Sanders

 I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...

Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was the actor George Sanders. With his good looks and crisp, sonorous upper-crust voice, he became the man for playing debonair, louche, more or less depraved English aristo types – most memorably Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jack Favell in Rebecca and Addison deWitt in All About Eve. He was a commanding presence on screen, even if he was mostly doing little more than playing himself (though he can hardly be accused of that in his classic voicing of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book).
  The tenor of Sanders's personal life may be judged from the fact that he called his autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad, and suggested the title A Dreadful Man for his biography (written by his friend Brian Aherne). He managed to marry not only the ineffable Zsa Zsa Gabor but also, some years later, her sister Magda – a marriage that lasted just six weeks and drove Sanders even further into drink. His end was sad. Threatened by dementia and failing health, Sanders decided to give up the unequal struggle, finally killing himself with a massive overdose of Nembutal in a hotel room in a small coastal town near Barcelona. He left behind a message addressed to 'Dear World': 'I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good Luck.' He was 65 – the precise age at which, according to his pal David Niven, he predicted that he would kill himself.
  But what of the real George Sanders? As ever, we turn to the authoritative Me Cheeta, where the index entries are not promising, all listed under 'Sanders, George, caddishness of'. However, Cheeta's few encounters with Sanders seem to have left a reasonably favourable impression. The two were introduced at a notably starry private screening of Tarzan and His Mate (the one in which Maureen O'Sullivan takes a very saucy swim). 'Cheetah, my deah,' says George. 'If you're anything like me, you'll find it absolutely excruciating to watch yourself on screen. I should leave before those terrible monstahs turn against you and skin you alive. It's not going to shit on me, is it, Maureen?'
  Hmm. On a more exalted level, it's an intriguing thought that the boy Sanders would have been walking the streets of St Petersburg at the same time as the teenage Nabokov*. I wonder if their paths ever crossed – either then or later, when both lived in Switzerland. Sanders might have made rather a good job of Clare Quilty in the Lolita film...

* and the young Eric Knight, author of Lassie Come Home, whose mother was a governess to the Imperial family.
  

O Canada

 July already, and my late mother's birthday (she'd have been 105 today) – and it's Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, formed on this day in 1867.
It was on Canada Day in 1980 that 'O Canada' became the country's official national anthem (and one of the best). Here is the one and only k d lang performing it –

And here she is again, referencing 'O Canada' in one of the most beautiful recordings she ever made – her cover of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case of You'...

The Say-But-the-Word Centurion

 It isn't often that a sermon turns up in my inbox, but today – the 4th Sunday after Pentecost – one did, and it's rather good. Here's a link...

https://www.rememberingsion.com/p/foundation-faith-sermon-4th-sunday-pentecost

And of course this led me straight back to Les Murray's great poem of faith, 'The Say-But-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary'...

That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox has died a slave’s death. We were manoeuvered into it by priests and by the man himself. To complete his poem.

He was certainly dead. The pilum guaranteed it. His message, unwritten except on his body, like anyone’s, was wrapped like a scroll and despatched to our liberated selves, the gods.

If he has now risen, as our infiltrators gibber, he has outdone Orpheus, who went alive to the Shades. Solitude may be stronger than embraces. Inventor of the mustard tree,

he mourned one death, perhaps all, before he reversed it. He forgave the sick to health, disregarded the sex of the Furies when expelling them from minds. And he never speculated.

If he is risen, all are children of a most real high God or something even stranger called by that name who knew to come and be punished for the world.

To have knowledge of right, after that, is to be in the wrong. Death came through the sight of law. His people’s oldest wisdom. If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable

in the language of death’s era, there will be wars about religion as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians. Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has died

for you before you ever met it, may seem colder than the favours of gods who are our poems, good and bad. But there never was a bad baby. Half his worship will be grinding his face in the dirt

then lifting it to beg, in private. The low will rule, and curse by him. Divine bastard, soul-usurer, eros-frightener, he is out to monopolise hatred. Whole philosophies will be devised for their brief snubbings of him.

