Butterflies and California Dreamin'

A dismal day today, cold and grey. Just the day to look back to sunnier times and relive my butterfly season, which is surely now over (though I saw a single, surprisingly lively Red Admiral yesterday, and on a sunny morning a week or so ago I totted up three more, plus a late Holly Blue, an even later Small White, and a Comma)...
The season got off to a great start with a February heatwave, the glorious surprise of a Hummingbird Hawk Moth in March, and an unprecedented species count of 16 (not including the moth) by the end of April. Later highlights included Wall butterflies in Derbyshire and beautiful Dark Green Fritillaries on some local downland where I'd never seen them before. A bonanza year for Painted Ladies began for me at the end of June, and went on into early autumn. On a July day near Brookwood I found myself in the company of more Graylings than I've seen since boyhood, and later Chalkhill Blues galore on my favourite Surrey hillside, followed a little later by a few – a very precious few – Silver-Spotted Skippers. Then, out of the blue, the surprise finale of a single Brown Hairstreak at my local nature reserve.
Meanwhile, today's dismal weather has set the Mamas and Papas song California Dreamin' playing persistently in my head. This may seem odd, but remember, the first words of that song are 'All the leaves are brown/And the sky is grey./I've been for a walk/On a winter's day...' It just doesn't sound like a winter song: the lush arrangement, and those joyous vocal harmonies, make it sound like a summer rhapsody, full of Californian sunlight, not the exile's lament it actually is (the exile being a spell in New York in winter). This contrast between the words and the sound of a song is very much a John Phillips trademark, and is apparent throughout his solo album, Wolfking of LA. Consider, for example, this dark number set to an oh so jaunty, upbeat tune –

But, to return to California Dreamin', here is something of a curiosity – the original recording, by Barry (Eve of Destruction) McGuire, with the Mamas and Papas as backing singers, various of the Wrecking Crew behind them, and a rather unfortunate harmonica solo...

Then producer Lou Adler had the bright idea of giving the song back to the Mamas and Papas, with the sweet-voiced Denny Doherty on lead vocal, and Bud Shank's jazzy flute replacing that harmonica. And so a great, great single was born.

Words of the Year – oh dear...

It's 'Word of the Year' time again, heaven help us. This little publicity gimmick by Collins dictionaries can always be relied on to lower the spirits, and this year it obliges handsomely. The word of the year, according to Collins, isn't even a word but a phrase – 'climate strike'. (This is not when climate strikes, but when schoolchildren, with their teachers' encouragement, walk out of school to demonstrate about what they have been told is an imminent 'climate emergency' that will wipe them from the face of the earth.)
There are other new words lined up to join 'climate strike' in Collins's next edition. Reading the list is like hearing a bell tolling for the end of civilisation as we once knew it – a litany for end times, if you like (or am I getting carried away here?):

Climate strike.
Non-binary.
Double down.
Influencer.
Hopepunk.
Deepfake.

Hands up if you even know what the last two mean. Truly we live in strange times...

Johnson's Savage

While on my travels, I picked up a second-hand copy of Johnson's justly famous Life of Savage, in a paperback edition (Harper Perennial) with an introduction by Richard Holmes, and with three short essays by Johnson appended: on Biography, Autobiography and Literary Biography.
  The introduction (sadly littered with typos, though the rest of the volume isn't) is excellent, making clear just how brilliant Johnson's Life of Savage is, and how original and important as a new kind of biography that broke with all earlier models – the uncritical hagiographies of the medieval period, the shapeless accumulations of material in the biographical dictionaries of the 17th century, and the collections of scandalous anecdotes popular in Johnson's own time. The Life of Savage is, among other things, something quite new: a psychological study of an extraordinary individual, the product of an unusually intense imaginative and emotional engagement on the author's part (one that led him, indeed, to distort the facts to suit his story). And, formally, this new kind of biography absorbs for the first time elements of various very English non-literary forms, such as the Newgate confessional, the sentimental ballad and the drama of the courtroom. What's more, this work establishes that great biography can be made from failed and thwarted lives, not only from the lives of the famous and successful. Johnson had discovered a new kind of narrative, one with endless possibilities – as was to be demonstrated by the development of biography into one of the (potentially) great literary forms, and one which the English have always done especially well, and especially often. 
  Since Johnson's time, English biography has been through many evolutions, including a tendency towards hagiography and gigantism in Victorian times, the development of more supple and fluid approaches – and shorter lives – in reaction to the Victorians, and the threat in more recent times of a return to oversized compendia of facts. Johnson, in his essay on biography, writes: 'I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful' (and indeed he once told Boswell 'that he could write the life of a Broomstick'). But what he had in mind was surely not the huge, compendious volumes devoted to lives of limited intrinsic interest by the toilers in today's biography industry. The Life of Savage comes in at a scant hundred pages, but there are few, if any, biographies that can match it for insight, for  narrative power and literary style, and for sheer emotional impact.
'Those are no proper judges of his conduct, who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty, nor will any wise man presume to say, "Had I been in Savage's condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage."' Indeed.

