'In our language it means "mother's milk"'

 My induction into the bitter world of Fernet-Branca is going all too well – already I love the stuff. I think, however, even I might draw the line at galasiya, the (mercifully fictional) national tipple of (equally fictional) Voynovia. In this scene from James Hamilton-Paterson's Cooking with Fernet Branca, Marta has received a worrying visit from two local carabinieri, which, thanks in part to Gerald Samper's presence, has ended well. Relief all round. Samper tells what happens next...

'"This calls for a drink [declares Marta]. A very special drink from Voynovia ... Just an amaro [she tells the carabinieri]. If you like Fernet you'll love our galasiya."
"Well, just a small one, signora. We're really still on duty." 
... The glasses of dense black liquid are passed around. It looks like sump oil.
"Salute!" everyone echoes, and takes an obligatory quaff.
Holy bicycling Christ, I think as projectile tears leap from my eyes and splash into the glass. I dimly recall Marta having mentioned this stuff as being a more butch version of Fernet Branca made by huntsmen or something. Actually tasting the distillation of gall and lighter fuel simply confirms what I've long known, that Voynovians lack an essential element of human physiology. A central nervous system, possibly. Through dancing lenses of tears I can see the maresciallo has been equally hard hit but is bearing up with noble shreds of dignity. 
"Madonna putana della Madonna, ma quanti gradi ha?" he rasps at last, his vocal cords evidently cauterised.
"Ninety-two, I believe," says Marta brightly, examining the bottle. "But they seldom put it on the label. Everyone in Volnovya knows galasiya. In our language it means 'mother's milk'."
... The maresciallo's sidekick, I notice, is looking thoughtfully at his empty glass and shaking his head with an incredulous smile. A serious drinker. When his commanding officer has recovered enough to walk, the two men take their leave ... Watching through the window, I am touched to see [him] solicitously take his senior comrade's elbow before he finishes his totter to the car. All very mystifying, but the interlude has taught me one thing: that in a world containing galasiya, the brothers Branca must look to their laurels.'

I don't think even Kingsley Amis, the past master of writing about booze and its effects, could have topped that evocation of the impact of galasiya on the unwitting drinker.

The Light Programme

 Born  on this day in 1945 was the BBC Light Programme, a national network devoted largely to light entertainment and light music, which replaced the BBC General Forces Programme, which had itself replaced the BBC National Programme for the duration of the war (and had done a great deal for the nation's morale). The Light Programme was the soundtrack of my childhood and boyhood, and even lasted into my adolescence, coming to an end in 1967, when it was remade as two networks, Radio 1 and Radio 2. By then, I had migrated to pirate radio, initially Luxembourg, then Radio London, which I preferred to Caroline and the others because it played more American music. However, my first hearing of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' was actually on the Light Programme, where its impact was the more electrifying for the easy-listening musical mush surrounding it. Mostly the music I heard on the Light Programme through my boyhood was not for me – my parents' taste was for shows like Sing Something Simple and Your Hundred Best Tunes – and what it gave me chiefly was comedy and exciting serial drama. The comedy ranged from The Al Read Show, a particular favourite of my father's, to Take It From Here (featuring the home life of the Glums), Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne (which still make me laugh) to The Goon Show (which doesn't), Hancock's Half Hour to The Navy Lark and The Men from the Ministry – all of these, and other shows best forgotten (The Clitheroe Kid, anyone?) were the comedies I listened to and mostly loved, in those innocent days before we had television in our house (or in many others). The exciting dramas that seemed essential listening to my junior self and his brother included Journey Into Space, Dick Barton – Special Agent, The Flying Doctor (set in Australia) and the suave amateur detective Paul Temple. Different times.
   Some of the old Light Programme's output can be heard these days on Radio 4 Extra, and some programmes have endured into the present: Desert Island Discs, which is little changed, Woman's Hour, which is changed beyond recognition – and The Archers, that 'everyday story of country folk' (as it was when it began in 1951), to which I remain reluctantly addicted, through thick and thin. It was the first radio programme I became aware of, as my grandmother (who lived with us) listened to it daily. Misunderstanding the title, I assumed it must be something to do with medieval soldiers firing arrows at each other. Life is full of disappointments. 
 