But regained excels kept, he taught. Thus he has done the impossible to show us it is there. To ask it of us. It seems we are to be the poem and live the impossible. As each time we have, with mixed cries.

JR, B-P, MB

 In Eminent Edwardians (which I'm still reading, with great enjoyment), Piers Brendon tells of a curious connection between John Ruskin and the young Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, known to his family as 'Stephe'. B-P's formidably well connected mother consulted Ruskin about 'Stephe's vexatious habit of painting with both hands (on occasion with both feet)'. Happily the great man approved of the boy's ambidexterity and encouraged it, and B-P was to put it to good use in his military career, taking notes with either hand and making sketches with both simultaneously, drawing with one hand while shading with the other. Brendon also tells of an occasion when Thackeray came to dinner with the Baden-Powells and, 'when young Stephe attempted to join the party, paid him a shilling to go away – the earliest recorded instance of bob-a-jobbery.' 
   There is also one thing – and surely only one – that B-P had in common with Max Beerbohm: they were both educated at Charterhouse under Dr William Haig Brown, the headmaster who had moved the school out of the city and re-established it on a Surrey hilltop. This was just the school for young Stephe, offering 'few impediments to Stalkyish independence, to the practice of Spartan chivalry and Machiavellian chicanery. As for intellectual impedimenta of the kind provided by modern culture and ideas, the school was disinclined to clutter fledgling minds with such stuff.' All his life, B-P, the eternal schoolboy, was a keen and loyal Old Carthusian, and 'one of his sharpest disappointments during the siege of Mafeking was that he could find no other Carthusian with whom to celebrate Founder's Day'. He was, in Max Beerbohm's phrase, 'of the straitest sect'. In Old Carthusian Memories (1920), Max writes that 'the straitest sect is never happy. It simply can't bear the thought of having left Charterhouse. After-life for it is one long anticlimax' – which was certainly not the case for Beerbohm, though he writes quite affectionately about the old place, and is glad he spent five years there. 'The main thing that I had learnt there, and have not yet forgotten,' he writes, 'was a knack of understanding my fellow-creatures, of living in amity with them and not being rubbed the wrong way by their faults, and not rubbing them the wrong way with mine.' A very useful thing to learn; we could do with more of it in the world.
   Max continues: 'It is often complained that public schools tend to repress individuality in a child. Charterhouse in the eighteen-eighties did not at all tend that way ... Its traditions left plenty of latitude. I was a queer child. I didn't care a brass farthing for games. What I liked was Latin prose, Lain verse, and drawing caricatures. Nobody bothered me to play games. Boys and masters alike ... encouraged me to draw as many and as impudent caricatures as possible. I ought to have been very happy. But––oh, how I always longed to be grown-up! Boys are mostly not cursed with a strong instinct towards independence; nor men mostly, for the matter of that. I, alas, was.' Max went his own way – and so, along a very different path, did Baden-Powell. 

Hot

 These are not the dog days – they come in August when the dog star, Sirius, is rising – but, by heaven, they feel like it. It's proper hot, as we say around here, and more to come tomorrow. At least the butterflies are loving it – to the extent that a Silver-Washed Fritillary paid a fleeting visit to the garden the other day: they sometimes do this, flying far from their usual haunts, when the weather gets really hot. But talk of dog days inevitably leads me to this, one of Auden's best – so good it even impressed Randall Jarrell...

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:

The heather lies limp and dead

On the mountain, the baltering torrent

Shrunk to a soodling thread;

Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,

Vacant the scholar’s brain

Under his great hat,

Drug though She may, the Sybil utters

A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,

Lying in bed till noon,

Your bills unpaid, your much advertised

Epic not yet begun,

Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish

Some earthquake would astonish,

Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing

Unlock the prisons and translate

The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,

The hawthorn hedges in bloom,

When, serene in their ivory vessels,

The three wise Maries come,

Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in

By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:

Ah! how the cannons roar,

How jocular the bells as They

Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence,

Before it break and drown,

When the insurrected eagre hangs

Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt

Tombs of the sorcerers shatter

And their guardian megalopods

Come after you pitter-patter?

