classic. And last night's finale was one of the best episodes ever; I'll certainly be watching it again.
 So all that added up to two hours of cheering and (after GW) laugh-filled television. I can't remember when that last happened.


* Like everyone else, I assumed this was a quotation, perhaps from the Bible, or Milton, or even Wordsworth. In fact it has no known origin. Rather like 'between a rock and a hard place'...

May

May at last, after an April that few of us will forget, for all manner of reasons, some bad but many good. May has always been a month that gets the poets busy, as Leigh Hunt notes, a touch sardonically, in this little poem:

There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May's in Milton, May's in Prior,
May's in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;
May's in all the Italian books:--
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,
And will rise and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms.
Come, ye rains, then if ye will,
May's at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.

  A heartfelt lockdown Amen to those last four lines.

In the May of 1652, Milton wrote a poem of a very different kind, a magisterial sonnet addressed to Cromwell which, after celebrating the great man's victories over the Scots and all other foes, ends with a plea to preserve freedom of conscience from its enemies:

To the Lord General Cromwell, May 1652

Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud,

Not of war only, but detractions rude,

Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,

To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed,

And on the neck of crownèd Fortune proud

Hast reared God’s trophies, and His work pursued,

While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued,

And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud,

And Worcester’s laureate wreath: yet much remains

To conquer still; peace hath her victories

No less renowned than war: new foes arise,

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.

Help us to save free conscience from the paw

Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.

  Again Amen to that closing couplet. Freedom of conscience has been seriously eroded in recent years, with many finding out that 'wrong thinking' can carry heavy penalties – and we've just surrendered another chunk of our traditional freedoms in the cause of 'saving lives' and 'protecting the NHS'. Let's hope they are soon restored, and that the sacrifice will have been worthwhile.

But enough of that. It's time for something both beautiful and seasonal. Here is a Schubert's Fruhlingsglaube, a spring song that is full of hope – something we could all do with plenty of in these strange times...