'the crux a craftsman's triumph'

 Yesterday I was in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, marvelling at the Staffordshire Hoard – or rather at the half of it that is in Stoke, the other half being in Birmingham. Everything about the Staffordshire Hoard is wildly improbable and deeply mysterious. It was found, by pure chance, in 2009, in a recently ploughed field at Hammerwich, a village near Lichfield, by a detectorist called Terry Herbert, who had no expectation of finding anything, the field having just been searched by another pair of detectorists. However, he did find something – first, a fragment of gold lying on the surface, then, as he dug down, more and more pieces, until, over the next five days, he had uncovered 244 gold objects. And that was just the beginning: excavation work by Birmingham Archaeology, funded by English Heritage and successfully kept secret, eventually unearthed the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork (and garnet-inlaid cloisonné) ever found: almost four thousand six hundred items in all, containing eleven pounds' weight of gold and three pounds of silver. 
  The hoard consists largely of decorative features from sword hilts and scabbards – 
'What is carried over? The Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter.
The sword is in the king’s hands; the crux a craftsman’s triumph. Metal effusing its own fragrance, a variety of balm...' (Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns)
And everything in the hoard, including even a very fine and elaborate helmet, appears to have been carefully selected then systematically broken into often very small fragments. Why was this done? What is this hoard and who would have put it together and hidden it? Was it simply plunder (in which case why break it up so carefully?) or some kind of religious offering? The collection can't have been intended as grave goods; were they a metalworker's store of pieces to be repurposed? Why did such a hoard, having been collected together and buried, then lie lost and forgotten until that chance discovery in 2009? 
  Looking at the cleaned and restored fragments today, as they lie in their well lit display cases, one can only marvel, not only at the mystery that surrounds them, but also at the sheer quality and beauty of the workmanship, all of it dating from well before the end of the seventh century. These fragments offer tantalising glimpses of a highly sophisticated culture of which we know almost nothing beyond the bald facts of chronological history. They are precious flotsam washed up by chance on the shore of that great ocean of the unknown that lies all around us, spreading ever wider as we go back and back in time...

'I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my time: where the mole
shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe...'

All Souls

 Today is All Souls, when Christians are enjoined to remember 'the faithful dead'. For most of us, I suspect, the ever growing family of our dead contains only a minority of the Christian faithful, but today, well placed in the elegiac season of autumn, is a good day to remember them all. Loss and remembrance are great themes in English poetry – Lycidas, Gray's Elegy, In Memoriam, to name only the more imposing monuments. On a far smaller scale, and much more recent, I always find this poem by Kay Ryan – short, subtle and oblique – especially poignant...

Things shouldn't be so hard

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

As for music, Schubert marked All Souls Day with one of his most beautiful songs, the Litanei. This morning Radio 3's Song of the Day was the Litanei, sung to an orchestral accompaniment by Benjamin Appl (a new release, not yet available online). For me, this version, sung by Bryn Terfel (using, like Hans Hotter, only a fraction of his vocal power), is my favourite...

'Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light'

 Johannes Vermeer's date of birth is, like so much else about him, unknown, but it was on this day in 1632, at the Reformed Church in Delft, that he was baptised, so All Hallows Eve is regarded as his anniversary. This poem by the American poet Howard Nemerov, simply titled 'Vermeer', catches, I think, something of the essence of his unique art... 

Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvellous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded window, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat’s cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.

If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold…
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.

Fungi and Larkins

Yesterday afternoon I decided to join a 'Fungus Foray' in St Michael's churchyard. I think my interest was piqued by recently finding a very fine Fly Agaric growing up against the wall of the church hall (not St Michael's) around the corner. It was doing very nicely and the top was opening and spreading when someone came along and kicked it to pieces, as is the British way with fungi (in other countries they're more likely to fetch a basket and start gathering, though probably not the Fly Agaric). In the churchyard some thirty or forty people had gathered, many of them armed with field guides, and, after a short talk by the mycologist in charge (a woman, so presumably spared the 'fun guy' gags – though 'fun gal' has possibilities...), the group set off in a body to see what they could find. After twenty minutes they were still gathered around a nearby tree stump admiring some Sulphur Caps, while I hovered on the periphery, already beginning to think this was all too serious for an inveterate dabbler like me. Just then I noticed a Speckled Wood flying off along one of the woodland paths (this churchyard, said to be the largest in England, is also a semi-wild nature reserve) and I followed it, leaving the mycophiles to their fungal fun.
  I was lucky, not only in spotting the Speckled Wood – a late flyer, probably my last of the year – but in happening upon a clump of Larkin family gravestones in among the trees and shrubbery. I've found them before, but ever since they have proved strangely elusive, and despite many wanderings in the churchyard I have never again, since I first saw it, found the headstone of the poet's ancestral namesake – the one that gave the young Larkin such a turn – or the decidedly plain grave of his parents. Next time perhaps...