How will you answer when from their qualming spring

The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,

And out of the open sky

The pantocratic riddle breaks –

"Who are you and why?"

For when in a carol under the apple-trees

The reborn featly dance,

There will also, Fortunatus,

Be those who refused their chance,

Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,

And mawkish in their wits,

To whom these dull dog-days

Between event seemed crowned with olive

And golden with self-praise. 

Fortunatus was a sixth-century poet of the Merovingian court, who wrote in Latin and became a Christian bishop (and was venerated after his death).
'Soodling' means dawdling, 'baltering' tumbling along.
The 'three wise Maries' are three variously identified Maries from the Gospels who, according to medieval legend, made landfall in Provence after travelling from the Holy Land. 'Sossing' is simply onomatopoeic.
An 'eagre' is a kind of tidal wave, commonly known as a 'bore' – which would not have sounded quite as good: 'the insurrected bore'!

 

Ten Years Ago

 On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy Burnham)...

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/06/picture-of-day.html

Cometh the Hour...

 McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June
– Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –
That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation 
To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation.
His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham,
But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour party and indeed of the nation, the question many are asking is 'Can he turn 'em?'

'Lying flat in the bracken...'

Here's one for Father's Day, tangentially. A loose, joyful almost-sonnet, written by Gavin Ewart, sixty years ago this month...

June 1966

Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park
while the legs and voices of my children pass
seeking, seeking: I remember how on the
13th of June of that simmering 1940
I was conscripted into the East Surreys,
and, more than a quarter of a century
ago, when France had fallen,
we practised concealment in this very bracken.
The burnt stalks pricked through my denims.
Hitler is now one of the antiques of History,
I lurk like a monster in my hiding place.
He didn't get me. If there were a God
it would be only polite to thank him. 

Never Dull

 More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end, Chapter VIII of volume three, aptly titled Finis: 'Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself...' After a long, overheated passage of 'prophecy' from Alessandro Cagliostro, described by Carlyle himself as 'the Quack of Quacks', the author returns to take an elegant farewell: 
'And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together [you're not wrong, Tom]; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnate Word'. Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.'
   Well, it was quite a ride. This was a book that, as Carlyle put it, came 'direct and flamingly from the heart', and that is how it reads – impassioned, vivid, personal, written as if by an eye-witness who was in the thick of the action and now invites us to be there alongside him. Exclaiming, apostrophising, drawing the reader in with the first-person plural, he takes off into sometimes obscure flights of prose poetry, bringing in myths and scripture, scattering metaphors, references, personifications, archaisms and new-coined words left and right, always with an eye to bringing alive the extraordinary, often terrible events he chronicles. The effect at times is almost cinematic, wholly unlike any other history, and, God knows, it is never dull. 

 

So cross that he postponed his bath...

 I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I served my 22 years in Northcliffe House – and how Northcliffean the management style is/was. But I'll say no more (and Paul Dacre was always very nice to me). 
  I'm now reading about the languid aristocrat Arthur Balfour, Cambridge 'Soul', 'scented popinjay' and charming ornament of the highest society, who was steered into a political career by his uncle, Lord Salisbury, and ended up being Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, leading his party into the political wilderness for 20 years. As his government fell apart around him, nothing dented his aplomb: Brendon writes that 'The only reverse that evoked a gleam of passion in him was the Duke of Devonshire's resignation in 1903; the Prime Minister was so cross that in order to write the Duke a stiff letter he postponed his bath.' Not exactly The Thick of It, is it?
  Balfour found it hard to reconcile himself to being in Opposition, and could scarcely believe that the 'natural rulers' of the country were no longer in power. He 'found himself compelled to "go about the country explaining that I am 'honest and industrious', like a second footman out of place" and enduring those "attendant horrors" of public meetings, the "subsidiary luncheons and dinners, which are fatal to one's temper at the moment, and to one's digestion afterwards.' He was surprised to find that his reappearance in the Commons as Opposition leader was 'the signal for ill-mannered interruptions' – and for a most ungentlemanly attack from the new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 'a man who resembled nothing so much as an enraged sheep', and whose name the absent-minded Lord Salisbury had never been able to remember. C-B caddishly attacked Balfour for the very thing he most prided himself on – his silky forensic technique, 'the spinning of diaphanous webs in which his adversaries became fatally enmeshed'. This art the enraged sheep denounced as mere 'foolery' – and much of the House agreed. Times had changed, and Balfour's ideal of parliamentary debate as 'concord enlivened by mellifluous displays of intellectual counterpoint' had, alas, gone for good.  
  Still to come: Mrs Pankhurst and General Baden-Powell. I'm looking forward to them both. 

