Technical Note

Several times recently, valued would-be commenters have told me that they are having problems posting comments on this blog, and often find themselves getting nowhere at all in their efforts to do so. Of course I have no way of knowing how many people are being affected by this. Nor do I have any idea why it is happening. I've looked on various Blogger forums, but am none the wiser.
I wonder if my more technically-minded readers have any suggestions as to how I might fix this problem? You can contact me by email (nigeandrew@gmail.com)
Thank you.

Easy Money and Smart Thinking

This morning I was approached by a lady with a clipboard who asked me if I'd take part in a little market research. Normally I say no to this kind of thing, but two factors swayed me this time: the research was taking place in a nearby church hall complex that I was mildly curious to see, and a £5 note was on offer, just for answering a few simple questions.
 The questions were indeed simple (to do with the local water company); I had the pleasure of looking around the attractive late Gothic interior of the church hall complex (1907, by Gordon & Gunton – it's in Pevsner); and I came out with a new fiver in my pocket. I decided to invest my newfound wealth in a small book, if I could find anything suitable in the Waterstone's around the corner.
 Browsing the shelves, I was surprised to discover a large section devoted to 'Smart Thinking'. What could that be? I wondered. On easy chairs nearby, a respectable-looking elderly man and woman who seemed to be friends were chatting in rather carrying voices. The conversation began, in the usual way, with health and symptoms... I examined the 'Smart Thinking' shelves, soon discovering that it was a mix of popular science, trendy ideas (lefty of course) and instant smart aleck books, but with a few classics dotted about, apparently at random – The Prince (fair enough, I suppose), Utopia (smart?), the Communist Manifesto...
 By the time I tuned back in to the carrying conversation from the easy chairs, the subject had changed, rather alarmingly, to Viagra. Both the lady and the gentleman seemed more than happy that the heyday in the blood was tame, and neither fancied the idea of senile sexual athletics. But that was far from the end of the conversation, as it wandered into the field of what these days are called 'relationships'. The lady gave a particularly lurid account of an evening with a man who seemed to think he had bought her favours for the price of a couple of drinks... But I mustn't pass on any more of what was presumably intended to be a private conversation, even if anyone within 20ft could hear every word. I bought a suitably small book – Carlo Rivelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – and went on my way.
 Incidentally, there was no sign of Montaigne (a truly smart thinker) on those Smart Thinking shelves. It's his 486th birthday today.

Gunn's Bewick

Last year I picked up a copy of Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains in a local charity shop. Yesterday I spotted his Jack Straw's Castle in the same shop, and snapped it up (1977 reprint, classic Faber cover, £1.99).
Here, from Jack Straw's Castle, is Thomas Bewick, a poem about the great wood engraver that manages to encapsulate the man himself, his works and the country he depicted in them, all in one elegant package. I've walked in that country – beside the rural Tyne, well upstream of Newcastle – and at times it is like walking through Bewick's engravings. As is Gunn's poem...

I think of a man on foot
going through thick woods,
a buckle on his brimmed hat,
a stick in his hand.

He comes on from the deep
shadow now to the gladed parts
where light speckles the ground
like scoops out of darkness.

Gnarled branches reaching down
their green gifts; weed reaching up
milky flower and damp leaf.

I think of a man fording
a pebbly stream. A rock
is covered in places with
minute crops of moss
– frail stalks of yellow rising
from the green, each
bloom of it distinct, as
he notices. He notices
the bee's many-jointed legs and its     

papery wings veined like leaf,         
or the rise of a frog's back
into double peaks, and this morning
by a stile he noticed ferns
afloat on air.

                     Drinking from
clear stream and resting
on the rock he loses himself
in detail,
               he reverts
to an earlier self, not yet
separate from what it sees,

a selfless self as difficult
to recover and hold as to
capture the exact way
a burly bluetit grips
its branch (leaning forward)
over this rock
                       and in
The History of British Birds.

The White Cutter

One of the names I came across in the Book of Forgotten Authors that was among my Christmas presents was that of David Pownall – which rang quite a loud bell with me. Back in the day I must have reviewed a good many of his radio plays, and I certainly read and enjoyed his two comic novels set in Africa, The Raining Tree War and African Horse, both in the tradition of Waugh, and both probably too politically incorrect to be published today. Pownall seems to be (he's still with us) one of those authors who wrote too much, across too wide a range of themes and forms, to be easily pigeonholed or granted the critical reverence reserved for the more costive. I was interested to read of one of his novels, The White Cutter (1988), set in the thirteenth century and telling the tale of a pair of stonemasons, father and son; their tempestuous relationship; and the succession of adventures the boy, who is the narrator, goes through on the way to the act of parricide for which he is atoning by (among other penances) writing this book, which is to be burnt when completed.
  Having now read The White Cutter, I can report that it's an excellent piece of work, something of a picaresque 'rattling good yarn' with frequent changes of scene and dramatic incidents, but with real historical, psychological and philosophical depth. Religious rather than philosophical  perhaps, for Herbert and Hedric, the father and son, are Albigensian heretics, as are (we are told) all stonemasons, whose ultimate business is to work under the radar of the Christians – 'Cretins', as they call them – and bring to birth the Second and Third Style of Emergence which will follow the 'pointy' Gothic (and they don't mean Dec and Perp, but something far more radical). They're making a good job of it so far...
'We were being elevated, vaunted as the new heroes in the ultimate battle, as the Cretins saw it: the Armageddon between the army of Human Prayer and the fortress of Christ's Indifference (sometimes called mercy). As we put up the great churches, they took them as evidence of Man's penetration of the divine consciousness. The higher the church, the deeper it got into the core of the supreme being's esprit.'
  Hedric, the son, has (unlike his father) a touch of architectural genius, which brings him to the attention of The Four who are the rulers of England – the King (Henry III, who has a surprising second identity), Simon de Montfort, Richard Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, and the King's master mason, Henry de Reyns, architect of Westminster Abbey. The story follows the twists and turns of Hedric's relationship with his wilful and unreliable father and his surrogate, Master Henry, and his often perilous adventures, including a desperate flight from cannibalistic Carthusian monks in Ireland and an ambush by Robin Hood's men. It all goes on rather too long, some of the cast of characters don't really come to life, and the closing stages of the narrative aren't as gripping as the earlier parts, but this was an exhilarating reading experience – and clearly the work of a novelist who deserves to be remembered.

