tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25267367576514140612024-03-18T18:26:38.178+00:00NigenessA hedonic resourceNigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.comBlogger4469125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-976207190704423922024-03-18T18:25:00.001+00:002024-03-18T18:25:47.721+00:00'So that when I stretch'd out my hand.....'<p> It was on this day in 1768 that Laurence Sterne died, at the age of fifty-four, less than three weeks after the publication of his <i>Sentimental Journey through France and Italy</i>. What happened after his death is a strange saga of interment, 'resurrection', reinterment, disinterment and eventual burial of at least part of the remains in their rightful grave. I've written about it before <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/03/alas-poor-yorick.html">here</a> – and there's a fine account of Sterne's long duel with death in the excellent Public Domain Review: here's the link – <br /><br /><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne/?fbclid%3DIwAR1GY3vik7LM4FiqFA0NXuqZnCNEfq_ZrDCQFKnvTpRcxkVU4NJzFPrNTns&source=gmail&ust=1710869460352000&usg=AOvVaw1JmaLhaNSoxDot2-BkHAtQ" href="https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne/?fbclid=IwAR1GY3vik7LM4FiqFA0NXuqZnCNEfq_ZrDCQFKnvTpRcxkVU4NJzFPrNTns" jslog="32272; 1:WyIjdGhyZWFkLWE6cjI3OTI2Nzk0NTk4OTMzNDkzNiJd; 4:WyIjbXNnLWE6cjUwMDM3MTk1NDU1NDgzOTU1NjQiXQ.." style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;" target="_blank">https://publicdomainreview.<wbr></wbr>org/essay/alas-poor-yorick-<wbr></wbr>the-death-and-life-of-<wbr></wbr>laurence-sterne/?fbclid=<wbr></wbr>IwAR1GY3vik7LM4FiqFA0NXuqZnCNE<wbr></wbr>fq_<wbr></wbr>ZrDCQFKnvTpRcxkVU4NJzFPrNTns</a><br /><br />Sterne's creative life closed more elegantly, with the gloriously inconclusive ending of <i>A Sentimental Journey</i>, at once deathly and bawdy. Yorick, Sterne's alter ego, has been obliged to share a bedchamber with an attractive young Piedmontese lady, who has an equally attractive maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety (rather in the manner of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in <i>It Happened One Night</i>), Yorick, restless and unable to sleep, exclaims 'O my God!'...<br /><br />'– You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself – I begg'd a thousand pardons – but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation – she maintained it was an entire infraction of the treaty – I maintain'd it was provided for in the clause of the third article. <br /> The lady would by no means give up her point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.<br /> Upon my word of honour, Madame, said I – stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration – <br /> (– I was going to have added, that I would not have trespass'd against the remotest idea of decorum for the world) – <br /> But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me – <br /> So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's<br /><br /> END OF THE SECOND VOLUME<br /><br /><br /> </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-34542377108876598542024-03-17T16:43:00.001+00:002024-03-17T16:43:17.350+00:00Graceful Monuments to the Obvious<p> For reasons of research (mostly), I've been looking at a 1978 volume, edited by Kingsley Amis – <i>The Faber Popular Reciter</i>, an anthology of 'all the poems you've <i>really</i> enjoyed and which you can never remember properly' (to quote the back jacket). Amis's introduction is, as you'd expect, a fine, punchy little essay, one that strikes something of an elegiac note: he knows he is writing in the last days of a once vigorous tradition. 'When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War,' he begins, 'the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting. If they were not in one anthology, they were in a couple of others; they were learned by heart and recited in class, or performed as turns at grown-up gatherings; they were sung in church or chapel or on other public occasions [Amis's anthology is unusual in containing a scattering of hymns and songs]... Most of that, together with much else, has gone.' Nowadays 'any adult who commits a poem to memory does so for personal satisfaction; if he utters it in company he does so to share it with like-minded friends (or as a harmless means of showing off), and as one who quotes, not one who recites.' Despite its title, Amis's anthology is not intended for recitation as such, but rather for reading aloud – not as a performance but as a way of 'finding out more about a piece of writing and so enjoying it more'. This is perhaps the best reason to read poetry aloud, and to at least attempt to learn it by heart. Reading aloud broadens out our experience of a poem from something on the page to something more intimately, more physically known, on the pulses, as you might say. <br /> What Amis offers is an anthology of popular (or once popular) poetry that lends itself particularly well to reading aloud, by virtue of strong rhythm and rhyme, clarity of expression and some stirring or inspiriting quality. He recognises that Orwell was perhaps right to judge most such verse as 'good bad poetry', but Orwell added that 'A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form ... some emotion which nearly every human being can share.' As Johnson said of Gray's<i> Elegy</i>, '<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures;"> </span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures;">The </span><cite style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures;">Church-yard</cite><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures;"> abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' And what can be wrong with that?</span> <br /> Thomas Gray's great elegy features, quite rightly, in the <i>Popular Reciter.</i> And so too does a much later poem of the same (almost) name, G.K. Chesterton's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard', a short, angry poem, written in the aftermath of the First World War, and ending on a bitter note to which, in these times, many a bosom might still return an echo – </span></p><div class="o-vr o-vr_12x" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 60px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="c-feature" style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.231; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="c-feature-bd" style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="o-poem isActive" data-view="PoemView" style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">The men that worked for England<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">They have their graves at home:<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">And birds and bees of England<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">About the cross can roam.<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;"> <br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">But they that fought for England,<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">Following a falling star,<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">Alas, alas for England<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">They have their graves afar.<br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;"> <br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">And they that rule in England, <br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">In stately conclave met, <br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">Alas, alas for England <br /></span></div><div style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">They have no graves as yet.