The Industrious Francis Bacon...

Jonathan Bate, in The Genius of Shakespeare (an excellent book), devotes a chapter to demolishing, coolly but definitively, the various absurd theories about who - other than the man himself - wrote Shakespeare. Of course no rational argument will ever dent the conspiracy theorists' conviction - based on snobbery and ignorance - that someone other than the 'grammar school boy' Shakespeare must have written his plays. Bacon is generally the favourite (even the otherwise sane E. Nesbit was a convinced Baconian) - but what I hadn't realised, until I read Sarah Bakewell's How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and 20 Attempts at an Answer, was that the arch-Baconian Ignatius Donnelly, having proved to his own satisfaction that his man wrote Shakespeare, then goes on to establish beyond peradventure (hem hem) that Bacon also wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, all of Marlowe's works - and, er, the Essays of Montaigne. Stands to reason, doesn't it? The word Francis occurs several times in the Essays (referring to Francois I), and the word bacon more than once. And the clincher is that the plays supposedly written by Shakespeare frequently mention mountains, or 'Mountaines'. Why did Bacon write in French, under Montaigne's name? Why, he needed the cover in order to express sceptical, heterodox views. Case closed... Truly there is no bottom to human folly.

Bumblebee

That favourite mimosa of mine (see below)is not yet in full bloom, so its scent is hardly making itself felt above the rather heavy fragrance of the Sweet Box that is planted all around it. Today there was a bumblebee visiting the Sweet Box flowers (a white-tailed Bombus lucorum, to be precise, as in the picture). This was my first of the year, and despite the cold she seemed to be in fine fettle, bombinating merrily around the shrubbery. Time was when you never saw bumblebees in winter, but now they barely hibernate, at least in town, where parks and gardens supply many of their favourite winter-flowering plants. You would have thought, though, that they would feel the cold. As you would with all those other creatures reportedly starting their annual cycle earlier and earlier with every passing year, regardless of the weather. I always thought it was day length that regulated such things, with weather too playing a significant part, but the first hasn't changed and the second has been decidedly parky. What else is at work then? The obvious answer is 'climate change', but I cannot see how something as nebulous and long-term as that could be affecting individual animals. If it was manifesting itself in an obvious way - i.e. a mild winter - that would make sense, but when winters are like this one and still the (accelerating, they say) trend towards earliness continues, you have to wonder what is going on. Well, I do - perhaps there's something I'm missing...

Toyota, Updike, Forgetting

The beleaguered Japanese car makers Toyota are recalling cars left, right and centre, and facing reputational meltdown. How very different it all looked back in 1979:

'Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Spring Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. The fucking world is running out of gas. But they won’t catch him, not yet, because there isn’t a piece of junk on the road gets better mileage than his Toyotas, with lower service costs … That’s all he has to tell people when they come in. And come in they do, the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending … He tells them, whey they buy a Toyota, they’re turning their dollars into yen. And they believe him. A hundred units new and used moved in the first five months of 1979, with eight Corollas, five Coronas including a Luxury Edition Wagon, and that Celica that Charlie said looked like a Pimpmobile unloaded in these first three weeks of June already, at an average markup of eight hundred dollars per sale. Rabbit is Rich.'

That, of course, is the opening of John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich, which I found the most satisfactory of the tetralogy when I read it, though I haven't revisited it in years. It finds Rabbit prospering, having inherited the co-ownership of a Toyota dealership from his late father-in-law. There is, of course, trouble on the way, in the form of Rabbit's returning son and a ghost from his amatory past... Beyond that my memory is vague and fragmentary, as with almost everything I read (in accordance with Montaignean wisdom) - though I have a good deal more of Updike in my head than Nicholson Baker did when he wrote U And I (first sentence: 'On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law's study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap.') Baker too made a virtue of forgetting. What else can you do?