Cheers to Beer

 I've only just realised, with a start, that today is National Beer Day.
 The date was chosen because it's the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, which has something to say about standard measures of beer and other drinks – and also, one would like to think, represents our traditional liberties, of which the drinking of beer, preferably in a pub, is a pretty good embodiment. Johnson was a great advocate of what we now call the pub: 'There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.' I think he would have loved Wetherspoon's, that most convivial of national institutions – and famed for its cheap, well kept beer. 
  National Beer Day enjoins us to raise a glass at 7pm in a national Cheers to Beer toast. I'll drink to that.

'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House...'

 Born on this day in 1811 was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the abolitionist bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born, I was interested to see, in Litchfield, Connecticut, a small town that wisely changed its name from Bantam township, adopting the name of the great Mercian cathedral city, but inserting, for reasons unknown, an extraneous 't'. 
  Following the sensational success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and in the second year of the Civil War, Mrs Stowe and family visited President Lincoln at the White House. Alas, it seems he did not greet her with the famous words, 'So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.' However, her daughter recalled, intriguingly, that 'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House, I assure you ... it was all very funny – and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while.' Mrs Stowe herself told her husband in a letter: 'I had a real funny interview with the President.' It seems Presidents were cut from a different cloth in those days. 
  As a boy, I made a rash attempt to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. I don't think I even reached the end of chapter one, and all I remember is a single image, of a man holding a glass of some kind of wine up to the light and admiring a bee's wing floating in it. This struck me as very odd, and the image stayed with me for years – until I realised that what was being described was not the wing of a bee but a flake of the translucent 'crust' of port or old red wine, a sign of long ageing in the bottle. Composed of potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar), it's called 'beeswing' because of its resemblance to the delicate veined wing of a small flying insect. This adds a new, appropriately alcoholic, level of meaning to Betjeman's description of Wilde's 'bees-winged eyes' in his poem, 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel', one of the best he ever wrote – 

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
Did tower in her new-built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
That shone on his unmade bed.

“I want some more hock in my seltzer,
And Robbie, please give me your hand —
Is this the end or beginning?
How can I understand?

“So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.

“More hock, Robbie — where is the seltzer?
Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

“One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s —
Another one’s at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
And bring them on later, dear boy.”

A thump, and a murmur of voices —
(”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered — and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the plants on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.

 

'If his face looks like this...'

Yesterday's announcement of David Hockney's death was greeted by a wonderful outpouring of affectionate and admiring tributes – and quite right too. He was that rare thing, a genuine artist who was also widely popular and well-liked – the equivalent in painting, perhaps, of John Betjeman in poetry. Not easy to think of another, in either field, with such a combination of attributes...
  I've always loved Hockney's drawings, perhaps rather more than his paintings – certainly more than his late paintings, cheering though they are. The above pen drawing of Auden is a favourite – so economical in means, yet so perfectly capturing the man. Hockney has wisely simplified the prodigious reticulation of wrinkles that covered the ageing Auden's face, giving it the appearance, as he put it himself, of 'a wedding cake left out in the rain'. I wonder – well, I don't really, but you never know – if the lyricist Jimmy Webb had that phrase in mind when he wrote that totally bonkers song 'MacArthur Park': 

'MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
All the sweet green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain,
And I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe again.
Oh no!
Oh no!'
(Check out the full lyrics here to savour just how bonkers this song is. I particularly like the line 'Like a striped pair of pants' in the first stanza.)