<br /></span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="o-grid" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="o-grid-col o-grid-col_10of12" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: left; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline; width: 638.359px;"></div></div><p><span style="font-family: times;"><br /><br /></span></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-80490092932223236452024-03-15T12:47:00.001+00:002024-03-15T12:47:48.024+00:00Radio, Television, and That Man Again<p> Ever since I broke with Radio 4 and made Radio 3 my default network, with all my radios tuned to it, I have of course been a happier, healthier, wiser and saner man. Although Radio 3 has its faults – it is, after all, a branch of the BBC – it offers a musical menu that is rarely unlistenable and in its totality includes the greatest, most beautiful and soul-enriching music ever written. However, speaking as a semi-insomniac – one who has no trouble falling asleep but often finds it hard to stay that way in the small hours, and resorts to low-volume radio as a soporific – I find the musical menu on offer during those difficult hours thoroughly unsatisfactory. Whenever I turn to Radio 3 for something quiet and calming, I find that there is nothing on offer but thumping, bombastic orchestral music, symphony after symphony, concerto after concerto, with little or nothing in the way of chamber music – and, what's worse, it's mostly live, so if I have managed to nod off despite everything, I'm liable to be jolted awake by a burst of applause. This goes on right through to 6.30, when Petroc Trelawny comes on with a more varied and altogether less jolting musical menu. I've no idea why 3 fills the small hours with all those orchestral fireworks, just when 'relaxing classics' (as Classic FM likes to call its own output) are what is called for. What's worse, when in small-hours desperation I turn to Classic FM, I usually find that even they are playing the same sort of stuff as 3. Why do both networks do this? Are they going for the Antipodean audience? I wish there was a night-time radio station playing only chamber music, with maybe a bit of soothing choral stuff – I'd be tuning in to that. <br /> From radio to television (I don't suppose I'l be writing again about either any time soon) – I was astonished to discover recently that the massively 'transgressive' comedy <i>Little Britain</i> is available for all to see on one of the outlying digital channels. David Walliams and Matt Lucas's show got into a fair bit of trouble when it first went out (2003-6), but in these woke times there is not the slightest chance it would ever get made. With sketches revolving around a revolting, supposedly disabled man who is actually faking it, two unmistakably male men who insist on behaving like and being treated as 'ladies', and the extravagantly caricatured young homosexualist, Daffyd, who insists, in the teeth of all the evidence, that he's 'the only gay in the village', I think it's safe to say that <i>Little Britain</i> would be shot down in flames and Walliams and Lucas barred from polite society, at the very least. Anyway – to my point: the village in which Daffyd believes himself to be 'the only gay' is called Llanddewi-Brefi, and at first I assumed this was an invented name. Later I discovered that it is a real village in west Wales (Cardiganshire), and one of some historical importance, as the site of the sixth-century Synod of Brefi, a gathering of Welsh saints and bishops (in those days practically every bishop was a saint), and the scene of various miracles performed by, among others, St David (Dewi), the patron saint of Wales. On one occasion during the synod, the ground mysteriously rose up under David while he was preaching, allowing him to be seen and heard by the whole of the large crowd that had gathered around him. This miracle is recalled in a poem by R.S. Thomas – yes, it's that man again...<br /><br /><i>Llanddewi-Brefi</i><br /><br />One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,<br />And buy a cottage and stand at the door<br />In the long evenings, watching the moor<br />Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall<br />Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.<br />And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall<br />Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,<br />And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood<br />Preaching to the people from his secret mound,<br />A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.</p><p><br /></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-41796476429508458532024-03-14T10:12:00.001+00:002024-03-14T10:12:48.452+00:00A Word Is Born<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-_fbsFDhg9VxH0-QDg3Y5f2KTe2xaRFbUQCEW0488KWOorE8yvsYa1t5IuW_GotUysdHHMeNRij8mkYOqD_J26vmOvHDnEocCNt6X3sTpc1K0VpORLTvKu3KwcSmPxp7MrmJFHxI1gCF1i19IOT_PUMxLPhT2p1M2EWBLOXflFqPO_UXX8Gk344lCZmq/s1029/John_Herschel_by_Jula_Margaret_Cameron,_Abril_1867.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1029" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-_fbsFDhg9VxH0-QDg3Y5f2KTe2xaRFbUQCEW0488KWOorE8yvsYa1t5IuW_GotUysdHHMeNRij8mkYOqD_J26vmOvHDnEocCNt6X3sTpc1K0VpORLTvKu3KwcSmPxp7MrmJFHxI1gCF1i19IOT_PUMxLPhT2p1M2EWBLOXflFqPO_UXX8Gk344lCZmq/s400/John_Herschel_by_Jula_Margaret_Cameron,_Abril_1867.jpeg" /></a></div><p> It seems it was on this day in 1839 that the word 'photography' entered the language. The polymath – inventor, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, botanist, etc. – Sir John Herschel described, in a lecture at the Royal Society in London, a series of processes that he called 'photography', i.e. drawing with light. No one had uttered the word in public before. <br />This gives me a ready-made excuse for posting Julia Margaret Cameron's wonderful 1867 photograph of Sir John in old age – a perfect example of 'drawing with light', and surely one of the greatest portrait photographs ever taken (if 'taken' is the word – perhaps 'made' would be better). </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-37024953366097585502024-03-12T10:01:00.000+00:002024-03-12T10:01:47.551+00:00'I never took up the lancet again'<p> Talking of Keats... I've just read an essay, 'The Medical Keats', by Joseph Epstein, published in his gloriously named collection <i>In a Cardboard Belt!</i> (a reference to a line spoken by Zero Mostel's Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks's <i>The Producers</i> – 'Look at me now! Look at me now! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!'). Of course I'd always known that Keats had some medical training and could be numbered with Chekhov and Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne and Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith and Somerset Maugham in the company of writers with medical training (in which company the self-taught apothecary-physician Samuel Johnson could <i>almost</i> be counted). What I had not realised until I read Epstein's essay, was how big a part his medical training played in Keats's life, and how much of that short life it consumed: as Epstein points out, 'Six of his twenty-five years, after all, were spent in medical surroundings and training, and these represented more than half his intellectually conscious life.' He was good at medicine, too, taking a real interest in the subject and passing all his examinations – no mean feat at a time when the great majority of medical students failed and dropped out. <br /> Epstein rightly emphasises how tough Keats was, for all his extreme sensitivity. Anyone would have to be tough to endure surgical training at Guy's at that time, especially if you were assigned, as Keats was, to the worst surgeon in the hospital, William Lucas, Jr. William Hale-White (physician son of the author known as Mark Rutherford) wrote in <i>Keats as Doctor and Patient</i> (which Epstein quotes) that 'His surgical acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly performed and accompanied by much bungling if not worse.' Lucas's colleague Astley Cooper described Lucas as 'neat-handed, but rash in the extreme, cutting amongst most important parts as though they were only skin, and making us all shudder from the apprehension of his opening arteries or committing some other error'. As for conditions in the dissecting room, a contemporary of Keats's wrote that 'On entering the room, the stink was most abominable. About 20 chaps were at work, carving limbs and bodies, in all stages of putrefaction, & of all colours ... while the pupils carved them, apparently, with as much pleasure as they would carve their dinners. One ... amused himself with striking his scalpel at the maggots, as they issued from their retreats.' Such scenes seem not to have unduly disturbed the young Keats, but watching Lucas's butchery surely had an effect, and enhanced his main inhibition – the fear of doing harm. Tough though he was, Keats did not have the steely temperament and massive self-confidence needed to perform surgery, especially in those days before effective anaesthesia and antisepsis. 