Butterflies, Dead White Males and Brexiteers

This early spring / warm spring / warm spell has been a joy. For several days now, the early afternoon sun has warmed things up to such an extent that I've even been reduced to shirtsleeves. And it has brought the early butterflies out: in the three days around mid-month I saw a Red Admiral, a first Brimstone, a Peacock and a Tortoiseshell, all without straying from my usual haunts. There have been many Brimstones since – and today, walking on Ashtead common, I happened on a Comma, basking in the unseasonal sunshine. That's five species – and it's still February! Most years I see nothing, even a Brimstone, until March. If this is that 'climate change' the schoolkids are warning us about, it certainly has its upside... But it could equally well be the deceptive prelude to a bitter late winter, with the country shivering in the grip of the Beast from the East again. I'm making no forecasts.

On Desert Island Discs this morning, I was amused to hear the very likeable historian Margaret Macmillan talking about the difficulties she faced in getting her book about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 published. One respected university press told her that no one would be interested in a book about 'dead white males sitting around a table talking'. Eventually a publisher took it, and since then Peacemakers (US title Paris 1919) has sold around half a million copies.

Earlier, I was less amused to hear Yasmin Alibhai-Brown describing those who want to actually leave the EU – which, as is now clear, can only be done via 'No Deal' – as 'Brexit Jihadis'. What a truly delightful turn of phrase.

Thinking on Paper

Also yesterday, I dropped in on the British Museum (which seemed to be even more packed than usual – no doubt the half term effect) to take a look at the prints and drawings gathered for a small exhibition called Rembrandt: Thinking on Paper. One of many exhibitions planned for the 350th anniversary of the artist's death, this one brought together in one room some 65 items from the BM's own collection – etchings and drypoints in various states, drawings, and even one rare example of a surviving copper plate (below – a wonderful thing to see).

The arrangement is thematic – portraits, self-portraits, landscapes and biblical scenes – and the caption information is very useful in illuminating Rembrandt's working methods. It's not an epoch-making exhibition, but for anyone with an interest in this aspect of Rembrandt's work – and a love of drawing and printmaking at their very best – it's a must. The drawings alone – quick, spontaneous, full of life – are ample evidence that this was an artist of phenomenal natural gifts. The prints, exquisitely worked and reworked with an astonishingly sure touch, confirm how hard he worked on his art and how he never stopped developing and experimenting as an artist and printmaker. In one state of an etching of the entombment of Christ, Rembrandt has created an almost entirely black image, which yields just the faintest glimmer of its subject in one corner of the plate – an extraordinary effect.
  In the little sketch below – dashed off in minutes – a mischievous toddler succeeds in removing a man's hat. All done with a few deft strokes of the pen.

In the Poets' Church

Today I dropped in on the ironically named St Giles in the Fields, Bloomsbury, which now stands surrounded not by fields but by hideous and very tall buildings, including Centre Point, not to mention roaring traffic and hordes of people dashing by. It's a rather fine, galleried and gilded mid-18th-century church, nicely restored in the mid-20th, and has a few monuments from the old church that preceded the present one. The best is that of Lady Frances Kniveton, with its white marble effigy (above), which dates from the 1660s and is probably by Edward Marshall or his son Joshua, both of whom were capable of good work. The figure of Lady Frances, lying in her rather sketchily realised shroud, is a little bland (and not in the same league as Nicholas Stone's Lady Berkeley at Cranford or Lady Bruce at Exton), but it has a certain quiet beauty.
  St Giles is known as the Poets' Church and has a surprising number of poetical associations. George Chapman, the translator of Homer and inspirer of Keats, has a memorial, erected by his friend Inigo Jones. John Milton brought his second daughter, Mary, to be baptised in the old church. In 1818, the atheist Shelley and his friend Byron had William and Clara (Shelley) and Clara Allegra (Byron) baptised in the new church. Edward Herbert, brother of the more famous George, is buried in the crypt. And Andrew Marvell, who lived nearby and is buried under the South aisle, has a memorial tablet inscribed with what must be one of the most fulsome epitaphs any English poet ever received. He was, according to this, 'a man so endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study, and Travel, so consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any...'  Phew – really?