   To return to Auden's face, Hockney recalled that, when drawing it, he kept thinking, 'If his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?' 
  Scientific Postscript: Some medical experts believe that the state of Auden's face was due to a rare genetic condition known as Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome. But many years of heavy smoking, supplemented by alcohol and benzedrine, can't have helped. 

Aethelflaed

 Happy Aethelflaed Day, everyone! 
Aethelflaed (870-918), daughter of Alfred the Great, is remembered as the Lady of the Mercians, and is something of a feminist icon. With her brother, who later became King Edward the Elder, she ruled over much of Mercia from 911, successfully fighting off the Vikings. She died on this day 1,108 years ago (have I got that right?).
Above is a strange and, er, somewhat unsatisfactory statue of Aethelflaed, which stands on a traffic island in Tamworth, the Mercian capital. 

An Unplanned Church

 Yesterday I had an appointment at a hospital some little way from Lichfield. For reasons I won't bore you with, I ended up arriving a full hour early. What to do? I'd noticed, on the way in, a red sandstone church standing apparently alone in the fields – Victorian by the look of it, and probably locked – but I thought I'd go and have a look. The hospital is in what might be called a semi-rural location, with the Big House (much Victorianised) close to it, and the village stretching along the main road, inhabited largely by the kind of people who like to build big showy houses behind tall wrought-iron gates and Virginia Water shrubbery. Not very inspiring then, and reeking of money. But the church – that was the thing. And I was lucky: as I drew near I spotted some human activity, which turned out to be the churchwarden and her husband finishing off the flowers with which the church was abundantly decked. This was in honour of the new vicar, who is being installed today. So, by pure luck, I had found the church open. It's wonderful how often this happens – sometimes it seems almost miraculous, as with the Lady with the Key. 
   Anyway, I had a nice chat with the churchwarden, and was able to have a look around the church before she locked up and left. The church is Victorian indeed, small and simple but of high quality, the gift of the then owner of the Big House, with lavish fittings, a spectacular polychrome sanctuary floor, and a couple of good stained-glass windows. Pevsner describes the interior as 'wholly satisfying', and it is indeed. I'm so glad I chanced to find it open. It was one of those happy unplanned moments that have peppered my church-crawling life – and indeed the rest of my life. Reasons to be thankful. 

'There is nothing to do with a day except to live it'

 Another day begins. Here is a starting-the-day poem by the great Richard Wilbur. It's just the kind of celebration of the domestic and the quotidian that got him such a bad reputation among the more 'advanced' taste-makers – more fools them: this is no simple celebration. 

C Minor

Beethoven during breakfast? The human soul,
Though stalked by hollow pluckings, winning out
(While bran-flakes crackle in the cereal bowl)
   Over despair and doubt?

You are right to switch it off and let the day
Begin at hazard, perhaps with pecker-knocks
In the sugar bush, the rancour of a jay,
   Or in the letter box

Something that makes you pause and with fixed shadow
Stand on the driveway-gravel, your bent head
Scanning the snatched pages until the sad
   Or fortunate news is read.

The day's work will be disappointing or not,
Giving at least some pleasure in taking pains.
One of us, hoeing in the garden plot
   (Unless, of course, it rains)

May rejoice at the knitting of light in fennel-plumes
And dew like mercury on cabbage-hide,
Or rise and pace through too-familiar rooms, 
   Balked and dissatisfied.

Shall a plate be broken? A new thing understood? 
Shall we be lonely, and by love consoled?
What shall I whistle, splitting the kindling-wood?
   Shall the night-wind be cold?

How should I know? And even if we were fated
Hugely to suffer, grandly to endure,
It would not help to hear it all fore-stated
   As in an overture.

There is nothing to do with a day except to live it.
Let us have music again when the light dies
(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it
   Something to organise.