'My last operation,' he told his friend Charles Brown, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety; but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.' <br /> Who knows? If the young Keats had not been introduced into literary circles and decided that he must be a poet, he might well have spent the rest of his short life as a physician. Certainly, had he done so, the world would have been immeasurably poorer. </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-42565172555468404492024-03-10T11:43:00.004+00:002024-03-10T11:46:20.040+00:00The Sweet Dove Died: A Strong, Sad Book<p> So – <i>The Sweet Dove Died</i>, the Barbara Pym novel to which I turned after the harrowing experience of reading <i>The Blood of the Lamb</i>. <i>The Sweet Dove Died </i>was written in the Sixties, when Pym's star had sunk far below the horizon of fashionable taste, was rejected by 21 publishers in all (even when she sent it in under a male name), and finally published in 1978, after the great Pym revival occasioned by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both naming her, in a <i>TLS</i> feature, as the most underrated novelist of the century. <br /> The version of the novel published in 1978 differed from its original form, partly in response to Larkin's helpful suggestions: 'With fewer characters and slower movement,' he advised, 'it could be a strong, sad book.' And a strong, sad book it is, also one with rather few characters (and not many pages: it comes in at a bit over 180). The central character is Leonora Eyre, an elegant and attractive middle-aged woman who is taken up by Humphrey Boyce, a pompous upmarket antique dealer, and his ineffectual but personable nephew James, a young man of ambiguous sexuality who has lost both his parents and been, in effect, adopted by Humphrey: 'There was something about the idea of an orphan that brought out the best in Humphrey, that desire to do good without too much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us.' Leonora is only too happy to be taken up by Humphrey and James, the former offering a convenient and conventional relationship (though the fastidious Leonora flinches from the prospect of sex with him), the latter something more emotionally satisfying and flattering to her self-image. Between Humphrey's assiduous wooing and James's undemanding adoration, Leonora is in just the kind of situation she likes, with a little world spinning devotedly around her. She is, as we gradually discover, self-centred and self-serving to a quite alarming degree, happy to behave ruthlessly in her own interests, while all the time convinced she is doing absolutely the right thing: whatever serves to keep her little world spinning to her satisfaction can only be the right thing, surely. <br /> However, the cosy Humphrey-Leonora-James triangle comes under threat from outside, in the shape of the dangerously amoral Ned, an American whom James meets on his travels. On Leonora's first meeting with him, she feels an instant, cool antagonism, which turns to something more troubling when Ned pointedly quotes to her the seemingly innocuous little poem by Keats from which Pym's novel takes its title: 'I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving...' Ned goes on, 'his voice lingering over the words and giving them a curious emphasis. "O, what could it <i>grieve</i> for? Its feet were <i>tied</i>/With a single thread of my <i>own hand's</i> weaving."' Leonora is right to sense danger...<br /> <i>The Sweet Dove Died</i> darkens towards the end, and has little of the high comedy of her earlier works, but it has real depth, is full of acute observation, and, with its strongly drawn characters and tight, well managed plot, it makes for a richly satisfying read. I'd rate it very high among Pym's novels. And to think – if it hadn't been for Larkin and Cecil, we'd never have heard of it.</p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-1436768270809862742024-03-08T11:09:00.000+00:002024-03-08T11:09:03.614+00:00Heroic Futility, and R.S.T.<p> My Facebook activity is sporadic (life's too short, etc.) and pretty random, but I do have spurts of activity from time to time. One of these recently resulted in me joining something called the Dull Men's Club. The stimulus – hardly the appropriate word – was a piece describing one man's heroically futile journey, by plane, train and automobile, all the way from the West coast of Scotland to Stourbridge in the West Midlands with the sole purpose of taking a ride on the Stourbridge Shuttle, Britain's shortest – and probably dullest – branch line, four-fifths of a mile between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town, a three-minute journey each way. An account of this adventure appeared under the aegis of the Dull Men's Club, and turned up out of nowhere on my Facebook feed. When I wanted to find it again, it had of course disappeared, so I threw caution to the wind and joined the Dull Men's Club. Or rather, as I later discovered, I joined one of at least three Facebook groups that go by that name (and between them have a worryingly large following) – and of course it was not the one that had carried the post I was looking for. Since then I have found <a href="https://uk.news.yahoo.com/train-fan-makes-18-hour-192800548.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAE0cjWBaT4Yqtqu0czHkiforyDXiYmKTEfiYskVjshaw8FZZcMQmTx3i2GwvcJZ8M5eqslqJFnfvRALpoi7tHjl0GaAbyxxaUcOemNkaQ1jDf5mvixWPX78JiEvNRhhwNoWpA8F2AxEuZNaZJBFBVLfQDTe2QWT7fZkt5L0p8dKm#:~:text=The%20Stourbridge%20Shuttle's%20route%20is,from%20a%20larger%20main%20line.">this report</a>, which gives the gist of the story, but is doesn't have the particular flavour of Neil Hughes's original first-person account. <br /> Meanwhile, I've found that the Dull Men's Club (UK Chapter) does come up with some good, magnificently dull stuff, which I do find strangely amusing. I should say in my defence that I also recently joined an R.S. Thomas group (guaranteed to crack a smile), Dutch Golden Century Painters, UK Butterflies, Pursuing the Pre-Raphaelites, Painters from the North (i.e. Scandinavia) and other reputable groups. Not to mention my long-standing membership of the estimable Edinburgh Salon. But who could resist the saga of the Stourbridge Shuttle? Not me.<br /> And talking of R.S. Thomas, here is the poem for today, a sonnet – 'Young and Old'<br /><br />Cold sea, cold sky:<br />This is how age looks<br />At a thing. The people natter,<br />The wind blows. Nothing they do<br />Is of worth. The Great problems<br />Remain, stubborn, unsolved.<br />Man leaves his footprints<br />Momentarily on a vast shore.<br /><br />And the tide comes,<br />That the children play with.<br />Ours are the first questions<br />They shelve. The wind is the blood<br />In their veins. Above them the aircraft<br />Domesticate the huge sky.</p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-19019220412802729582024-03-06T09:39:00.000+00:002024-03-06T09:39:06.023+00:00Novels<p> My recent fiction reading has been something of a rollercoaster ride. Reeling from the impact of the horrific <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/search?q=Lord+Jim+at+Home">Lord Jim at Home</a>, I took refuge in P.G. Wodehouse, whose works are a sovran balm for most of life's ills. I read and enjoyed <i>Service with a Smile</i> (1961), a Blandings novel in which the eternally youthful Uncle Fred sorts out a range of knotty problems presented by various combinations of misunderstandings, impostures, disapproving aunts and crossed wires, all to universal satisfaction – service with a smile indeed. I laughed several times in every chapter – what more could you ask? With my spirits restored, I next took from the shelf a volume I had been meaning to read for some while – Peter de Vries's <i>The Blood of the Lamb</i>. A long time ago – it would have been in the late Seventies and early Eighties – I was a huge fan of Peter de Vries's comic novels, reading them voraciously, and I know that at some point I did read <i>The Blood of the Lamb</i>, but I cannot remember how I responded, nor had I remembered anything about the book itself. I think now that, at the time, it simply bounced off me: I was too young.