Olympians All

So, who won the first Olympic medals for the Irish Free State, at the Paris Olympics of 1924? The answer is surprising – Jack Butler Yeats, the painter brother of the poet William, and Oliver St John Gogarty, the original of Joyce's Buck Mulligan. This was in a more civilised Olympic era when prizes were awarded for artistic as well as athletic endeavour – a feature of the Games that lasted until London 1948. 
  Yeats won a silver medal in the Painting category with the picture above, The Liffey Swim, depicting a traditional Dublin event. The chap in the fedora and the lady in the yellow hat behind him are probably the artist and his wife. The painting now hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. As for Gogarty, he took a Literature bronze with his 'Ode to the Tailteann Games', a piece commissioned by the Irish government to mark the revival of said traditional games (a revival that proved short-lived).  
  In 1928 the painter William Nicholson was surprised to find himself the recipient of an Olympic gold medal, but I've written about that before – here...

Clarkson's Concerns

Unsurprisingly after so much cool wet weather, it has been a pretty terrible butterfly season so far, especially for those of us not living in the South of England (though around Lichfield at present grassland butterflies like the Meadow Brown, Ringlet, Gatekeeper and Small Skipper are all doing fine). Jeremy Clarkson, petrolhead turned farmer, has noticed the lack of butterflies and other insects on his land, and publicised his concerns. I pass this piece on partly because it has the rare distinction of containing not a single use of the phrase 'climate change' – hurrah for that. I hope this conspicuous absence might be a straw in the wind, but I rather doubt it, especially with the ludicrous 'Ed' Milliband in place as Energy and Climate Change Secretary. The madness will, I fear, go on...

'Their shadows all a brilliant disrepair'

 Time for a poem. 
Opening my Richard Wilbur New and Collected Poems at random, I happened on this – a poem to which, as with so many of Wilbur's best, all I can really add is an awed 'Wow!'...

Statues

These children playing at statues fill
The gardens with their shrillness; in a planned
And planted grove they fling from the swinger's hand
Across the giddy grass and then hold still

In gargoyle attitudes, – as if
All definition were outrageous. Then
They melt in giggles and begin again.
Above their heads the maples with a stiff

Compliance entertain the air
In abrupt gusts, losing the look of trees
In rushed and cloudy metamorphoses,
Their shadows all a brilliant disrepair,

A wash of dodging stars, through which
The children weave and then again undo
Their fickle zodiacs. It is a view
Lively as Ovid's Chaos, and its rich

Uncertainty compels the crowd:
Two nuns regard it with habitual love,
Moving along a path as mountains move
Or seem to move when traversed by a cloud;

The soldier breaks his iron pace;
Linked lovers pause to gaze; and every role
Relents, – until the feet begin to stroll
Or stride again. But settled in disgrace

Upon his bench, one ageing bum,
Brought by his long evasion and distress
Into an adamantine shapelessness,
Stares at the image of his kingdom come. 

1967

 I was startled to learn the other night that the top-selling single in the US in 1967 – you know, 1967, Summer of Love, psychedelia, Haight Ashbury, flowers in your hair – was the theme song of the film To Sir With Love, performed by the can belto artist still known as Lulu. What's worse, it beat one of the greatest singles ever – The Box Tops' 'The Letter' – into second place. Also left trailing in Lulu's wake were 'Ode to Billie Joe', 'I'm a Believer', 'Light My Fire', 'Happy Together' and 'Groovin'', while another of the greatest singles ever made – Aretha Franklin's 'Respect' – languishes at number 13, just ahead of Stevie Wonder ('I Was Made to Love Her'), Arthur Conley ('Sweet Soul Music') and Sam & Dave's 'Soul Man'. Not much evidence of the spirit of '67 there, though 'All You Need Is Love' just makes the top 30.
  Things were little better in the UK, with the two top-selling singles both recorded by the artist formerly known as Gerry Dorsey – Engelbert Humperdinck, whose 'Release Me' and 'The Last Waltz' were huge hits. However, over here, the great anthem of the Summer of Love, Scott Mackenzie's 'San Francisco', was beaten only by the all-conquering Humperdinck, and 'Whiter Shade of Pale' and 'All You Need Is Love' are also in the top 10. 'Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever', The Move's 'Flowers in the Rain' and Traffic's 'Hole In My Shoe' all made the top 30. So, the lesson is clear – the Summer of Love never happened in the States, it happened over here. Or, alternatively, there's not a lot we can usefully learn from perusing the singles charts of yesteryear – unless it is that much of what sold best (the stuff I haven't mentioned) was forgettable dross. 'Twas ever thus, and not only in the music field. 

