Making-Up Is Hard to Do...

Here at NigeCorp, my female colleagues often comment on the number of women to be seen on the Underground and on commuter trains sitting as if in front of their mirror at home and performing their elaborate, often lengthy make-up routines, quite oblivious of their surroundings. Being the kind of gals who wouldn't stoop to such vulgarity, they naturally disapprove of this conduct.
For myself, I find it mildly interesting - especially if it's well done - to see the transformation wrought by a good maquillage. And by Golly you need a steady hand to do it on a moving train... This morning on the Underground, I enjoyed a novel variant on the theme, as the young man sitting next to me set about applying his make-up - toner, mascara and a rather pungent hand cream - and a very good job he made of it. Nice to see a chap make an effort.
Meanwhile, the American basketball star Jason Collins has 'come out' as gay. All very laudable, and Obama and Clinton and co are rushing to praise him for his courage. His coming clean about his sexual orientation has been widely described as 'heroic'. Well maybe, but, as someone remarked drily in a tweet to the Today programme this morning: 'The bar for heroism seems to have been lowered since Normandy.' Quite. 

'... and a sense that the world was mad'

'He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.'
Not a bad line, is it, with its fine metrical lilt? Not verse but prose, it is in fact the opening sentence of Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, born on this day in 1875. Sabatini, an Italian-English writer with a rather racy cosmopolitan background, was a prolific and very popular writer of colourful swashbuckling historical adventures, several of which were filmed, and remain in print to this day - notably The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood and the aforementioned Scaramouche, his first success and a huge international bestseller. His life had its share of sadness - his only son killed in a car accident, and his stepson in a plane crash on the day he received his RAF wings, flying in celebration over the parental home. But when Sabatini died in 1950, his widow had that line from Scaramouche engraved on his headstone. Not a bad epitaph, is it?

Thin on the Ground?

Almost May, and here's a funny thing - I've yet to see a single Red Admiral. I've seen Commas galore, Peacocks galore, Brimstones galore (when the weather's relented and we've had some warm sun), and recently Orange Tips, Small Whites and Holly Blues - but still no Red Admiral. Normally it's my first or second sighting of the year, and the most frequent of the early (and late) fliers, but not this year. Even if I see one tomorrow, it will be the latest first sighting I can remember - and an unheard-of seventh on my list.
Is it just me, or are the Red Admirals unusually thin on the ground this spring?

IDS's Bright Idea

I see that Iain Duncan Smith is urging those of us who have spent decades forking a huge proportion of our hard-earned money straight into the ever more voracious and insatiable maw of the Exchequer and are now, in our 60s, finally getting a few quid back, to return any of said few quid we don't really need into the hands of the State. Here's a better idea: save it up until you happen upon a three-testicled sailor on shore leave and hand it over to him - he'll spend it more wisely than the State.

Essex Beauties

Well, the Essex walk was fine - not the Dengie Hundred, but the Five Parishes, a cluster of parish churches (and pubs) in rich rolling country near Dunmow. The stars were St Mary, Tilty (pictured), an extraordinary cut-and-shut job, with a simple Early English nave and a grand, wholly out-of-scale Decorated chancel with a huge, beautifully reticulated East window, glazed in clear glass, flooding the interior with light.  And St Mary, Little Easton, which looks unpromising and over-restored from the outside, but inside is a treasure house, with everything from medieval wall paintings to a jewelled Art Nouveau plaque by Alfred Gilbert in memory of Ellen Terry, by way of a grand set of monuments from the early 15th to the late 17th century, some ghastly stained glass in a memorial chapel to the American bombers stationed here during the war, and a brilliant, thoroughly unchurchy portrait bust (by Edward Boehm) of Frances, Countess of Warwick in her heyday as a stunner - not to mention various memorials of the parish's 'Rocking Reverend', Jack Filby, whose gravestone is fittingly carved with a guitar. And the last church on the walk, St Mary, Chickney, a modest but wonderfully atmospheric little church, with every angle of its structure slightly askew, standing remote from any village, amid deep rural silence - broken only by the occasional pop of a pigeon scarer, and the odd Stansted Airport plane.
  Once again, as after any of these walks, I am left marvelling at how much there is to see, how much of history and beauty and quietness survives in this over-populated, concreted, built-over land of ours - even hard by an international airport and a motorway.