'Slowly, silently...'

 Talking of Radio 3, one of its pleasing regular features is the Sunday poem, requested by a listener and read, in commendably straightforward style, by the presenter, Martin Handley. Often I miss it (it's aired some time before 8), but this morning I caught it, and it was one I hadn't heard (or read) since my boyhood, when it was in every children's anthology. I wonder if it still is, or is that strange archaism 'shoon' too much for today's kids? It's 'Silver' by Walter de la Mare, which I now see is a sonnet in length but not in shape, written in rhyming couplets and with no turn. A purely descriptive, entirely visual poem, it yet has something eerie and mysterious about it, as so often with De La Mare, and it is really very good. I love 'Couched in his kennel, like a log, With paws of silver sleeps the dog'. 

Slowly, silently, now the moon

Walks the night in her silver shoon;

This way, and that, she peers, and sees

Silver fruit upon silver trees;

One by one the casements catch

Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;

Couched in his kennel, like a log,

With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep

Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,

With silver claws and a silver eye;

And moveless fish in the water gleam,

By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Radio: 4 Loses, 3 Gains

 I was not surprised to read that yet more listeners are deserting Radio 4, especially its unlistenable Today Programme. Why anyone should inflict Today on themselves when they could be listening to good music on Radio 3 has been a mystery to me for some while – probably since I defected from 4 to 3 myself. Radio 3 has its tiresome aspects – self-conscious popularisation, endless repetitive trails, odd traces of wokery – but by and large it is surely good for the soul, whereas 4 offers only vexation of spirit, and a dreary North London semi-woke mindset that now embraces almost all its output. Back in the day, when I was a radio critic, Radio 4 was studded with well made, imaginative programmes that were worth listening to, and at worst it was a pleasant, painless backdrop to the day.  No longer. 
What the Guardian piece (linked above) doesn't mention is that, while Radio 4 haemorrhages listeners, Radio 3 has had a surge in listening, much of it no doubt at 4's expense. It would be good to think that the BBC might learn something from this, but on past form that seems highly unlikely. 

From The Da Vinci Code to 1984

 One of the books most frequently dumped on charity shops in recent years was Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (though it was surely outdumped for a while by Fifty Shades of Grey). At one point the Da Vinci glut reached such a pitch that an Oxfam shop in Swansea displayed a pile of the unwanted title in its window with a notice pleading with donors to please donate something, anything else, preferable vinyl. That was back in 2017, and things have changed since then – now the most dumped books, at least in Swansea, are Richard Osman's cosy murder mysteries – but one David Shrigley, described as an artist, has belatedly done his bit to clear the Da Vinci Code mountain. Having searched out and bought some six thousand dumped copies  – mostly from a vast Oxfordshire warehouse where the most comprehensively unwanted books go to die – he has spent 'a six-figure sum' pulping them and republishing them as an eye-wateringly expensive limited edition of a very different book, George Orwell's 1984, some of the proceeds of which will go to Oxfam. 'It's not literary criticism, ' he declares accurately, though he does regard 1984 as 'a really important book for people to read'.  So, if you've got £495 burning a hole in your pocket, head for that Swansea Oxfam and pick up one of Shrigley's 1984s. Tragically, it might even be a sound investment, the 'art' market being what it is these days – and at least you'd end up with a book to read. 
The BBC News website covers this story in its usual exhaustive manner. It's good to learn that Shrigley has not actually read The Da Vinci Code (perhaps he's a man of taste and discernment after all) and that, when approached for a quote, Dan Brown was 'in transit'.