<br /> The fine line between comedy and tragedy has often been remarked upon, and it's commonly said that the best comedy comes edged with something dark, even tragic (which clearly does not apply to P.G. Wodehouse). It's certainly true that few writers can write equally convincingly in the comic and the tragic mode, especially in the course of a single work – yet that is what De Vries does in <i>The Blood of the Lamb</i>, which is, for much of its length, an essentially comic novel, but one in which tragedy strikes again and again: I can't recall another modern novel in which so many leading characters die (most of them, in this case, of a single affliction – TB). The narrator is one Don Wanderhope, raised in a strict Dutch Reformed household in Chicago, and his voice is much like that of any other Peter De Vries narrator, except that while telling his tale he is engaged in an epic argument, a battle even, with God, the God who could allow all these cruel deaths to happen. For about the first two thirds of the book, the comedy somehow remains dominant, despite all that is going on, but the rest of the novel is something else, something utterly heartbreaking, at times almost unbearably so. A reviewer in the TLS wrote that 'those who have laughed with De Vries in the past and during this book will not begrudge him their tears'. And I did not begrudge him mine, but once again I was left shaken and in need of a fictional calmative. <br /> Happily I found just the thing on the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop – a Barbara Pym that I hadn't read, <i>The Sweet Dove Died</i>. I'm about two thirds of the way through, and loving it. I'll probably have more to say about it soon...</p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-47686844983590279932024-03-04T14:24:00.000+00:002024-03-04T14:24:16.474+00:00'Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk'<p> Slim volumes of Thom Gunn's verse keep turning up in the charity bookshops that I visit, and I invariably snap them up (quite aside from the contents, which I have only come to appreciate in recent years, they are beautifully designed Faber paperbacks – the legacy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Wolpe">Berthold Wolpe</a> – a joy to handle, and they take up very little shelf space). My latest buy was <i>The Passages of Joy</i> (1982) – a Johnsonian title, taken from <i>The Vanity of Human Wishes</i>: 'Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy'. Leafing through it, I found 'Keats at Highgate', a sonnet recalling Keats's fortuitous meeting with Coleridge on Hampstead Heath in April 1819. Here's the story as related by Coleridge, writing, with the premonitory wisdom of hindsight, years after the event (1832):<br /><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times;"><span style="color: #333333;">'A loose, slack, and not well dressed youth, met Mr. — and myself in a lane near Highgate. — knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he ran back and said: “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” — “There is death in that hand,” I said to —, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.'</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times;">And here is the story as told by Keats, in the midst of a long letter to his brother and sister-in-law, soon after the event. His account – very different from Coleridge's – rings perfectly true, and includes a wonderfully vivid description of what it must have been like to be subjected to the unstoppable Coleridge in full flow: <br /><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times;">'Last Sunday I took a Walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield's park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator at Guy's in conversation with Coleridge – I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable – I</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: times;">walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things—let me see if I can give you a list—Nightingales, Poetry—on Poetical sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied by a sense of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: times;">touch – single and double touch – A dream related – First and second consciousness – the difference explained between will and Volition – so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness – Monsters – the Kraken – Mermaids – Southey believed in them – Southey's belief too much diluted – A Ghost story – Good morning – I heard his voice as he came towards me – I heard it as he moved away – I had heard it all the interval – if it may be called so.'<br /><br />And here, finally, is Thom Gunn's sonnet: </span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(51, 51, 51, 0.7); margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #333333; margin: 0px 0px 1.6842em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b><i>Keats at Highgate</i></b></span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #333333; margin: 0px 0px 1.6842em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">A cheerful youth joined Coleridge on his walk<br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">(“Loose,” noted Coleridge, “slack, and not well-dressed”)<br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk<br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">Of First and Second Consciousness, then pressed<br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">The famous hand with warmth and sauntered back<br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">Homeward in his own state of less dispersed<br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">More passive consciousness – passive, not slack,<br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">Whether of Secondary type or First.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #333333; margin: 0px 0px 1.6842em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times;">He made his way toward Hampstead so alert<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />He hardly passed the small grey ponds below<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Or watched a sparrow pecking in the dirt<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Without some insight swelling the mind’s flow<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />That banks made swift. Everything put to use.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose.</span></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-31282022436924196362024-03-03T17:54:00.002+00:002024-03-03T17:54:41.205+00:00Searle's War<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJlJhyphenhyphenumju-RKhUzgVpYWCCyheyEOHgruW8iOUDnaUaixkWeYO57fWYjGgSk5C4ACQEUE8FJzJ2RXL-cGZhzsf2Hl_U424DGIpx6Pc6jrzJnq2r800qpKJ8WPpbvjTD19dwFJ6hMOgRhkda4HAkHqDM8HoBES6X7PPAkkegIrLfjGbr99EC1M8htn21DFB/s800/In_the_Jungle_-_Working_on_a_Cutting._Rock_Clearing_after_Blasting_Art.IWMART1574787.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="626" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJlJhyphenhyphenumju-RKhUzgVpYWCCyheyEOHgruW8iOUDnaUaixkWeYO57fWYjGgSk5C4ACQEUE8FJzJ2RXL-cGZhzsf2Hl_U424DGIpx6Pc6jrzJnq2r800qpKJ8WPpbvjTD19dwFJ6hMOgRhkda4HAkHqDM8HoBES6X7PPAkkegIrLfjGbr99EC1M8htn21DFB/s400/In_the_Jungle_-_Working_on_a_Cutting._Rock_Clearing_after_Blasting_Art.IWMART1574787.jpg" /></a></div><p> Today is Ronald Searle's birthday. He was born in 1920, and died at a grand old age in 2011 (an event marked <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2012/01/ronald-searle.html">on this blog</a>). It was amazing, going on miraculous, that he even made it through his twenties: serving with the Royal Engineers in Singapore in 1942, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and spent the next three years in the notorious Changi jail, at various camps, and working in the Kwai jungle on the even more notorious Burma railway, the well named 'Death Railway'. He contracted beriberi, dysentery and malaria, among other afflictions, was frequently beaten, and, like all the prisoners of the Japanese, kept on starvation rations. And through it all he drew, on whatever scraps of paper he could come by, recording what was going on around him, even though he knew he would have faced almost certain death if his drawings were discovered. A fellow prisoner described Searle at work: 'If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren't revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being.' <br /> Searle hid his drawings, often under the mattresses of fellow prisoners dying of cholera, hoping that the Japanese guards would be too fearful of infection to go near those beds. Astonishingly, some 400 of his drawings survived the war – and so did Searle, who went on to have a glittering career as an illustrator. Most of his PoW drawings are now in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, a valuable record of the brutality visited on their prisoners by the Japanese. They are remarkable not only for their skill but for their calm, dispassionate documentation of the often horrific scenes he recorded; there is none of the expressionistic anguish you might expect. More about this remarkable body of work, about Searle's war, and about the illustrated memoir he subsequently wrote, <i>To the Kwai and Back</i>, can be found <a href="https://illustrationchronicles.com/the-war-drawings-of-ronald-searle">here</a>.