Plain and Coloured

I've been on my Mercian travels again, this time mainly in Lincolnshire...
The picture above (not mine, but the rest are) shows the beautiful church of St Helen's, Brant Broughton, near the Nottinghamshire border, with its tall and elegant spire (just shy of 200ft). The interior, mostly of the 14th and 15th centuries and wonderfully rich in decorative detail, is as fine as the outside. It also serves as a superb example of how good Victorian restoration could be. Restoration and, indeed, rebuilding; the chancel, with its wooden vault, was rebuilt by Bodley in 1876 – and it works beautifully –

All the stained glass in the church is Victorian, and all of it is good. It was mostly designed by Canon F.H. Sutton (the Rector here from 1873 to 1888) and made by the famous Kempe, in co-operation with the Canon, who was clearly a man of excellent taste. There is stained glass in every window, and the effect in sunlight is gloriously polychromatic.
The restoration even extended to a heart-lifting angel roof. Those Victorian Gothicists were so good when they got it right (and so bad when they didn't, of course)...

The other big church highlight, every bit as breathtaking in its very different way, was Holy Trinity, Tattershall, hard by the remains of the castle. This is a vast, classically Perpendicular church, built in one build and at great expense, but with a bare minimum of ornament, and barely altered since (except in one particular, which I'm coming to).
It is the classic 'house of glass', its walls almost all window, the kind of thing you'd expect to find in East Anglia – and the interior is flooded with light, to dazzling effect. This is because, in contrast to Brant Broughton, almost all the windows are of clear glass. All that remains of the church's original glass has been reassembled, to beautiful effect, to fill the lower part of the great East window. The rest went to St Martin's, Stamford, and to the great hall at Burghley. A shame Canon Sutton wasn't in charge here – he'd have had a few ideas about what to do with those walls of glass...

The Wreck of the Hesperus

All Hallows' Eve, and I see that R.T. has posted a fitting poem, Haunted Houses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that erstwhile giant of 19th-century verse (on both sides of the Atlantic).
  Longfellow was one of my routes into poetry. There were few poetry books on the family bookshelf of my boyhood, but a big fat volume of Longfellow was one of them – one of those ornate Victorian productions, poorly printed, in columns of small type, but lavishly illustrated with dramatic line engravings. I was drawn to The Song of Hiawatha, perhaps because I was invariably obliged to play the vanquished Red Indian in games of cowboys and Indians, so I found it easy to identify with these noble and oppressed people. However, the sheer scale of Hiawatha defeated me, much though I enjoyed its distinctive, unstoppable rhythm (trochaic tetrameter). 
  Excelsior – 'The shades of night were falling fast,/As through an Alpine village passed/A youth who bore, 'mid snow and ice,/A banner with the strange device,/Excelsior!...' – I found exciting and mysterious. But the Longfellow poem that thrilled me most was The Wreck of the Hesperus (partly because of the suitably melodramatic illustrations). I reread it just now, for the first time in many years, and I must say it's a devastatingly effective piece of work, ideal for heart-wrenching recitation. Subtle it isn't, but Longfellow's turbocharged ballad is perfectly designed to grip from the start and never let go. Here it is...