Brilliance and Grace

Just back from a couple of days in God's Own County, viz Derbyshire - but before I went, I visited the Barocci exhibition at the National Gallery. It's an absolute stunner, and if you haven't seen it I'd suggest you catch it before it's gone (on May 19th) - there's unlikely to be another like it in our lifetimes: a major exhibition of works by an Italian Renaissance master with no obvious box-office appeal, of whom most people are barely aware.
  I only knew Federico Barocci for his Madonna with a Cat in the National Gallery - oversweet for my taste - and the rather lovely Nativity in the Prado (it's in the exhibition, and I was pleased to note that the Christ Child, most beautifully and naturalistically drawn, looks remarkably like my grandson, Frankly Adorable Sam). For me, then, this exhibition was a revelation. It's built around a dozen or so masterpieces from all points of his career - the greatest of them, perhaps, the stunning Last Supper from Urbino Cathedral -  but a large part of the pleasure of this exhibition is in the beautifully executed preparatory drawings, chalk studies and cartoons, through which you can follow Barocci's creative processes, and marvel at his quite breath-taking skills as draughtsman and colorist. Wandering among these pictures, it seems incomprehensible that such a master as Barocci should somehow have become an all put forgotten painter over here. That will surely change after this magnificent eye-opener.
  The Barocci exhibition - aptly titled Brilliance and Grace - is, sadly, housed in the basement of the Sainsbury Wing, with no natural light; this is not good, particularly for the larger altarpieces. But on the other hand, it's Not a Blockbuster - it's an exhibition on a manageable scale, from which you'll emerge (well, I emerged) elated and illuminated, rather than exhausted. Also, it doesn't seem to be attracting large numbers of visitors, so it's possible to enjoy the pictures in peace.
  And now I''m off again, on my way to a walk in Essex tomorrow...

A Mistitled Book

I think I mentioned recently that I was reading Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion. I  finished this misnamed book last week - it's not a quick read, being quite densely packed ('full of matter,' as Johnson would say) and written in a dry, almost textbook-like style. I say misnamed because Sheldrake's book is in no way an attack on science as such - it is avowedly 'pro-science', but anti the dogmatic, authoritarian postures into which science is perpetually inclined to lock itself, perhaps never more so than at present. I imagine the publishers' marketing department came up with The Science Delusion in the hope of catching the backlash to Dawkins' The God Delusion (to which it is most definitely not a riposte, though the author takes a few well-merited potshots at Dawkins - who wouldn't?)
  In America, Sheldrake's book has the much more descriptive title, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. The ten paths are laid out systematically. They open out from a list of ten 'core beliefs that most scientists take for granted' - 'The Scientific Creed', Sheldrake calls is. Each of the ten beliefs - which amount to unspoken assumptions or unexamined dogma - is then inverted into a question in the ten chapters that follow, from 'Is Nature Mechanical?', 'Are the Laws of Nature Fixed?' and 'Is Matter Unconscious?' to 'Is Mechanistic Medicine the Only Kind that Really Works?' In each chapter, he proposes new lines of inquiry and cites strong evidence that they might be fruitfully pursued. He closes each chapter with a few cogent 'Questions for Materialists' and a Summary of the content. After the ten core chapters comes Illusions of Objectivity, an eye-opening account of how Science is actually done - research, funding, peer review, publication - and how the authoritarian dogmatic structure works against free inquiry and can positively encourage bad science, even fraud.
  The book aims to open up science, to stimulate it to question its assumptions and explore new avenues. It would better be called The Delusions of Science - the principal delusion being that it is firmly founded on certain unassailable truths that no longer need to be examined. Sheldrake's questioning leaves that edifice of certainty riddled with holes and looking more and more like the ossified outgrowth of an outmoded world view. His job, in this book, is not really to propose an alternative, but its outlines can be discerned clearly  enough - in crude summary, it's a model of reality conceived in terms of fields rather than particles (Sheldrake is best known for his Morphogenetic Field theory).
  I can't claim to have enjoyed The Science Delusion as a reading experience, but on the intellectual level it was an exhilarating journey of discovery, putting flesh on the bones of my own intuitions about the reductive dogmatism and closed-mindedness of scientism, and showing that, even within science, there are sound, mind-opening alternatives to this self-defeating stance. It left me firmly convinced that, in the end, there is really very little we can be firmly convinced about - and that, surely, is a good thing.
  Country Life, in a fine spray of Reviewers' Adjectives, describes The Science Delusion as 'refreshing, important and astounding' - and actually that's not far wrong. A shame we'll never see Sheldrake presenting a TV series and giving us a (refreshing, important and astounding) break from Brian 'Boy' Cox - and, of course, Dickie Dawkins.