</p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-31229964557891421232024-03-01T11:41:00.001+00:002024-03-01T11:41:33.695+00:00March<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6u_obRSGcDFnVWxStcTQ3QxaBsOPd0FeVa66uKNJAGO5laai-XjOUbnjXVgoY3XaFxrQwJfjOvHr27Hv0SHYc_xKiOM7ibizPddI1S_BUVDLDQqtqpcNNO9QykbTCb07jOBKJknwbPAmg-j7RabVtZx2727KrVPpfrq7CXYvSc2iqwMlzT6NX3eXbEdr5/s599/Beeny%20Cliff.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="508" data-original-width="599" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6u_obRSGcDFnVWxStcTQ3QxaBsOPd0FeVa66uKNJAGO5laai-XjOUbnjXVgoY3XaFxrQwJfjOvHr27Hv0SHYc_xKiOM7ibizPddI1S_BUVDLDQqtqpcNNO9QykbTCb07jOBKJknwbPAmg-j7RabVtZx2727KrVPpfrq7CXYvSc2iqwMlzT6NX3eXbEdr5/s400/Beeny%20Cliff.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p> The first day of March (St David's Day), so here is a March poem – indeed a poem of two Marches, in which Thomas Hardy, writing in 1913, looks back to the March day in 1870 when he and his new love, Emma Gifford, rode out to Beeny Cliff (in Cornwall), he on a bicycle, she on horseback 'with bright hair flapping free'. She was a bold horsewoman, and remembered in later life '<span style="font-family: times;">scampering up and down the hills on my beloved mare alone, wanting no protection, the rain going
down my back. … The villagers stopped to gaze when I rushed down the hills … for no one dared
except myself to ride in such wild fearless fashion.' Poor Emma made the mistake of marrying Hardy: it was a notably unhappy relationship, partly because of her increasing eccentricity and delusions of grandeur, partly because of his difficult personality. After she died in November 1912, Hardy's mind went back to the early days of their relationship, when there was still some chance of happiness. He revisited the scenes of their romance, and wrote some of his best poetry in the elegiac sequence published as <i>Poems of 1912-13</i>, from which this one is taken... </span></p><p><b>Beeny Cliff</b></p><p><i>March 1870 - March 1913</i></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #414850; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,<br />And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –<br />The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.<br /></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #414850; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away<br />In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,<br />As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.<br /></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #414850; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,<br />And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,<br />And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.<br /></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #414850; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,<br />And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,<br />And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?<br /></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #414850; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,<br />The woman now is – elsewhere – whom the ambling pony bore,<br />And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #414850; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #414850; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">['Mews', by the way, are gulls.]</span></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-39714234637255502352024-02-28T13:28:00.001+00:002024-02-28T13:28:54.868+00:00To London<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Wc3wGKFUxHIY02f0i74no6WUDugbeI7xSg1uHp14VUdQsJ9O07tAJEcKIln7CWqjhLySQS1BDzdsxCkXiLmsB74LNIX7rD2P1q8Izl-Xo8yhkizmf2nWnA28sDYaewZTxuy6iOqSw1-dc_ZHX8EZksMKvMif4QLYB71SPtoGKRlrQaMoW8NDhCjahkfo/s1280/Degas%20green.webp" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Wc3wGKFUxHIY02f0i74no6WUDugbeI7xSg1uHp14VUdQsJ9O07tAJEcKIln7CWqjhLySQS1BDzdsxCkXiLmsB74LNIX7rD2P1q8Izl-Xo8yhkizmf2nWnA28sDYaewZTxuy6iOqSw1-dc_ZHX8EZksMKvMif4QLYB71SPtoGKRlrQaMoW8NDhCjahkfo/s400/Degas%20green.webp" width="400" /></a></div><p> Yesterday I entrained for the Metropolis to meet and lunch with An Old Friend (my best old friend). In the afternoon we visited the Royal Academy exhibition 'Impressionists on Paper' (hurry hurry, ends 10 March). It's a crowd-pulling title for an exhibition of works mostly by <i>post</i>-impressionists (Degas, Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec) or never-impressionists (Odilon Redon, for heaven's sake). Also, while I'm being pedantic, not all the works are on paper. A more accurate title would have been 'Works, Chiefly Drawings and Pastels, from Late Nineteenth-Century France' – that would have had the punters queuing round the block. <br /> Anyway, quibbles aside, this smallish exhibition (three rooms) includes half a dozen stunning pastels by Degas, a handful of lovely watercolour studies by Cézanne, and a couple of brilliant Toulouse-Lautrecs, and these alone would be worth the visit. As would the picture that dominates the first room, and is indeed facing you, unignorably, when you walk through the door – a study of a yawning dancer, drawn on a background of shocking acid green, a green you have to see to believe. This, and other works of his on show, confirm Kenneth Clark's judgment, if it needed confirming, that Degas was indeed 'the greatest draughtsman since the high renaissance'. <br /> On my way towards lunch, I took a turn around Soho Square, and noticed a feature that I had somehow missed, or forgotten, until now – the statue of Charles II by Caius Gabriel Cibber. It is much battered, mutilated and restored, but still has considerable presence. Originally the centrepiece of a grand Baroque fountain, it ended up at Grim's Dyke near Harrow Weald, the home of W.S. Gilbert, whose widow, long after Gilbert's death, returned it to Soho Square. I have written about Cibber before, e.g. <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-monument-and-walk.html">here</a>, and indeed his wonderful Sackville monument at Withyham is featured in <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mother-Beauty-Nigel-Andrew/dp/1953882153/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=gM0S0&content-id=amzn1.sym.f4bf6248-c25e-4846-ab32-07f8b3e1cc4d%3Aamzn1.symc.afd86303-4a72-4e34-8f6b-19828329e602&pf_rd_p=f4bf6248-c25e-4846-ab32-07f8b3e1cc4d&pf_rd_r=C33TMX5DG0N49B7RFA1J&pd_rd_wg=8rWbr&pd_rd_r=f1047530-d3a4-48db-8308-96a3aded1a6e&ref_=pd_gw_ci_mcx_mr_hp_atf_m">This Book.</a>..</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSNlfGzefHD9YhKxFFipEwx_WSKaMeIX_6lOhbeL4UawToq3Cr5dGuCv_Z0ZeKb4laPdhNL3qg8w9y63pDACPSCAGYAuWcOrncjZumZphWFhhNC2kIYRFogrDlyP8ZfNam23bW6vpyar6Qc9eZ8BS5i8DTwcZ2-EP2KzicdWzks82JFo9kyZuWMErqThVt/s320/Chas%20II%20CIbber.