Laughs and Bitters

 When I wrote recently about James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius, I mentioned that I was 'strongly tempted' by another novel of his with the intriguing title Cooking with Fernet Branca. Well, I yielded to that temptation, bought it (for a song), and I'm happy to report that it's one of the funniest comic novels I've read in recent years. It might even be, almost, what one excited reviewer called it: 'A work of comic genius.' I have certainly been laughing immoderately every couple of pages at least – a positively Wodehousean hit rate, though there's nothing of P.G. about the book. Published in 2004 and described as 'a gleefully tasteless bad dream of modern Italy', it's told through the eyes of Gerald Samper, a snobbish, somewhat effete, thoroughly absurd Englishman in Tuscany, who makes his living reluctantly ghost-writing celebrity memoirs, and has a penchant for cooking pretentiously disgusting food, passing on recipes for such delights as otter in lobster sauce and rabbit in cep custard. (He is rather reminiscent of Damien Trench, Miles Jupp's creation, in the radio series, In and Out of the Kitchen, though Trench's recipes are nothing like so outlandish.)
   Arriving at his new house in the Tuscan hills, Samper is appalled to find that he has a neighbour (albeit at some distance), Marta, whom he instantly mistakes for a half-mad, sex-hungry eastern European peasant woman, though she is in fact a Voynovian aristocrat who writes film music: Samper not only lacks self-awareness but basic awareness of, or interest in, other people. The narrative unfolds through two parallel accounts of events – Samper's often delusional version and Marta's more grounded account of dealing with her tiresome neighbour, whose antics provide her with plentiful entertainment. And what of the Fernet Branca of the title? The notoriously challenging drink is omnipresent, to the point where Samper and Marta each believe the other to be hopelessly addicted to the stuff, though in fact Marta, who has an unwanted box of it, is plying Samper with Fernet to get rid of it. It crops up also in Samper's recipes, one of which is for garlic and Fernet Branca ice cream. Yum.
  Fernet-Branca is an old-fashioned Italian amaro (bitters), a class of drinks of which I am very fond. It's made, of course, to a secret recipe, involving some 27 ingredients, and is very strong (39 per cent alcohol) and very bitter, with a sharp medicinal tang to it – just my kind of drink in fact, but somehow I'd never got round to trying it. Until last night, when, inspired by Cooking with Fernet Branca, I poured myself a glass, over ice, as a digestif. What can I say? It did not disappoint – it was the ultimate bitter bitters, with an almost eye-watering impact, but, once I'd got used to it, I became aware of subtle and intriguing undertones. I look forward to sampling it again – perhaps in the form of a Hanky Panky cocktail (gin, sweet vermouth and Fernet), created by Ada Coleman, head barman of the Savoy's American Bar back in the day, for the actor Charles Hawtrey (no relation to the Carry On actor who stole his name). On first knocking one back, Hawtrey declared, 'By Jove! That is the real hanky panky!'. Many other cocktails feature Fernet-Branca, and it is apparently the favourite tipple of the fraternity of barmen, hence its nickname, the 'barman's handshake'. In Argentina, where most of the stuff is sold, it is drunk with Coca-Cola – I don't think I'll be trying that...
  Anyway, I am grateful to James Hamilton-Paterson for not only providing me with excellent reading material but sending me off to listen properly to The Dream of Gerontius, and inspiring me to finally buy a bottle of the ultimate bitters. 

190 Today

 Born on this day 190 years ago was Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, who would go on to simplify his name to Edgar Degas and become one of the greatest draughtsmen who ever drew – the greatest since the high renaissance, in Kenneth Clark's estimation. 
Here, to mark his birthday, is Degas's Les Repasseuses, an oil painting on rough brown canvas showing women in a laundry wearily working their way through a pile of ironing  ('repasser' in French, so much more expressive of the action than 'ironing').
And here is a poem by R.S. Thomas inspired by the painting (which hangs in the Musée d'Orsay) –

one hand
     on cheek the other
on the bottle
     mouth open
her neighbour
     with hands clasped
not in prayer
      her head bent
over her decreasing
      function     this is art
overcoming permanently
     the temptation to answer
a yawn with a yawn


['decreasing function' is brilliant]

'Let me confess...'