Ever since I switched my allegiance from Radio 4 to Radio 3, classical music has been a background to my life for rather too much of the day (including even Classic FM pianissimo while I sleep, or not). If I'm awake early, I like to hear the snatch of birdsong that starts the Radio 3 day – but, by the time I'm eating my breakfast, I'm happy to turn the music off for a while. Wilbur is right – Beethoven at breakfast is not a good idea. But what was the C minor piece that was switched off? The expressive key of C minor was a favourite of Beethoven's – it's the key of the Pathétique sonata (and the last, number 32) and the Fifth Symphony. Wilbur talks of 'pluckings', perhaps suggesting a string quartet – maybe it was this one, a fine piece, but certainly not breakfast music...

'The best example of what living constantly with humans leads to'

 I see that the supermarket chain Sainsbury's is doing its bit to cut 'emissions' by removing brown eggs from its shelves in favour of white ones, which, according to its research, have a 12.7 percent lower 'carbon footprint' than their brown cousins. This major contribution to achieving 'net zero' has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that white eggs are cheaper and easier to produce... 
  Anyway, this got me thinking about chickens. The domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the most numerous bird, and the most numerous domestic animal, on the planet, with a population estimated at upward of 26.5 billion (four chickens for every human?). Our debt to them, as producers both of meat and of those natural wonders, eggs, is immense – but are we grateful to them, do we appreciate them? Of course not. Here is the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's tribute to the doughty fowl –

Hen

The hen is the best example of what living constantly with
humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and
grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump
like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy,
when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes
with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that
parody of song, throat-slashed supplications over a thing un-
utterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.
   The hen brings to mind certain poets.

[translation by Czeslaw Milosz]

Minced Oaths

 An American friend inquires – as well he might – what 'a Herbert Spencer of a cold' might mean. As I told him, I'm probably the only person on the planet who still uses the phrase (to universal bafflement). I came across it years ago in, I think, a novel by H.G. Wells (Love and Mr Lewisham?), where a character says he has had 'a Herbert Spencer of a day'. He means of course a Hell of a day, and it's an example of what is known as a 'minced oath', where an innocuous form of words, with the same initial letter, is substituted for a profanity.  There is no actual connection between Hell and Herbert Spencer, except that neither is a lot of fun. Another example where the name of a famous person is put to this use is 'what the Dickens?', which has nothing to do with the writer, but is simply a way of avoiding saying 'devil'. Similarly the exclamation 'Gordon Bennett' is a way of avoiding naming the deity. The Gordon Bennett thus invoked was the wealthy publisher, sportsman and celebrity (in his day) Gordon Bennett Jr, who, among other things, sponsored Stanley's expedition to Africa to find David Livingstone. And then there's the sad case of 'sweet Fanny Adams' (a way of avoiding the expression 'sweet f*ck-all'). Fanny was an eight-year-old girl whose brutal murder in Alton, Hampshire,  in 1867 caused a national outcry. But that's enough minced oaths. 
   Meanwhile, my own Herbert Spencer of a cold still has me firmly in its grip, so I have entirely missed out on the Devon jaunt I was looking forward to. Hey ho. 

A Cold, A New Month, A Poem

 I spent the weekend with my cousin amid the floriferous glory of Derbyshire at the turn of summer, with sunshine (much of the time) to heighten the beauty. However, along the way I discovered that, annoyingly, I was developing a stinking cold – which is now, on my return to Lichfield, in full dismal swing, a real Herbert Spencer of a cold. Still more annoyingly, I was supposed to be travelling to Exeter tomorrow to join my walking friends for a few days. Now my best hope is to make the journey on Thursday instead, if this tiresome virus has gone into retreat by then. Here's hoping...
   Meanwhile, I notice that May has become June, and today, the 2nd, is the date on which, in 1840, Thomas Hardy, Wessex's Monarch of Mirth, suffered the terrible fate of being born. Did he have something to say about June? Oh yes, he did, but, being Hardy, his thoughts inevitably turned to autumn – 

June Leaves and Autumn

I

Lush summer lit the trees to green;
But in the ditch hard by
Lay dying boughs some hand unseen
Had lopped when first with festal mien
They matched their mates on high.
It seemed a melancholy fate
That leaves but brought to birth so late
Should rust there, red and numb,
In quickened fall, while all their race
Still joyed aloft in pride of place
With store of days to come.