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSNlfGzefHD9YhKxFFipEwx_WSKaMeIX_6lOhbeL4UawToq3Cr5dGuCv_Z0ZeKb4laPdhNL3qg8w9y63pDACPSCAGYAuWcOrncjZumZphWFhhNC2kIYRFogrDlyP8ZfNam23bW6vpyar6Qc9eZ8BS5i8DTwcZ2-EP2KzicdWzks82JFo9kyZuWMErqThVt/s400/Chas%20II%20CIbber.jpeg"/></a></div>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-40797514112694161482024-02-26T11:22:00.002+00:002024-02-26T11:22:45.543+00:00Bridge<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM07MOEZZwssVRya-LK21DP5mFO-LZfJ02_YylOCmyRdQUfFd0BTOFS2nOOJSwo9gIMSrRbiXFLiH0yu0TqCrnQvr8uI515I3UghnZEBApo3LMiu179ZdiSe6DymbjfTYoZXsEa-05jlLXJUkxsh_tb89E15Zekix7yXzzlDrSnUnS1v6GK3T6lRVYqPrC/s1191/Frank-Bridge-Profile.jpeg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1191" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM07MOEZZwssVRya-LK21DP5mFO-LZfJ02_YylOCmyRdQUfFd0BTOFS2nOOJSwo9gIMSrRbiXFLiH0yu0TqCrnQvr8uI515I3UghnZEBApo3LMiu179ZdiSe6DymbjfTYoZXsEa-05jlLXJUkxsh_tb89E15Zekix7yXzzlDrSnUnS1v6GK3T6lRVYqPrC/s200/Frank-Bridge-Profile.jpeg" /></a></div><p> Born on this day in 1879 was the composer, musician and snappy dresser Frank Bridge, who taught Benjamin Britten, and was greatly admired by his pupil, who championed his music and paid musical homage in his <i>Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge</i>. When Britten sailed for America in 1939, Bridge gave him his 1843 Giussani viola, bidding him <i>bon voyage et bon retour</i>. Bridge died in 1941, never seeing Britten, or his Giussani, again. <br /> I can't pretend to know much of Bridge's music, though I like most of what I have heard. However, when I was learning piano, I managed to just about play 'Rosemary', the second of his <i>Three Sketches</i>. Hearing it today takes me back to my piano teacher's study, with its soft-toned Blüthner, its heavy Arts & Crafts decor and lingering smell of pipe smoke and tweed... </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MrBbf21-WsM" width="320" youtube-src-id="MrBbf21-WsM"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-35182728383137444302024-02-23T12:01:00.001+00:002024-02-23T12:03:04.155+00:00'I can scarcely bid you good bye...'<p><span style="font-family: times;"> On this day in 1821, John Keats died, of consumption, in Rome. He was just 25 years old, and the loss to English poetry, let alone to those who loved him, was incalculable. This heartbreaking document (addressed to Charles Brown, his closest friend) is the last letter he wrote...</span></p><blockquote style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-style: italic; margin: 40px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 28px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Rome. 30 November 1820.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 28px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">My dear Brown,</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 28px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">‘Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book, – yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been – but it appears to me – however, I will not speak of that subject. I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from Chichester – how unfortunate – and to pass on the river too! There was my star predominant! I cannot answer any thing in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, – and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of. my life. There is one thought enough to kill me – I have been well, healthy, alert &c, walking with her – and now – the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture, – but you must bring your philosophy to bear – as I do mine, really – or how should I be able to live? Dr Clarke is very attentive to me; he says, there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George, – for it runs in my head we shall all die young. I have not written to x x x x x yet, which he must think very neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven. I shall write to x x x to-morrow, or next day. I will write to x x x x x in the middle of next week. Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell x x x x I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; – and also a note to my sister – who walks about my imagination like a ghost – she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 28px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">God bless you !<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />John Keats.</span></p><div><br /></div></blockquote>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-48718981061475383962024-02-22T14:22:00.002+00:002024-02-22T14:22:41.030+00:00Life Among the Dead<p> I see the dear old Church of England, in the person of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/11/bishop-of-norwich-calls-for-churchyards-to-be-rewilded">Bishop of Norwich,</a> is calling for the 'rewilding' of churchyards, in the interests of 'biodiversity'. Well, I don't know where the Bishop has been these past few decades, but the kind of measures he recommends – maintaining 'wild' areas in such a way as to encourage a wide range of wildlife – have been practised in a great many churchyards for some years. In many places this is done well, in others not so well (the key being to mow two or three times a year at the right times). Left to itself, land is very unlikely to 'rewild' in a way that encourages biodiversity, but will rather turn into unattractive and inhospitable scrub, dominated by the most thuggishly invasive plant species. The romantic idea that all will be well if you just let Nature take over is delusional, as is the idea that planting trees in quantity is bound to be a Good Thing (they have to be the right trees, properly sourced, in the right place and in appropriate numbers). There is more on the subject of nature in churchyards in <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mother-Beauty-Nigel-Andrew/dp/1953882153/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=DAWB0&content-id=amzn1.sym.f4bf6248-c25e-4846-ab32-07f8b3e1cc4d%3Aamzn1.symc.afd86303-4a72-4e34-8f6b-19828329e602&pf_rd_p=f4bf6248-c25e-4846-ab32-07f8b3e1cc4d&pf_rd_r=7QDS8JNCXTNP89R4BXAQ&pd_rd_wg=PANzw&pd_rd_r=c668008e-16f2-4c8f-9767-5b7ed7b1556e&ref_=pd_gw_ci_mcx_mr_hp_atf_m">This Book</a>, and I also recommend <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2020/03/silent-mansions.html">this one</a>, which I reviewed a while back. <br /> As it happens, I had early experience of a rewilded (albeit involuntarily rewilded) churchyard when I first moved to the erstwhile Suburban Demiparadise. The extensive churchyard was in an advanced state of neglect, well on its way to becoming a miniature version of the old Highgate cemetery, which in those days was an all but impenetrable jungle. The state of the churchyard reflected the state of the parish, where the eccentric, ultra-High-Church incumbent had driven away virtually all his flock – no mean feat in the days when most people still went to church. Anyway, that overgrown graveyard made a great wild playground, with a slight edge of danger (always welcome), for us children, but it was not to last: the churchyard was in due course tamed, kept neatly mowed, then gradually maintained more loosely, so that parts of it indeed became flourishing little hubs of biodiversity where I had many a happy butterfly encounter. And now I live in Lichfield, where the great churchyard of St Michael's (where<a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-other-philip-larkin.html"> Larkins and Johnsons</a> lie) is a perfect mix of functioning cemetery and carefully managed nature reserve. The Bishop of Norwich would surely approve.</p><p> </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-891812903599046682024-02-20T15:37:00.000+00:002024-02-20T15:37:03.239+00:00'Simply because I have no seniors...'<p> Here is another poem from the <a href="http://nigeness.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-dwindling-body-of-ageing-fish.html">Listener anthology</a>. In it, Gavin Ewart – whom I've written about before, e.g. <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-warming-to-us-all.html">here </a>and <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2019/12/ewart-is-very-frivolous-and-brittle.html">here</a> – looks forward, with tongue very firmly in cheek, to a future in which he is a grand old man of English poetry, a national treasure and object of literary pilgrimage, like Tennyson and Hardy, both of whom he cleverly parodies in the course of the poem ...<br /><br /><i>2001 – The Tennyson/Hardy Poem</i></p><p>When I am old and long turned grey<br />And enjoy the aura of being eighty,<br />I may see the dawn of that critical day<br />When my lightest verse will seem quite weighty.<br />I shall live somewhere far away,<br />Where the illiterate birds are nesting.<br />To the pilgrim admirers my wife will say:<br /> Ewart is resting.</p><p>Instead of the heedless sensual play<br />And the youthful eyes of love and brightness<br />I shall see critics who kneel and pray<br />In homage – I shan't dispute their rightness –<br />And Supplements keen to seem okay<br />Will flatter me with fulsome pieces.<br />Scholars will put it another way:<br /> Ewart's a thesis.<br /><br />When the aching back and the bleary eye<br />And the dimness and the rational drinking,<br />The cold unease of the earth and sky,<br />Leave me no pleasure except thinking,<br />I shall be warmed (but what will be 'I'?)