 'Very few people can write poetry,' I opined. 'And he [the subject under discussion, who will remain anonymous] sure ain't one of them.' Actually I'll modify that assertion: very few people can write poetry that anyone in their right mind would want to read. All too many people are writing poetry, or something that can pass for it, and even doing so very competently – but who in their right mind, etc? The internet has massively encouraged people to write poetry, regardless of ability or aptitude – and there are other factors that have been at work much longer, notably the poetry workshop and the creative writing course. I recently came across two poems written by battle-scarred veterans of that particular field of endeavour. Here is Dana Gioia, who has had enough of sestinas (and writes one to say as much):

My Confessional Sestina

Let me confess. I’m sick of these sestinas
written by youngsters in poetry workshops
for the delectation of their fellow students,
and then published in little magazines
that no one reads, not even the contributors
who at least in this omission show some taste.

Is this merely a matter of personal taste?
I don’t think so. Most sestinas
are such dull affairs. Just ask the contributors
the last time they finished one outside of a workshop,
even the poignant one on herpes in that new little magazine
edited by their most brilliant fellow student.

Let’s be honest. It has become a form for students,
an exercise to build technique rather than taste
and the official entry blank into the little magazines—
because despite its reputation, a passable sestina
isn’t very hard to write, even for kids in workshops
who care less about being poets than contributors.

Granted nowadays everyone is a contributor.
My barber is currently a student
in a rigorous correspondence school workshop.
At lesson six he can already taste
success having just placed his own sestina
in a national tonsorial magazine.

Who really cares about most little magazines?
Eventually not even their own contributors
who having published a few preliminary sestinas
send their work East to prove they’re no longer students.
They need to be recognised as the new arbiters of taste
so they can teach their own graduate workshops.

Where will it end? This grim cycle of workshops
churning out poems for little magazines
no one honestly finds to their taste?
This ever-lengthening column of contributors
scavenging the land for more students
teaching them to write their boot camp sestinas?

Perhaps there is an afterlife where all contributors
have two workshops, a tasteful little magazine, and sexy students
who worshipfully memorise their every sestina.

Gioia's barber is taking a correspondence course in poetry – and in this poem, Galway Kinnell writes as an instructor on such a course, who, like Gioia, has also had enough:

The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me   

snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting   

you were beautiful; goodbye,

Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain   

brown envelopes for the return of your very

“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer   

of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues

give the fullest treatment in literature yet

to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,   

who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”   

instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,   

neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way   

of cheering myself up, as I licked

the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,   

the game I had of trying to guess   

which one of you, this time,   

had poisoned his glue. I did care.   

I did read each poem entire.   

I did say everything I thought   

in the mildest words I knew. And now,

in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,   

I realize, than those troubled lines   

I kept sending back to you,

I have to say I am relieved it is over:

at the end I could feel only pity

for that urge toward more life

your poems kept smothering in words, the smell   

of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils   

as new, God-given impulses

to write.

Goodbye,

you who are, for me, the postmarks again

of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—

their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.

And here is a wonderfully wry piece by Kay Ryan, overcoming a lifelong aversion to all forms of co-operative creative endeavour and attending, for the first time, an AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programmes Annual Conference). The session she gets the most from is on... The Contemporary Sestina!            

Soul Journeys

 Reading James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius naturally got me interested in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, a work I barely knew, so I've bought a CD (featuring the wonderful Janet Baker as the Angel) and embarked on listening to it. Although I'm very much more a Vaughan Williams man than an Elgarian, I'm impressed and enjoying it. Perhaps it was because of The Dream – a setting of Newman's poem charting the journey of a dying man's soul from this life to the next – that the phrase 'animula vagula blandula' came into my head. It's the first line of a short poem in which the dying Roman emperor Hadrian bids farewell to his soul. I have a vague memory that, years ago, one of the back-page competitions in the Spectator or New Statesman challenged entrants to translate it (I don't suppose that would happen these days). I can't remember whether I entered, but 'Animula vagula blanda' is a translation challenge to which many have risen: more than a hundred translations have been published in book form, and many more can be found on the internet. 
  Here is the text, with a straight translation: 

Animula vagula blandula

Hospes comesque corporis

Quae nunc abibis in loca

Pallidula rigida nudula

Nec ut soles dabis iocos

Little wandering, charming soul,

Guest and companion of my body,

What places will you go to now?

Pale, stiff, naked little thing,

Never again to share a joke.

Among the more eminent of the poets who have translated it are Alexander Pope, who strikes an inappropriately grand note – 

Ah! Fleeting Spirit! wand’ring Fire,
That long hast warm’d my tender Breast,
Must thou no more this Frame inspire?
No more a pleasing, chearful Guest?