II

At autumn-end I fared that way,
And traced those boughs fore-hewn
Whose leaves, awaiting their decay
In slowly browning shades, still lay
Where they had lain in June
And now, no less embrowned and curst
Than if they had fallen with the first,
Nor known a morning more,
Lay there alongside, dun and sere,
Those that at my last wandering here
Had length of days in store.


[published in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles, 1925]

'Paradoxes flung up in the air'

G.K. Chesterton was born on this day in 1874. Max Beerbohm first met him in 1902 and described him as 'like a mountain, and a volcanic one – constant stream of talk flowing down – paradoxes flung up into the air – very magnificent.' They became friends, and Beerbohm admired him – within limits: 'I am not nearly as witty as Chesterton for one, but certainly I have not prostituted and cheapened my wit as he has' – harsh words, by Max's standards, but fair enough: the unstoppably prolific Chesterton did turn out plenty of substandard stuff.
  Beerbohm parodied Chesterton in full flow in the great parody collection A Christmas Garland. Chesterton is represented by 'Some Damnable Errors About Christmas', a fine stream of paradoxes which asserts that 'for nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated Christmas, he would have understood it from the first.' Among the 'more obvious fallacies' are the idea that 'Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation' and that it 'comes but once a year'. Spiritually, Chesterton asserts, 'Christmas Day recurs exactly seven times a week. When we have frankly acknowledged this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realise the Day's mystical and terrific beauty. For it is only every-day things that reveal themselves to us in all their wonder and their splendour.' All very Chestertonian, 'very magnificent'.
  Above is one of Beerbohm's caricatures of Chesterton. He was a huge man, standing six feet four inches tall – my own height, as it happens – and tipping the scales at something over twenty stone (which I don't). His girth was famously immense: there was a story that during the Great War a lady asked him why he was 'not out at the front', and he replied, 'Madam, if you go round to the side, you will see that I am.' And Wodehouse described a loud crash as 'a sound like G.K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin.' In 1931, the BBC asked him to give a series of talks on the radio, and they were a great success, delivered more or less impromptu, with his wife and secretary in the studio with him. Four years later, Beerbohm began his own series of radio talks, which were also a great success, and were later published in the collection Mainly on the Air, one of his best. 

A Painted Lady Summer?

 So there I was, in the supermarket car park, gazing happily at a tough-looking low-growing shrub covered with tiny white flowers (maybe a Contoneaster of some kind) – and there, drinking their fill of nectar, were three glorious Painted Lady butterflies, all in my field of vision at once. Some years that is as many as I see in a whole season, but this year we seem to be having a Painted Lady Summer – they are everywhere, even in town. Those three came on top of another half dozen or so I'd seen on my short walk to the supermarket, and there have been many more in the garden. I do love these butterflies, and have done since early childhood, when I first registered the extraordinary beauty of their intricately marked underwings, and marvelled at the journey they had made to get here. We now know that they fly not only from the Med but all the way from the desert fringes of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, making much of the journey at high altitude. And here they are this year, in glorious abundance. 
   Also this morning, just down the road from our house, I spotted a Hummingbird Hawk moth, feeding on red valerian. This little moth, which does give a very good impression of a hummingbird, has thrived wonderfully in recent years, even surviving the winter in many parts. 
  So there we are – at least two reasons to be cheerful. Also, the oppressive heat of the past couple of days has cooled down to a perfect early summer day (even though it's still spring). 

