New Year, Old Year

 As 2023 hoves improbably into view, it's time to take the annual look back at the Old Year...
   It was a momentous one for me and Mrs N, being the year in which we finally said goodbye to the Suburban Demiparadise and began a new life in Mercia's ecclesiastical capital, birthplace of Johnson, City of Philosophers etc, Lichfield. Getting from that A to that B has been a saga – The Merciad, you might call it, and it would be even more tedious than most sagas. I am not going to relate it here, but all that move-related and family-related busyness has certainly had an effect on the blog: I seem to have been reading fewer books than usual, there has been less in the way of nature notes, only one serious walk chronicled (and surprisingly few church visits) – and, for the first time since records began, not a single major art exhibition visited or reviewed.  But what have been the high points?
 Well, on the poetry front, I have been finding yet more to enjoy in Thom Gunn, admiring Charles Causley's later work, discovering Ned Balbo and Dick Davis. I was not disappointed by rereading Marilynne Robinson's classic Housekeeping, and among the books I enjoyed most were Javier Marías's The Infatuations, P.J. Kavanagh's memoir The Perfect Stranger, James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? and Michael Wharton's The Missing Will. I completed the Auberon Waugh Project by reading, and enjoying, A Bed of Flowers. Any new books I read were for review elsewhere, but among them was one to cherish – C.B. Newham's Country Church Monuments. And I actually read one almost new novel, Sol Riviere's Dead Souls, and loved it. In the course of the year, I have had some wonderful musical moments, many of which I have posted here, and have repeatedly played Vikingur Olafsson's glorious Debussy Rameau CD. At present I am without a CD player, and with most of my books in storage. Not for long, I devoutly hope...
  In the wider world, the Platinum Jubilee and then the death and funeral of the Queen were huge events, and, I think, heartening in what they told us about the true nature of this much falsified, much vilified England. That the Queen's death marked the end of an era is a truism, but no less true for that: we live in a deeply changed world now, partly as a result of that loss, partly (I am convinced) by the endlessly ramifying and deepening destructive effects of the Lockdown Years – but this is not the time to dwell on that... In a narrower world, two big literary centenaries meant there was more of Kingsley Amis and even more of Philip Larkin than usual on this blog, and the Ralph Vaughan Williams sesquicentenary, fittingly celebrated on Radio 3, gave me much listening pleasure.  
  Pleasure is supposed to be what this blog, this 'hedonic resource', is all about, so that would be a good place to leave this retrospective, and wish to everyone who browses here a very happy and prosperous new year. Cheers!

Vallotton at Etretat

 Born on this day in 1865 was the brilliant Swiss-French painter and printmaker Felix Vallotton, about whom I wrote at some length a while back, after seeing the eye-opening exhibition of his works at the Royal Academy. Above is a beautifully composed seaside view by Vallotton, painted at Etretat, where he also painted this simple beach scene, equally beautifully composed, of arrangements of colour rather than line. It put me in mind of a poem –

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be–
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost

Vintage Ties and Andy's Vacs

 This morning, spotting a site called Larkin With Women on the picture-sharing website Pinterest, I thought I'd have a look. It turned out to be devoted almost entirely to vintage ties and handbags (many of them available via Etsy and other online retailers), with a few photos of Larkin, with and without female company, added near the bottom as an apparent afterthought. Odd. However, as it's the festive season, it's definitely time to put up the cheering picture above, showing Larkin and Monica Jones really getting into the spirit. Nice tie he's wearing...

And another thing: last night I had a succession of strange dreams, all forgotten now, but all linked by the presence of Prince Andrew, the disgraced Duke of York, who, reasonably enough, had set up business selling vacuum cleaners door to door and from a small shop in the back streets of Cambridge, where he traded under the name Andy's Vacs. He seemed quite resigned to his fate, and had slimmed down noticeably. Pick the bones out of that, Herr Doktor Freud. 

Happy Christmas

 Wishing a happy Christmas to all who browse here.

(The painting is The Adoration of the Shepherds, generally attributed to Giorgione, though it might be an early Titian, or a collaboration, or even by someone else altogether. It's beautiful anyway, and it hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.)

'Hoping it might be so'

 It's the night of Christmas Eve, so heck, why not? It may be a bit sentimental, but it's a lovely poem, beautifully crafted (I love that 'flock' in the first stanza). It's 'The Oxen' by Thomas Hardy –

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

'This is the month...'

 One of the pleasures of living in Lichfield is having a magnificent cathedral on the doorstep. At yesterday evening's festival of lessons and carols, the choir were in great form, singing not only the more traditional Christmas fare – enough in itself to reduce a grown man (me) to a quivering wreck – but also treating us to, among other things, Poulenc's Hodie Christus Natus Est, Stainer's lovely setting of How Beautiful Upon the Mountains, and a quite astonishing piece, God Is With Us, by John Tavener, adapted from the Orthodox Great Compline for Christmas Eve and featuring a tenor singing lustily from the pulpit and some of the most earth-shaking organ chords I have ever heard. And, as well as the usual Christmas readings, we had the opening stanzas of John Milton's great Christmas poem, 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' – what more could anyone ask?

This is the month, and this the happy morn,

      Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,

Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,

      Our great redemption from above did bring;

      For so the holy sages once did sing,

            That he our deadly forfeit should release,

            And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,

      And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,

Wherewith he wont at Heav'n's high council-table,

      To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,

      He laid aside, and here with us to be,

            Forsook the courts of everlasting day,

            And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

'Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace...'

 'The time draws near the birth of Christ...'
One of the most moving and perfect sections of Tennyson's great poem of love and loss, In Memoriam A.H.H. – a work not short of moving and perfect passages – is the section numbered XXVIII. Tennyson, I take it, is either at his family home, Somersby rectory in the Lincolnshire Wolds, or  he is remembering or imagining himself back there at Christmastide. The 'four hamlets round' would be, I think, Bag Enderby (part of his father's parish), Stainsby, Salmonby and Ashby Puerorum (fine Lincolnshire names all). But then, I used to think that another great and famous passage from In Memoriam, 'Ring Out, Wild Bells', was also inspired by the ringing Wolds, but all the evidence suggests that it was, in that case, the bells of the abbey church at Waltham Abbey – a long, long way from Lincolnshire. 
'Sorrow touch'd with joy', or joy touched with sorrow – that's Christmas... 

The time draws near the birth of Christ:
      The moon is hid; the night is still;
      The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.

Four voices of four hamlets round,
      From far and near, on mead and moor,
      Swell out and fail, as if a door
Were shut between me and the sound:

Each voice four changes on the wind,
      That now dilate, and now decrease,
      Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

This year I slept and woke with pain,
      I almost wish'd no more to wake,
      And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
      For they controll'd me when a boy;
      They bring me sorrow touch'd with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.