Whither, ah whither art thou flying!
To what dark, undiscover’d Shore?
Thou seem’st all trembling, shiv’ring, dying,
And Wit and Humour are no more!

and Henry Vaughan, who comes much closer to the tone of the original  –

My soul, my pleasant soul and witty,
The guest and consort of my body,
Into what place now all alone
Naked and sad wilt thou be gone?
No mirth, no wit, as heretofore,
Nor Jests wilt thou afford me more.

while Charles Tennyson Turner (Alfred's elder brother) makes a neat job of it – 

Little wild and winsome sprite,
The body’s guest and close ally;
To what new regions wilt thou fly?
A pale and cold and naked blight,
With all thy wonted jokes gone by.

and Christina Rossetti's version is stark and bleak – 

Soul, rudderless, unbraced
The body’s friend and guest,
Whither away today,
Unsuppl’d, pale, discas’d
Dumb to thy wonted jest.

Hadrian, of course, was writing in a pre-Christian world, and his relationship with his soul is very different from that of the dying Gerontius, who is fully identified with his soul. Hadrian is bidding farewell to something that has been almost a part of himself but was always separate, and now it is off, alone and unhoused, to inhospitable regions unknown. His soul has been like a charming, mischievous child (all those diminutives) who has lived with him for a while, and is now setting out on his own to who knows where. It's been fun having him around, and Hadrian hopes he'll be all right out there. Gerontius, on the other hand, is not the temporary residence of a visiting spirit: he is his soul and his soul is him, and they journey together into a spiritual realm of which they know at least the outlines. Christian souls are not the lost, anxious, wandering spirits depicted in Homer, and the heaven that awaits at least some of them is conceived in very much more exalted terms than the asphodel meadows or the Elysian fields. I'm hoping Gerontius makes it...

A Bullet from the Back of a Bush

 The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum is also, as is only fitting, a bookshop, and the other day there were a few books outside on offer at £1 each. One caught my eye immediately – The Still Moment. Eudora Welty: Portrait of a Writer by Paul Binding, a book I never knew existed. Naturally I snapped it up. 
  The Still Moment begins, arrestingly, with the murder of the black civil rights activist Medgar Evers outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where Eudora Welty lived and died. Evers was shot from behind in a targeted attack by a white man, and his death caused an immediate outcry, sparking riots all over the Southern States. Welty's immediate reaction was to write a short story about the killing, writing it in the first person because 'I am in a position where I know. I know what this man must feel like. I have lived with this kind of thing.' The story, 'Where Is the Voice Coming From?', was written at one sitting on the day of Evers's death, and sent immediately to William Maxwell at The New Yorker. He decided to publish in the next issue, but it turned out that Welty's insight into the mind, motive and modus operandi of the killer was so uncannily accurate that details had to be changed for fear of prejudicing the case against the man who had now been arrested for Evers's murder. 'The route taken, the hour, the how and why of the crime – Eudora Welty had divined them all.'
  Welty's protagonist, exasperated by the attention given to a high-profile black activist in his town, decides to take the law into his own hands and get rid of him. He drives to his target's house late at night, parks his borrowed truck behind a tree, and awaits the man's return. The shooting exhilarates him – 'I was on top of the world myself. For once' – and he feels he has done his duty by his community, acting true to his own and that community's convictions. 'I done what I done for my own pure-D satisfaction,' he boasts, unrepentant, revelling in his notoriety, and facing arrest and the possibility of the  electric chair with equanimity. In the event, the real-life killer, one Byron de la Beckwith, was tried twice in Mississippi and acquitted twice when the all-white juries failed to agree. It was not until 1994 that he was finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. 
  The murder of Medgar Evers inspired Bob Dylan's 'Only a Pawn in Their Game' – not his best or most successful protest song, though it gets off to a cracking start – 'A bullet from the back of a bush Took Medgar Evers' blood...' (Oddly, and coincidentally, reminiscent of the opening of Geoffrey Hill's 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy' – 'Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Juarès dies in a wine-puddle.'). Here is young Bobby singing 'Only a Pawn' at the March on Washington in 1963...