<br />With the awe inspired by what's Jurassic,<br />And people will say, before I die:<br /> Ewart's a classic.<br /><br />Soon comes the day when the stream runs dry<br />And the boat runs back as the tide is turning,<br />The voice once strong no more than a sigh<br />By the hearth where the fire is scarcely burning.<br />Stiff in my chair like a children's guy,<br />Simply because I have no seniors<br />The literati will raise the cry: <br /> Ewart's a genius!</p><p>In the event, Ewart didn't quite make it to eighty, dying in 1995 at the age of 79. In his obituary, Anthony Thwaite described him as 'one of the oddest poetic phenomena of his time'. Which I suppose he was, but also one of the most cheering.</p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-40423032724048156212024-02-18T17:24:00.001+00:002024-02-18T17:24:58.544+00:00An Unfortunate Frog<p> As I set out for a restorative stroll this afternoon, I noticed a man kneeling in the road, apparently scraping something up. I recognised him – an extravagantly dreadlocked chap with whom I'm on cordial nodding terms – and, as I came up level with him, I saw what he was up to. He was dealing with the sorry remains of a frog that had fallen foul of a passing motor car – and with the considerable quantity of spawn that the frog, clearly a gravid female, had been carrying. As he scraped up the last of the frogspawn, into a Tupperware container, we agreed that it would be a good idea if he released it all, along with what was left of its progenitor, into one of Lichfield's many ponds and waterways. At worst, it would be food for other creatures, and with luck some of that spawn might hatch out into tadpoles; the unfortunate frog might not have died in vain. <br />All of which reminds me, inevitably, of Mrs Leo Hunter's immortal 'Ode to an Expiring Frog' (as featured in the <i>Pickwick Papers</i>) – <br /><br /><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">'Can I view thee panting, lying</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">On thy stomach, without sighing;</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Can I unmoved see thee dying</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">On a log,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Expiring frog!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Say, have fiends in shape of boys,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">With wild halloo, and brutal noise,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Hunted thee from marshy joys,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">With a dog,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Expiring frog!'</span></span></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-1852334518409913542024-02-16T17:36:00.001+00:002024-02-16T17:36:44.574+00:00May, 1945<p> That fine, all but forgotten poet Peter Porter would have been 95 today. In an effort to keep his memory alive, I've written about him quite often on this blog – e.g. <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-porter-birthday.html">here </a>and <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2019/02/peter-porter.html">here</a> – and posted several of his shorter poems. Here, to mark the day, is another, a Petrarchan sonnet about the bitter end of the Nazi regime: <br /><br /><i>May, 1945<br /></i><br />As the Allied tanks trod Germany to shard<br />and no man had seen a fresh-pressed uniform<br />for six months, as the fire storm<br />bit out the core of Dresden yard by yard,<br /><br />as farmers hid turnips for the after-war,<br />as cadets going to die passed Waffen SS<br />tearing identifications from their battledress,<br />the Russians only three days from the Brandenburger Tor –<br /><br />in the very hell of sticks and blood and brick dust<br />as Germany the phoenix burned, the wraith<br />of History pursed its lips and spoke, thus:<br /><br />To go with teeth and toes and human soap,<br />the radio will broadcast Bruckner's Eighth<br />so that good and evil may die in equal hope.</p><p>(Actually it was the Adagietto from Bruckner's Seventh – written in response to Wagner's death – that was played on German radio on the first day of May, 1945. Hearing it, the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who was working for the BBC World Service, inferred that it must mean Hitler was dead, and immediately informed Churchill. He was right. Porter makes the Seventh the Eighth to achieve the necessary near-rhyme with 'wraith' – justifiable poetic licence, I think.)</p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-26105544358787861032024-02-15T14:55:00.000+00:002024-02-15T14:55:13.147+00:00And So It Begins...<p>... the butterfly year, that is (you guessed!). This morning was uncommonly mild, no-coat mild, the first such day of the year, and it certainly felt like the kind of morning on which something should be flying. A few bumblebees certainly were, and the odd ladybird, but it was a while before I finally saw it (in the Peace Woodland in Beacon Park) – my first butterfly of the year! It was, as so often, a male Brimstone, bright and fresh from his hibernation and energetically ranging a bank of ivy. My heart, in the manner of the poet Wordsworth but from a different cause, leapt up. Winter is over – at least in the sense of the season without butterflies: meteorological winter might well make itself felt again (it was a mild Candlemas, which is supposed to mean that winter weather will surely return). What's more, the no-butterfly season has been unusually short this time, les than three months: last year I didn't see a butterfly here in Lichfield until April, a good seven weeks later than today's sighting. Oh, and I spotted another Brimstone soon after, in a front garden, so it was a day of double delight. </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-9890321712512997862024-02-14T15:26:00.001+00:002024-02-14T15:26:58.877+00:00Careers Advice<p> As a former librarian, I was amused to come across this little anecdote in a book I'm reading (for review) about John Carter and Graham Pollard, the bibliographical sleuths who exposed the notorious book forger (and thief) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_James_Wise">Thomas James Wise</a>. When Carter, a debonair Etonian with a taste for book collecting, came down from King's College, Cambridge, he had no clear idea what to do next... <br />'At first, he seems to have contemplated librarianship. A chance conversation with Bodleian librarian, Arthur Cowley, soon disabused him of that notion. The money might seem acceptable for a young man fresh out of university, Cowley explained, "but what do you suppose you will be getting when you are forty, and irretrievably addicted to wine, women and song?" The older man gave an embittered little snort. "Go away, my dear boy, and think again."'<br /> As it happens, I left librarianship at the age of forty. </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-88921839323742464032024-02-12T17:42:00.001+00:002024-02-12T17:43:09.343+00:00Kingsley's Coming of Age<p> Here is another from the <i>Listener</i> anthology. It's by Kingsley Amis, but I can't give you a date as, frustratingly, the poems in the volume are not dated (they seem to be arranged chronologically by date of birth of the poets represented, which is not very helpful). Anyway, it's a clever piece, whose relaxed air disguises a rhyme scheme of fiendish complexity: I think it goes like this – abacbdecfdeghfgh. <br /><br /><b>Coming of Age</b><br /><br />Twenty years ago he slipped into town,<br />A spiritual secret agent; took<br />Rooms right in the cathedral close; wrote down<br />Verbatim all their direst idioms;<br />Made phonetic transcripts in his black book;<br />Mimicked their dress, their gestures as they sat<br />Chaffering and chaffing in the Grand Hotel;<br />Infiltrated their glass-and-plastic homes, <br />Watched from the inside; then – his deadliest blow –<br />Went and married one of them (what about that?);<br />At the first christening played his part so well<br />That he started living it from then on,<br />His trick of camouflage no longer a trick.<br />Isn't it a spy's rarest triumph to grow<br />Indistinguishable from the spied-upon,<br />The stick insect's to become a stick?