Sun and Hail

Weather's the main thing of course - far more than a background effect, it permeates our lives, inner and outer, making and breaking our moods and our days. And we've been having a lot of it lately, with a spell of bitter cold, relentless leaden skies and peculiarly unpleasant forms of rain and sleet. So my spirits lifted when this morning brought blue skies and sunshine - a cold morning under blue skies is a very different proposition from a similarly cold one that is dank and grey and crushing. At lunchtime I sat by my favourite mimosa tree - yes, it's that time of year again - with the sun now intermittent but, when it was out, blazing straight into my face (where it was more than welcome). I was about to return reluctantly to work when it burst through brilliantly - and at the same time there came a heavy fall of hail. It was a strange magical effect, as if I was somehow making my own weather, like a room around me. The sky, I now saw, was a mix of brilliant sunlit blue and blur-edged clouds of intense black - an extraordinary and, as it turned out, short-lived effect. The hail passed. There was no rainbow, but I returned to work with my heart that little lighter.

A Herbert Spencer of a Day

This fine old phrase - which I believe occurs somewhere in H.G. Wells (Love and Mr Lewisham?) and is forgotten by all but a strange handful - occurred to me again yesterday, when it seemed the entire technical infrastructure of my home life was breaking down, one bit at a time. It began with a straightforward power cut - all too common in my neck of the woods - which lasted half an hour or so, followed by all the lighting in the house - but only the lighting - going off. This turned out to be a blown fuse, which I duly repaired. Then I noticed a marked lack of heating or hot water, and realised the timer had to be reprogrammed from scratch following the power cut. So far, so sorted - until, in quick succession, I sat down at my PC and found myself unable by any shift to get online, and then found myself equally unable to get a picture on the TV. You're probably ahead of me here - yes, my broadband provider was experiencing a little local difficulty. All I could do was wait, until eventually my online life did indeed kick back into action. Needless to say, I handled all these setbacks with my customary stoical sangfroid, which takes the paradoxical form of shouting, swearing, ranting and generally 'losing it' (briefly). It's the sheer dumb stupidity of those technologies on which we - the stupid ones - so cravenly rely. Is there anything more infuriating in the world than a non-responsive computer screen staring blankly back at you? What a day - oh, and in the middle of it my back started playing up (and still is). Hey ho...

Beware Weeping Politicians

Alastair Campbell, a man easily identifiable to the naked eye as an emissary of Satan, apparently broke down and wept on Andrew Marr's TV show this morning. It seemed that he was overcome with emotion when contemplating the awful things that have been said about his erstwhile boss Blair, but he later explained that it was about his (Campbell's) latest risible 'novel' being likened to the 'sexed-up' Iraq dossier - which is even more deplorable. I fear we're in for a lot more piping the eye from politicians as the election draws nearer. It's reported that G***** B**** is going to weep when he appears shortly on Piers Morgan's Life Stories, one of the most nauseating shows on TV - for which he was coached by none other than old gusher eyes Alastair. They probably think this is in line with the zeitgeist - all those lacrymose TV talent shows etc - but I very much hope they're wrong, and that all the other lot have to do now is to stay dry of eye and stiff of upper lip. Surely we don't want our politicians, after everything else they've done to us, embarrassing us by blubbing all over the place.

Sad News

Ian Carmichael - a fine comic actor and, by all accounts, a thoroughly decent man - has died at the age of 89. His performances in a clutch of comedies in the late 50s and early 60s - Private's Progress, I'm All Right Jack, Lucky Jim, School for Scoundrels, Heavens Above - were vintage stuff (and I'm of a vintage to remember seeing some of them in the cinema when they were released). Carmichael's playing of Bertie Wooster on TV, oposite Denis Price's magnificent Jeeves, was also very fine, even though he was too old for the role. There's an obit here - but what caught my eye in the coverage of his death was a remark by Richard Briers that Carmichael was 'never pushy. He sort of wandered through the world of film.' Quite so, and that was true of most actors of that generation, who, having just been through a world war, knew better than to take acting, let alone fame, seriously.