A Tenor Centenary

 Born on this day exactly a century ago was the great Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi. He was born near Parma, and according to Wikipedia he left school at 11 to work in a Parmesan cheese factory, where he was often in trouble for singing while at work (which seems unlikely in Italy). During the war he became involved in anti-Nazi activities and was interned for two years in a German prisoner of war camp. After being released by the Russians, he walked some 65 miles to get to an American camp, catching typhoid fever along the way. When he resumed his musical studies at the Arrigo Boito conservatory in Parma, he weight barely 80lb, but this seems to have had no long-term effects on his health, and he lived to the age of 90. 
  I came to opera late, and my way in was largely through cheap compilations of arias and duets, many of which, happily, featured Bergonzi's wonderfully natural voice, sometimes in combination with that of Renata Tebaldi, who seemed the perfect match. Their rendering of 'O Soave Fanciulla' from La Bohème still sends a shiver down my spine. Here it is...

Fleur's Jandals

 In my half sleep this morning, I half heard some talk of the New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock on Radio 3, and I believe one of her poems was read. Later, after I'd surfaced to face the day, I looked her up and was pleased to find that she is still alive – 90 now – and, since 2008, a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Over the years I've come across quite a few of her poems, mostly in anthologies. She writes a kind of cool, jaunty, no-nonsense light verse which reads easily and often leaves a feeling of good cheer in its wake – which is not a common thing among modern poets. Indeed, one of her poems, 'Londoner', opens Wendy Cope's cheering anthology, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems. Mutatis mutandis, this one has a slight feel of Frank O'Hara about it, and it brings back to me something of the excitement I used to feel about being young and at large in London. Here it is – 

Londoner

Scarcely two hours back in the country
and I'm shopping in East Finchley High Road
in a cotton skirt, a cardigan, jandals* –
of flipflops as people call them here,
where February's winter. Aren't I cold?
The neighbours in their overcoats are smiling
at my smiles and not at my bare toes:
they know me here.
                                 I hardly know myself,
yet. It takes me until Monday evening,
walking from the office after dark
to Westminster Bridge. It's cold, it's foggy,
the traffic's as abominable as ever,
and there across the Thames is County Hall,
that uninspired stone body, floodlit.
It makes me laugh. In fact, it makes me sing.

* 'Jandals', a conflation of 'Japanese' and 'sandals', is a New Zealand word for light sandals with a thong between the first two toes. 

'It's perhaps not surprising...'

 I was amused to read in the latest issue of Butterfly magazine that counting butterflies reduces anxiety by nine per cent on average, while also 'enhancing mental wellbeing'. It seems that spending just 15 minutes watching and counting butterflies made people 'feel more connected with nature'. Who'd have guessed? The research that came up with these findings was conducted by Butterfly Conservation in collaboration with the University of Derby, and comes ahead of this year's Big Butterfly Count, in which thousands of people note what butterflies they see, and in what numbers. 'It's perhaps not surprising that spending time in nature, looking at butterflies, is good for our mental health,' says Butterfly Conservation's head of science, with commendable understatement. The finding is of course yet another example of science validating what we already knew, thereby making it somehow more 'true' than it was before receiving this essential endorsement. And there's more, equally unsurprising: it seems the salutary effects of watching butterflies  last for six or seven weeks after the butterfly watching ends. 
  All this is, I suppose, mildly heartening, but I fear those taking part in this year's Butterfly Watch might find the experience less sustaining than usual. It's been a dire butterfly season so far, with way too much rain (and wind) and way too little in the way of sunshine and warmth. As it happens, I'm just back from a couple of days in Worthing ('Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort'*), where this morning the sun was shining brightly and the wind had dropped, so I was hoping to see some butterflies as I took my constitutional – but no such luck: in particular places where before I've seen the likes of Painted Ladies, Red Admirals, Commas and more, nothing was flying but a few whites and a single Speckled Wood. I'm already dreading the jeremiads that will surely follow the results of this year's Big Butterfly Count... 

* Jack Worthing to Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, which was written in Worthing.)

'The writer of some infidel poetry'