<br /><br /></p><p>Clearly there's something of the confessional about this one: Amis was a famously brilliant mimic who did indeed transcribe the speech of his targets phonetically, as in this merciless account of a lecture by one of his Oxford <i>bêtes noires</i>, Lord David Cecil –<br /><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;">Laze . . . laze and gentlemen, when we say a man looks like a poet . . . dough mean . . . looks like Chauthah . . . dough mean . . . looks like Dwyden . . . dough mean . . . looks like Theckthpyum</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;"> (or something else barely recognisable as 'Shakespeare') . . . </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;">Mean looks like Shelley</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;"> (pronounced 'Thellem' or thereabouts). </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;">Matthew Arnold</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;"> (then Prestissimo) </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;">called Shelley beautiful ineffectual angel Matthew Arnold had face </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;">(rallentando) </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555544;">like a horth. But my subject this morning is not the poet Shelley. Jane . . . Austen . . . '</span><br /></span>To some extent, in <i>Coming of Age</i>, Amis is perhaps describing himself becoming much like the very people he once mocked and satirised, but perhaps he is also seeing himself as one who so successfully cultivated a persona that he became indistinguishable from it, as one who 'wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it' (in Orwell's phrase). </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-59098310898250716872024-02-10T13:05:00.003+00:002024-02-20T15:37:44.370+00:00A Dwindling Body of Ageing Fish<p> For several years in the early 1980s, and some more in the late 1980s, I was radio critic for the late lamented <i>Listener</i>. My nominal editor was the genial and very well connected Derwent May, the literary editor, but I had been appointed by the new-broom magazine editor, Russell Twisk, who clearly wanted to shake things up. Though he was cordial enough to me, it was clear that Derwent would sooner have had almost anyone but a young gadfly like me writing the radio column, and who can blame him? He was, anyway, an excellent literary editor, and during his reign at <i>The Listener</i> (he left in 1986 and was succeeded by Lynne Truss) published some very fine poems. As it happens, I have just come across a volume called <i>The Music of What Happens: Poems from The Listener 1965-1980</i>, edited by Derwent May (BBC, 1981), and it's a mighty impressive anthology. It includes, for example, four of Larkin's best, all originally published in the pages of <i>The Listener </i>– 'Cut Grass', 'How Distant', 'The Explosion' and 'The Old Fools'. I fancy I'll be dipping into it quite often, and maybe posting some of the choicer items.<br /> Stevie Smith was one of May's regulars. In the introduction to the anthology, he recalls that 'Stevie Smith, when she was alive, would send me her new poems neatly typed out, but accompanied often by a torn scrap of paper with a witty, spiky drawing on one side, and a discarded draft of another poem on the back. It was Stevie who told me that the first line of her poem 'Friends of the River Trent' – 'A dwindling body of ageing fish' – was copied from a news item she saw in the <i>Angling Times</i> in a doctor's waiting-room.' And here it is: <br /><br /><b>Friends of the River Trent</b><br />(<i>at their annual dinner</i>)<br /><br />A dwindling body of ageing fish<br />Is all we can present<br />Because of water pollution<br />In the River Trent<br />Because of water pollution, my boys,<br />And a lack of concerted action,<br />These fish of what they used to be<br />Is only a measly fraction<br />A-swimming about most roomily<br />Where they shoved each other before,<br />Yet not beefing about being solitary<br />Or the sparseness of the fare.<br />Then three cheers for the ageing fish, my boys,<br />Content in polluted depths<br />To grub up enough food, my boys,<br />To carry 'em to a natural death,<br />And may we do the same, my boys,<br />And carry us to a natural death.</p><p>That one reminded me of another fishing-related poem with a title plucked from an unlikely source – this one by Kay Ryan:<br /><br /><b>When Fishing Fails</b></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Your husband is very lucky," observed Smithers,<br />"to have ornithology to fall back upon when fishing fails."</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">— Cyril Hare, </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Death Is No Sportsman</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">When fishing fails, when no bait avails,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">and nothing speaks in liquid hints</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">of where the fishes went for weeks,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">and dimpled ponds and silver creeks</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">go flat and tarnish, it's nice if</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">you can finish up your sandwich,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">pack your thermos, and ford</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">this small hiatus towards</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">a second mild and absorbing purpose.</span><span style="color: #333333;"><i><br /></i></span><br /></span><br /></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-63311613857637756522024-02-09T12:27:00.002+00:002024-02-09T12:27:32.514+00:00Mercian Rain<p> Incessant rain siling down all day yesterday, then through the night – and still it rains, though now more drizzly. How Geoffrey Hill would have loved this relentless Mercian rain... <a href="http://thedabbler.co.uk/2012/07/geoffrey-hill-laureate-of-rain/">This link</a> will take you to something I wrote on that theme some years ago. </p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-52815300445037307742024-02-08T11:46:00.001+00:002024-02-08T11:46:37.636+00:00PHD<p> Glancing at one of the local trade directories that come through the letterbox week after week, I spotted an ad for a company called 'No.1 PHD'. Not, alas, a business offering help with finishing that troublesome thesis – a bit too niche for Lichfield, that – but one devoted to Plumbing, Heating and Drainage. With so many graduates doing the sensible thing these days and becoming plumbers, this seems oddly apt: they're choosing PHD over a Ph.D. And quite right too.</p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2526736757651414061.post-53866593776114229272024-02-07T12:58:00.001+00:002024-02-07T12:58:14.917+00:00A Bit of Dickens<p> Well, it's Charles Dickens's birthday today (born 1812). What can one say? He was the best of novelists, he was the worst of novelists, often in the same book, or even the same chapter. I found him early, through <i>A Christmas Carol</i> and <i>Oliver Twist</i>, and read him for many years, mostly for pleasure, sometimes as curricular obligation. I think Dickens's greatest gift is for the comic and grotesque, and he is therefore at his best with his comic characters, when he can give full rein to the unparalleled demonic energy of his imagination. And lord, he can be funny, genuinely laugh-aloud funny, even today – of how many Victorian humorists can that be said? For sheer enjoyment, my favourite of all his books is the <i>Pickwick Papers</i>, and my favourite character is the one and only Sam Weller (see <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2012/07/sams.html">here</a> and <a href="https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2013/02/more-sams.html">here</a>). Running him close, though, is Mrs 'Sairey' Gamp, the best thing in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>. Mrs Gamp, the nurse-of-all-trades, with her capacious bag and monstrous umbrella, her imaginary friend Mrs 'Arris, her eye for the main chance and taste for gin, is as tumultuous a force of nature as Sam Weller, and very nearly as funny. For some years, the actress Miriam Margolyes did a brilliant impersonation of the immortal Mrs Gamp. Here she is in action at the Malton Dickens Festival (and it's worth seeking out her one-woman show, <i>Dickens' Women</i> on audiobook)...</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b0pbZmVP-Io" width="320" youtube-src-id="b0pbZmVP-Io"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13314891387515045404noreply@blogger.com2