It was the schooner Hesperus, 

      That sailed the wintry sea; 

And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr, 

      To bear him company. 

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax, 

      Her cheeks like the dawn of day, 

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, 

      That ope in the month of May. 

The skipper he stood beside the helm, 

      His pipe was in his mouth, 

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow 

      The smoke now West, now South. 

Then up and spake an old Sailòr, 

      Had sailed to the Spanish Main, 

"I pray thee, put into yonder port, 

      For I fear a hurricane. 

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring, 

      And to-night no moon we see!" 

The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe, 

      And a scornful laugh laughed he. 

Colder and louder blew the wind, 

      A gale from the Northeast, 

The snow fell hissing in the brine, 

      And the billows frothed like yeast. 

Down came the storm, and smote amain 

      The vessel in its strength; 

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed, 

      Then leaped her cable's length. 

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr, 

      And do not tremble so; 

For I can weather the roughest gale 

      That ever wind did blow." 

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat 

      Against the stinging blast; 

He cut a rope from a broken spar, 

      And bound her to the mast. 

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring, 

      Oh say, what may it be?" 

"'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" — 

      And he steered for the open sea. 

"O father! I hear the sound of guns, 

      Oh say, what may it be?" 

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live 

      In such an angry sea!" 

"O father! I see a gleaming light, 

      Oh say, what may it be?" 

But the father answered never a word, 

      A frozen corpse was he. 

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, 

      With his face turned to the skies, 

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow 

      On his fixed and glassy eyes. 

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed 

      That savèd she might be; 

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave 

      On the Lake of Galilee. 

And fast through the midnight dark and drear, 

      Through the whistling sleet and snow, 

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept 

      Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe. 

And ever the fitful gusts between 

      A sound came from the land; 

It was the sound of the trampling surf 

      On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. 

The breakers were right beneath her bows, 

      She drifted a dreary wreck, 

And a whooping billow swept the crew 

      Like icicles from her deck. 

She struck where the white and fleecy waves 

      Looked soft as carded wool, 

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side 

      Like the horns of an angry bull. 

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, 

      With the masts went by the board; 

Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank, 

      Ho! ho! the breakers roared! 

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, 

      A fisherman stood aghast, 

To see the form of a maiden fair, 

      Lashed close to a drifting mast. 

The salt sea was frozen on her breast, 

      The salt tears in her eyes; 

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed, 

      On the billows fall and rise. 

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, 

      In the midnight and the snow! 

Christ save us all from a death like this, 

      On the reef of Norman's Woe! 

Sisley

This very agreeable painting, The Lane of Poplars at Moret by Alfred Sisley, has the distinction of having been stolen three times – in 1978, 1998 and 2007. Its home is the Musee des Beaux Arts in Nice, but the first time it was stolen it was in Marseilles on loan (it turned up a few days later in that city's sewers). Back home, it next fell victim to the museum's curator, who was convicted, with two accomplices, of the theft. Finally, in 2007, it was stolen in a raid on the gallery, only to be recovered the following year – in Marseilles again. The defendants in the trial for that theft boldly claimed that they were being used by the FBI in an undercover operation whose ultimate aim was to recover a much more important haul. The judge was having none of it, and jailed them all.
  Sisley, who was born on this day in 1839, was perhaps the most consistently Impressionist of all the impressionists, devoting virtually all his career to painting landscapes en plein air. Very nice they are too – in fact a little too nice, a little lacking in vigour and inclining (at least to modern eyes) to a kind of bland prettiness. But then, the same could be said for a good deal of Monet's output, hence his phenomenal popularity. Sisley was French-born, but to English parents, and he retained his British citizenship all his life. He also paid several long visits to England (and Wales, where he painted on the Gower peninsula). On one of these visits, he painted the bridge at Hampton Court, from above

and, interestingly, below –

This was the bridge from which I saw my mystery bird last year...

Link

I see that the excellent Zoe Colvin is recommending a certain book as the ideal Christmas gift. Here's the link – and while you're there, have a good look around; ZMKC is a lovely blog, and if you enjoy the kind of things I write about here, you will surely enjoy the kind of things Zoe writes about there.