Another Sign of the Times

I note (head in hands, moaning) that the name of the agency that supplied the inept German doctor who killed a patient on his first shift in the UK is... Take Care Now. Truly we are well advanced along the road to perdition. How long before a constabulary renames itself Mind How You Go?

Retroprogressive Banking

I should have realised banking was doomed when I last visited my branch to 'see the manager'. These days of course the manager is far too exalted a personage to deal with financial minnows like me, so it was one of his small standing army of branch middle management who saw me. She was a buxom youngish lady with a rather common accent who addressed me throughout as 'Nigel' (at least it wasn't 'Nige'). She had nothing to tell me and nothing to offer that wasn't going to cost money - but what struck me, as I gazed around to keep my mind occupied during our interview, was how little my bank now resembled a bank. It could have been anything at all really - a slightly upmarket Job Centre, some kind of waiting room, a discreet pox doctor's - impossible to tell. Not only have banks dropped the word 'bank' from their names, they no longer offer any visible evidence of what they do, preferring expanses of carpet, strangely shaped receptionist's desks and pale wood cubicles to the familiar rows of tellers behind glass, doing bank stuff. That's why I like the sound of this development - back to proper banking - and hope that Metro Bank gets its licence. My own proposal (which most definitely won't get a licence) is to take it further with a chain of Retro Banks, run on similar principles, styled with restrained grandeur and gravitas, where the manager wears morning dress with wing collar (think Captain Mainwaring in his work clothes) and the staff well cut lounge suits (the gents) and elegant black dresses with white blouses (the ladies), and there are tellers galore. And they will all address all customers by surname and honorific.

Giacometti - Safe as the Rock of Gibraltar

What happened here? How did a Giacometti sculpture looking like all the others, only bigger, fetch the largest price ever paid for an auctioned work of art? Is Giacometti even a great artist, in the sense that, say, Titian or Rembrandt are? He always seemed to me a one-trick pony who, once he'd found his style, just carried on imitating himself (as many artists do). The record-breaking sculpture is big, instantly recognisable and has scarcity value - even though it would be possible to mass-produce exact replicas that would fool anyone. It is also - and this, I suspect, is the clincher - perfect Corporate Art, the kind of thing that would look good, and impressive, and expensive, and instantly recognisable, in the vast foyer of some mighty finance corporation. Poor Giacometti - that it should come to this, the tortured products of his existential angst now (in the words of Godfrey Barker yesterday) 'safe as the Rock of Gibraltar'. He meant in investment terms, but...

Mottos

Brit has discovered a motto for our times - and very good it is (and good to see Peter de Vries getting a mention). The motto puts me in mind of the wise words of Bertie Wooster on a similar theme: 'The bally balliness of it all makes it seem so bally bally.' It does indeed - and most especially so in times like these...

Invictus Redivivus

My father's taste in poetry was that of an upright Edwardian. He had a personal anthology of poems of moral uplift and patriotic heroism which he delighted in reciting while shaving. Vitai Lampada was of course a favourite, as were The Revenge ('Sink me the ship, Master Gunner - sink her, split her in twain! Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!'), The Loss of the Birkenhead and Horatius at the Bridge ('even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer'). These kind of poems were still to be found in the older anthologies of my childhood, but were soon to fade away... Or were they? The sudden vogue of W.E. Henley's Invictus suggests some at least of these poems have a long afterlife and are liable to flare into renewed vigour and popularity even now. Invictus has given its name to the new Clint Eastwood film about Nelson Mandela, just as the poem, on a scrap of paper, gave strength to the prisoner Mandela. John McCain has also claimed the poem as a source of personal inspiration - as has (gawd help us) Gordon Brown. Why is this? It is a very effective poem of its type, technically well done, full of memorable phrases, with a message that I suspect bordered on the subversive when it was published (1875) since it proclaimed man free from God (gods now plural and dubious), in control of his own destiny and fearing no afterlife or judgment. Now, however, it is one that stiffens the sinews of the individualist captain of his soul, at best in a way that will strengthen a good man (Mandela), at worst as a kind of archaic equivalent of My Way (G***** B****). Either way, it seems it's back. For a while.

Groundhog Day

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone! (Yes, it's come round again...). I'm pleased to report that, on emerging from my burrow this morning, I was unable to see my shadow. Winter, therefore, is nearing an end. I'll notify the Met Office forthwith.

Nature: Words and Pictures

Bette Midler on Princess Anne: 'She really loves Nature' [beat] 'despite what it did to her.' Well, as is amply documented on this blog, I too love Nature (and on the whole it's treated me quite kindly). However, I do not, by and large, like watching wildlife documentaries, too many of which seem to be a case of genius-level camerawork undermined by remedial-level commentary (and, often, music). Even the great Attenborough is liable to lapse into the windy platitudes and twee anthropomorphism that characterise the genre. However, once in a while, a film comes along in which the words live up to the images on screen, and one such is coming soon. It's a Natural World film called Wild Places of Essex, and it's on BBC2 on Wednesday of next week. The reason it's so good is that it's made by Robert Macfarlane, who wrote The Wild Places - indeed the commentary is adapted from that book. The result is an unusually thoughtful, eye-opening and insightful film, which, while pondering the nature of wildness, opens up its unpromising subject into something fascinating (and, along the way, pays homage to the late Roger Deakin). It is, of course, beautiful to look at - but the chief pleasure is in the accompanying words actually having something to say, and saying it well. (The picture's a Peregrine, by the way: they haunt the Essex badlands these days.)