Reasons to Be Cheerful (continued)

It's the last day of February - always the grimmest month of the year, and particularly dispiriting this time as days and weeks of grey skies and bitter cold have rounded out a winter that was, for the fourth time in five years, colder than usual. Remember those airy pronouncements at the turn of the century about how 'global warming' would put an end to white winters, so that snowfall would become 'a very rare and exciting event'? The Independent notoriously ran a front page to this effect in 2000, looking forward to generations of children growing up with no experience of snow, or even of cold. Since then, of course, snow has become a regular visitor to the Levant, let alone these isles.
 Tomorrow, by some reckonings, is the first day of spring - hurrah for that! But Jim Dale - not the one who played Marshal P. Knutt in Carry On Cowboy, but a senior meteorologist - warns us not to get our hopes up. 'Don't expect spring,' he counsels. 'We'll be fighting raw cold for weeks.' So clearly we're in for a fine warm March. Excellent news.

'You might be just the man to help me, sir...'

He came striding towards me on Cromwell Road yesterday evening as I was waiting to cross. Black overcoat, scarf, suit and tie, glasses, in his mid-40s maybe. 'You might be the just the man to help me, sir,' he began. The accent and manner suggested perhaps a minor public school (expelled) or, more likely, the full HMG (home-made gentleman). He exuded serial failure - well merited, no doubt - and, although well dressed, he didn't have the grooming or the glowing complexion of the truly prosperous. He looked, alas, like what he was.
'I'm really in the most embarrassing situation,' he continued. 'This is so humiliating...' Here we go again. His convoluted tale involved a celebratory lunch with friends - drink taken (though there was none on his breath) - chaotic journey across London, in the course of which he became detached from his wallet and briefcase - unhelpful hackney carriage company - unhelpful public transport authorities, etc, etc. At various points he delved in his inside pockets for documentary proof of his bonafides, which mysteriously never appeared. The one constant was the mobile phone in the palm of his left hand and the cigarette smouldering between two of its fingers. Anyway, the upshot of his unfortunate adventure was that he was quite resigned to walking to Paddington, but once there he would have to present the sum of £22.50 (it's always a precise figure) in order to board the train to his home in Great Malvern.
Along the way, he shook my hand warmly, gave me his full name - which was something suitably posh, along the lines of Anthony Charles Beaumont - told me his business was in buying and selling property and suggested an exchange of cards (his seemed to be invisible, I don't carry one) so that he could return the money to me with all due dispatch.Well, I am a bit of a sucker for these minor con artists - I keep hoping that one day I'll come across a bullsh*tter in the league of Dr Reo Symes - but I had a train to catch, so I didn't encourage any further elaborations on his narrative. I gave him a few quid - he seemed mildly affronted that it wasn't £25 and keep the change - and went on my way. He lost no time in introducing himself to a hapless tourist who had just stepped out of a hotel.
It wasn't a great performance, but it was quite inventive, and at least my friend 'Anthony Charles Beaumont' (or whatever it was) has made an effort. Unlike the much more downmarket panhandler who used to appear night after night on my homebound train with the same unvarying spiel, delivered in a wheedling tone: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I'm really sorry to disturb you - I wouldn't normally do this, but I'm desperate. I'm not a beggar...' I never gave that one a bean.

Old Tire Swingers

This is worth a look, for some pretty mean string-band music, and for the hilarious mismatch between hyperactive presenter and laid-back act.

Daffodils

Today is reckoned to be the average earliest flowering date for daffodils - some 13 days earlier than it was 20 years ago. This probably has less to do with 'global warming' than with a trend towards earlier-flowering bulbs. The daffodils (or some of them) have been coming into flower for the past week or so down my way, despite the bitter cold, and a very welcome sight they are, especially as today's varieties tend towards paler, more delicate flowers - more like the wild daffodil, and  less like the garish, stridently assertive standard garden daffs I remember from my boyhood, lined up like so many sentries in every suburban flowerbed.
  The wild daffodil is of course immortalised in that ur-poem of English romantic lyricism, Wordsworth's Daffodils - a poem whose first line alone is shorthand for Poetry Itself, at least in this country. But there is also Robert Herrick's beautiful lyric,To Daffodils - so spare yet so expressive, so simple yet brilliantly wrought. The second stanza, in particular, is quite wonderful...

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

         You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

         Has not attain'd his noon.

                        Stay, stay,

                Until the hasting day

                        Has run

                But to the even-song;

And, having pray'd together, we

Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,

         We have as short a spring;

As quick a growth to meet decay,

         As you, or anything.

                        We die

                As your hours do, and dry

                        Away,

                Like to the summer's rain;

Or as the pearls of morning's dew,

Ne'er to be found again.

Patrick George and Others

Well, I finally made it to the Patrick George exhibition during opening hours, and I was not disappointed. I was surprised to find that it's his 90th birthday exhibition - but then, this is a painter whose history goes back to the Euston Road school. However, it was relatively late in his career that he found his metier as a landscape painter, mostly of his home county, Suffolk. The landscapes on show at Browse & Darby include some wonderful work, the products of a long, patient, self-effacing engagement with his subjects. His paintings are - like the landscape he depicts - modest, unshowy and understated. Often they can seem unfinished - until you give them time and close attention, when they gradually reveal themselves. Despite appearances, many of them are the product of years of work and thought and revision. George says simply that he paints what he sees - not what is there; nature cannot be reproduced - but what he sees. Not being a one for self-promotion or for theorising about his art, George is strangely little known, has never been fashionable, and is, IMHO, seriously undervalued. If you find yourself near Browse & Darby (Cork Street) before March 13th, I'd recommend dropping in and having a look for yourself.
  After this, I made my way to Tate Britain and had a quick dash through an exhibition there, Looking at the View - a scrappily thematic selection of landscapes (in the broadest sense) from the gallery's own holdings. No Patrick George here (though the Tate has three), but a few unfamiliar pictures I was glad to see, notably an extraordinary moonlit William Nicholson of The Hill Above Harlech. And then there were two eye-catching pictures by one Annie Louisa Swynnerton, both portraits rather than landscapes, one of them this wonderfully extravagant picture of a Firbankian aristocrat in an Italianate landscape, which actually made me laugh.
 As I went into the Tate, a security van parked outside was repeatedly blaring out the message 'Help! Help! Security vehicle under attack. Please contact police.' No one was taking any notice, and it was still blaring away when I came out. Perhaps it was a work of art.

A Cat's Life

This minimovie should amuse anyone who, like me, spent too much of their youth in arthouse cinemas watching French films of the Nouvelle Vague.

BBCento

Just when you think the BBC's massive sense of its own importance and sheer wonderfulness couldn't get any more massive, along comes the latest jaw-droppingly self-congratulatory trailer for the supposed wonders of BBC2's output. Watch it here, if you can stand it...The verbal content of this shameless waste of licence fee payers' money might sound to the casual listener like so much windy 'inspirational' verbiage in the spirit of the Olympics opening ceremony - and a crime against John Keats and various other poets - but it is of some formal interest as a rare modern example of the verse form known as a cento. This is a patchwork of very short unrelated fragments from the works of one or more poets, stitched together into some kind of whole. At one time centos were often assembled from fragments of Virgil, sometimes to demonstrate the poet's unwitting foreshadowing of the Gospel story. The content of the BBC2 cento, stitched by one Alison Chisolm, is detailed here. Poor old Walter Savage Landor contributes two words of Alison Chisolm's 13, and Arthur O'Shaughnessy is, er, generously represented. But let us return to Keats and remind ourselves of that great sonnet - great enough to shrug off whatever violence is done to it...

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer Much have I traveled in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.