The Bower

 Today is the day of the Lichfield Bower, a curiously named celebration dating back to the reign of Henry II. Originally it was a muster or array, a way of finding out how many men could be called upon to fight if needed. All those capable of bearing arms would parade through the streets, accompanied by dancers and garlanded effigies of saints, and be handsomely rewarded at the end of the day with beef and wine at a specially erected 'bower house' decorated with laurel and lilac. When gunpowder became available, musketeers would join the procession, firing volleys outside the houses of leading townspeople, who were expected to respond by bringing out offerings of cakes and ale. While other towns abandoned such events, Lichfield continued to stage its Bower every Whit Monday, with a street parade that nowadays features local schools, bands and community organisations, with marching soldiers to represent the military. There are floats and lorries, a funfair, musical performances, the crowning of a Bower Queen (Ruskin would have approved), and of course – this being Lichfield – ample opportunities to eat and drink. I usually miss most of it, and that is perhaps just as well, as such spectacles stir up a strange brew of emotions in my breast – I don't know why – and I have been known to well up embarrassingly. 
  Philip Larkin seems to have been similarly, obscurely affected by such sights, to judge by his poem 'The March Past' (a villanelle of sorts), written on this day in 1951...

The march interrupted the light afternoon.
Cars stopped dead, children began to run,
As out of the street-shadow into the sun

Discipline strode, music bullying aside
The credulous, prettily-coloured crowd,
Evoking an over-confident, over-loud

Holiday where the flags lisped and beckoned,
And all was focused, larger than we reckoned,
Into a consequence of thirty seconds.

The stamp and dash of surface sound cut short
Memory, intention, thought;
The vague heart sharpened to a candid court

Where exercised a sudden flock of visions:
Honeycombs of heroic separations,
Pure marchings, pure apparitions,

Until the crowd closed in behind.
Then music drooped. And what came back to mind
Was not its previous habit, but a blind

Astonishing remorse for things now ended
That of themselves were also rich and splendid
(But unsupported broke, and were not mended) –

Astonishing, for such things should be deep,
Rarely exhumable: not in a sleep
So light they can wake and occupy
An absent mind when any march goes by.

A Bee

Aggrade. 
There's a word we're all familiar with, I'm sure... No? Me neither.
It means to build up or raise the level of a land surface by depositing sediment, and I mention it because it was the word that knocked my 11-year-old grandson out of the Canadian national spelling bee junior finals last night. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we were able to watch this event live as it went out, and Ethan (for it is he) sailed into the final five, tackling words such as 'dystopian' and 'spelunking', before 'aggrade' came up and shattered his young dreams – well, actually he wasn't too bothered, and was pleased enough with his performance. But 'aggrade'... really. It was the only word in the competition I didn't know, though I might have had some difficulty as a result of the question master's wayward pronunciation (worst example, 'plaited' pronounced 'plated') and bizarre habit of announcing 'there are two different pronunciations for this word', then saying it exactly the same way twice. 
   I had never seen a spelling bee before – we don't have them over here (perhaps because so few people can spell) – and I was struck by how joylessly the contest was conducted, though my daughter assures me there was plenty of joy in the room (as well as a few tears). I guess you had to be there. 
  The picture below is Norman Rockwell's 'Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus' – a word that happily didn't come up last night (and cousin Reginald could hardly be less like our Ethan).

Tea

 Yesterday was World Bee Day (not to be confused with World Bidet) – and, by chance, I had in my change a £1 coin I'd never seen before, with the face of our King on one side and on the other an attractive design featuring... two bees. Today – how they keep on coming – is International Tea Day. And why not? Tea, if properly made with good leaves and no milk, is a fine drink.
The poets have not had much to say about tea: there's Cowper's much-misquoted 'The cups that cheer but not inebriate', and this from Basho –
 
A monk sips morning tea.
It is quiet.
The chrysanthemum is flowering.

And then there's Wallace Stevens's 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon', from his astonishing first collection, Harmonium. This is not, it must be admitted, a poem about tea. It has a Wikipedia entry to itself, which I have battled my way through, emerging unenlightened and drained of all pleasure in life. So I return to the poem, which is a thing of beauty...

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


    Finally, and with apologies for lowering the tone, here is a lyric that is definitely about tea, sung by the great Jack Buchanan, and surely a fitting anthem for International Tea Day. His account of the genesis of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony is, I fear, unsound.