 This day in 1822 was the date of the most archetypically, even iconically, romantic of all the Romantic poets' deaths – that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in the Ligurian sea, and cremated on the beach by his friends. Unmoved, the London newspaper The Courier marked his death thus: 'Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or not.' 
  The famous littoral cremation did not go entirely smoothly. I tell the story in my book, The Mother of Beauty (still available on Amazon or direct from me), writing of
'Shelley’s dramatically informal ‘pagan’ cremation on the beach at Viareggio, an event stage-managed and later much mythologised by the writer and adventurer Edward Trelawny. Shelley drowned when the boat he was sailing was caught in a sudden storm, and his body was washed up ten days later at Viareggio, along with his two sailing companions. They were identifiable only by their clothes – and, in Shelley’s case, a volume of Keats that he had crammed into his pocket. With the help of Italian soldiers who were on hand, guarding the bodies, Trelawny built the funeral pyre and set it alight, while his friends Byron and Leigh Hunt looked on. The fierce heat of blazing resinous pine took Trelawny by surprise and drove the onlookers away to a safe distance. As the flames began to die down, Trelawny poured on frankincense and salt, then wine and oil, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, and that was that. The three men then took a long swim out from the shore, and, in one final romantic gesture, Trelawny seized Shelley’s heart from the embers of his pyre. (That heart now resides in the Shelley family vault at St Peter’s, Bournemouth, along with the body of Mary Shelley and the remains of her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, dug up from the churchyard of Old St Pancras).'
The volume of Keats was Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other poems (1819). There is some doubt over whether the unburnt remnant snatched from the pyre was actually Shelley's heart or some other organ, perhaps his liver. Either way, Trelawny gave it to Leigh Hunt, who for some while refused to hand it over to Mary Shelley, but finally relented. There is doubt too about the final resting place of the presumed heart, which might be at Christchurch Priory rather than St Peter's, Bournemouth. A piece of jawbone, also retrieved from the pyre, was eventually donated to the Keats-Shelley Memorial in Rome.  

Gerontius, and a Jarring Phrase

A while back, having read a devastating German and a sour Austrian novel back to back, I vowed to return to English fiction with my next selection from the charity shop fiction shelves. Those trusty shelves duly obliged by delivering into my hands Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson, a novel that I remembered having intended to read when it came out (in 1989 – 35 years ago now!).  
  Gerontius is a beautifully written, psychologically convincing account of a sea voyage undertaken in 1923 by an ageing Sir Edward Elgar, taking him over the ocean to Brazil and on into Amazonia as far as Manaus. He is known to have visited and admired the grand opera house there, but otherwise the whole unlikely episode is barely documented, so Hamilton-Paterson has free rein to make of it what he will. So far, I am only about halfway through – it's a fat book and I'm a slow reader – but I am impressed and thoroughly engrossed. As well as being an account of a sea voyage, Gerontius is also a journey around Elgar's life and mind, his anxieties and preoccupations, his uneasy relationship with his muse and with the social world, his grief for his wife, his many exasperations, his love of tinkering and 'japes', his susceptibility, perhaps, to something like late-life romance... I've read nothing else by this author – described on Wikipedia as 'the most reclusive of British literary exiles' – but I'm strongly tempted by a novel titled Cooking with Fernet Branca., which sounds very different indeed from Gerontius. 
  Anyway, to the point, if it is a point. There I was, reading away in Gerontius, when I was snagged by a jarring phrase that struck me as surely an anachronism. A character uses the expression 'economical with the truth', which I don't recall ever having heard before it entered the mainstream in 1986 after a senior civil servant (Sir Robert Armstrong) used it in the 'Spycatcher' trial. Surely no one in 1923 would be using the phrase? The idea itself, but not the wording, can be found in Mark Twain – 'Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economise it' (1897) –  and Edmund Burke: 'As in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth' (1796). It seems the actual words 'economical with the truth' might well have been in circulation, but are only recorded in obscure sources – The Iron and Metal Trades: Birmingham, 1897 ('One can say without being economical with the truth that they are in a state of "masterly inactivity"'), The Weekly Underwriter, 1897 ('The insurance superintendent of Kansas is said to be very economical with the truth'), and the record of debates in the New Zealand House of Representatives, 1923 ('It is not well to be too economical with the truth'). So the use of the expression in Gerontius is perhaps not anachronistic; it just sounds that way. Not that it matters. 

'I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more'

 I've dropped in on the little church of St Chad's, overlooking Stowe Pool in Lichfield, several times, but had somehow failed to spot these two Johnsonian tablets on the South wall until the other day. The upper one (harder to read in the picture) commemorates Johnson's stepdaughter, Lucy Porter, daughter of his wife 'Tetty' and her first husband, and the lower commemorates Catherine Chambers, 'the faithful servant of Michael Johnson [Samuel's father] and his family'. Catherine Chambers's tablet was erected long after her death, but Lucy Porter's is contemporaneous. It reads: 'In a Vault near this Place are deposited the Remains of LUCY PORTER, who died the 13th of January 1786, aged 70 Years. To whose Memory, in Gratitude for her liberal Acts of Friendship conferred on him, this Monument is erected by the Revd J.B. Pearson.'
  Pearson had reason to be grateful. He and Lucy Porter had become close friends in her later years, and at times he was the only person she would admit to visit her. His visits, and their games of piquet, apparently cheered her, though there were times when he exasperated her. Mrs Thrale/Piozzi relates, on the authority of Johnson himself, how 'being opposed one day in conversation by a clergyman who came often to her house, and feeling somewhat offended, cried out suddenly, 'Why, Mr. Pearson,’ said she, ‘ you are just like Dr. Johnson, I think: I do not mean that you are a man of the greatest capacity in all the world like Dr. Johnson, but that you contradict one every word one speaks, just like him.’
However, their friendship was strong, and Lucy Porter's gratitude real. Pearson, who was Curate of St Chad's, was the principal beneficiary in her will, inheriting a handsome sum of money and many Johnsonian relics – her final 'liberal Acts of Friendship'. 
   Johnson's relations with his stepdaughter were not entirely easy. Though he was, by all reports, 'ever attentive and kind' to Lucy, she was generally indifferent. He told Mrs Thrale that Lucy 'considers me one of the external and accidental things that are taken or left without emotion', though she seems to have warmed somewhat to him later in life. Recently a New Year letter from Johnson to his step-daughter came up for auction. It begins: 'Dearest Madam – I ought to have begun the new year with repairing the omissions of the last'. Johnson wishes Lucy 'long life and happiness always encreasing [sic] till it shall at last end in the happiness of heaven'. He meanwhile is 'pretty much disordered by a cold and cough', has just been 'blooded' [bled], and asks her to give his love to 'Kitty'.
  This 'Kitty' is the same Catherine Chambers memorialised in the lower tablet in St Chad's. She was officially Johnson's mother's maid, but became much more than that, living with her for 35 years, and caring devotedly for her in her last illness. Johnson always held her in very high regard. He is quoted on her memorial tablet (erected in 1910): 'My dear old friend Catherine Chambers; she buried my father and my mother and my brother ... I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more.' 

'A chartered member of Blandings'

 For some unfathomable reason, I continue to be bombarded with Bertrand Russell material on Facebook, invariably accompanied by photographs of the Great Man sagely sucking on a pipe. Today's bit of Russelliana did, for once, pique my interest. It quoted from a fan letter that Russell wrote in 1954 to P.G. Wodehouse, in which he declared that, 'In common with the rest of mankind, I derive great pleasure from reading your books.' He goes on to proudly outline what he has in common with Bertie Wooster:
'My name is Bertie; I had an aunt called Agatha and an uncle called Algernon; I came within an ace of being called Galahad; and my great grandfather put a plaque in his garden to commemorate a victory over his head gardener.'
Galahad Russell? Could he have had a career in philosophy with a forename like that? it would have been uphill work...
Wodehouse, in reply, declares that 'I am very proud to think that you have enjoyed my books', and goes on to tell Russell that 'You are certainly qualified to rank as a chartered member of Blandings!'.
The letter, the only one between the two men, is in the Russell Archives at McMaster University, which also has eleven Wodehouse volumes owned by the illustrious 'chartered member'. 

Painted by a Norwegian

 I don't often look at the stats for this blog, but when I do I always check to see which countries are giving Nigeness the most views. Today I was surprised to find that Hong Kong, a territory that I don't think had ever featured before, is now in second place – way, way ahead of the US, which itself is way ahead of the UK, which is not far clear of, er, Singapore. And who is in the coveted number one spot? Why, it's Norway again, a whisker ahead of Hong Kong (who I suspect will fade fast). 
  I've observed the strong Norwegian interest in this blog before, and put up obliging posts (this one, for example). So now here is another painting by a son of Norway, though it doesn't look in the slightest degree Norwegian. The picture above, titled Turner Fernisserer, shows J.M.W. Turner on a 'varnishing day', an occasion which he invariably used to finish his paintings in public, doing a great deal more than just applying varnish, while onlookers marvelled at the last-minute magic he wrought. Turner Fernisserer was painted, on a visit to London, by a Norwegian artist  with a very English name – Thomas Fearnley. He was a painter mainly of Romantic landscapes, and he owed his English name to a grandfather, also Thomas Fearnley, a merchant who emigrated from Canada to Norway. The painter Fearnley's brother was an astronomer, and his son founded a dynasty of shipping magnates. 
  Once again I salute you, Norway!