Calling All Bloggers...

Ever wondered what the language of your blog says about you? What kind of personality is coming across as you bash out your observations - and even what parts of the brain might be engaged in your mighty lucubrations? Me neither, but here's an amusing little game you can play... And here's Nigeness personified (just type nigeness.blogspot.com/ into the space). How did they know about my taste for getting drunk in transvestite bars? It's uncanny...

Looking Up

This is the time of year that always finds me oppressed by the winter gloom and longing for spring - or at least some sign that there's still a sun up there. So my heart lifted when I awoke yesterday to cloudless enamel blue skies - and the countrybound trains running to time. I was soon at Box Hill, toiling merrily up the dip slope - quite steep enough thanks, especially as the shadier tracks were still covered in ice that had frozen into a crackling layer of quartz-like crystals on top of the chalk and mud. There were quite a few people around, at least on the main walks and on the broad mound of downland that is the easiest, most popular way up and down the hill (and was the scene of that memorable picnic in Emma). The views were glorious in the crisp clear light - almost as sharp as early spring - under that dome of sky. I saw nothing especially notable - just being there was quite enough - until, on the way down, I paused to look back uphill, and there, walking quite insouciantly across the open down from one side to the other, towards the wooded margin, was a large and handsome deer, looking almost surreally out of place. I've seen deer in the woods often enough, but never before on the downland on a 'busy' day. Nobody seemed to notice this fine beast as it went on its way - as I too soon did; sadly this had to be a short walk. But it had been enough to lift the winter gloom.
Today was greyer, but just warm enough (i.e. not prohibitively cold) for a brisk lunchtime walk along to Holland Park - and my first 'picnic' since before the December cold snap. It was good to be back, sitting in an alcove watching the birds on the feeders (including those bullying gluttons, the ring-necked parakeets). Things are looking up. Spring is on its way.

Still Life

Over on the super soaraway Dabbler, I ponder a still life...

Brother of the More Famous Larry

If he were alive, the author, naturalist and zoo keeper extraordinaire Gerald Durrell would be celebrating his 85th birthday today (he made it to just shy of 70, despite a heroic alcohol intake). I've always had a soft spot for him since his books were among the first to get me into the habit of reading, and he was one of the first authors whose works I actually sought out and collected. As a child, I was a sporadic and haphazard reader, once in a while finding something that really fired me up, then lapsing into long periods of reading nothing. I had two relatives - one a cousin of my father's, the other a great uncle - who would from time to time send well chosen books as gifts, and it was the cousin who, when I was nine or ten, sent Gerald Durrell's Encounters With Animals. I remember the book fondly - a Rupert Hart-Davis hardback, with excellent illustrations by Ralph Thompson. As a budding young naturalist, I leapt on it, relished every page, and set about finding other Durrell books. Over the next few years, I must have read a dozen or so, including of course My Family And Other Animals, which I reread several times. I wouldn't care to revisit those books now (except perhaps My Family...) as I fear they would seem terribly glib and facetious. But Durrell - brother of the more famous author Lawrence - never claimed to be much of a writer: 'To me it's simply a way to make money which enables me to do my animal work, nothing more.' As Samuel Johnson remarked, 'No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.' And at least Durrell helped to make a reader of me - perhaps of many another nature-mad boy - and for that I'll always be grateful.

Meanwhile in Dogger...

It is a wonderful thing that England's cricketers have won the Ashes - and won them convincingly, trouncing a clearly inferior Australian team. Almost as wondrous is the fact that each of the three Test victories was, for those listening to Test Match Special on Radio 4 longwave, lost to the Shipping Forecast, as the network switched (as it is obliged to do) to its mesmeric recitation of sea areas for the benefit of mariners. Thus one cherished radio institution trumped another, transporting longwave stalwarts out to sea then, having missed the clinching of victory, back to the tumult and the shouting as England (and the increasingly tiresome Barmy Army) celebrated victory.
Seamus Heaney, in a famous sonnet, caught the poetry - and the utility - of the dear old Shipping Forecast...

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warming voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L'Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, 'A haven,'
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

Butterfly Thoughts

A typically luminous post on Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence has got me thinking about butterflies (it doesn't take much these grim winter days). The wonderful Janet Lewis poem that Kurp quotes is called The Insect (and it is indeed the right title). It could have been worse; until well into the 19th century - in the time of Grimaldi's collecting, for example - butterflies were generally known just as 'flies', a name not only unappealing but downright confusing. The word 'butterfly' has been around for a millennium and more ('buterflie' in Middle English, 'butorfleoge' in Old English), yet it seems to have taken a long while to become the definitive term for our fluttering friends. Why butterfly? As I've noted before (though I can't for the life of me find the post to link to), there's no easy answer to that one... It's certainly true that English is the only language that gives lepidoptera a name that has anything to do with butter. The ancient Greeks got it right first time by naming the butterfly 'psyche' - the breath or soul (in modern Greek, it's the almost as beautiful 'petaloudia', relating to words for petal, leaf and opening out). The Latin 'papilio' has been the most fruitful butterfly word, giving us the French papillon among others, and spreading its wings to become 'pavilion'. But for once it is the Germans who have the most beautiful word - 'schmetterling', which perfectly evokes a buttterfly's dipping flight and the faint swish of passing wings.

An Ambridge Scandal

[NOTE: The following will make no sense at all to many readers of this blog, but sometimes a man has to speak out...]
For most of my sentient life, I've been listening to - or at least aware of - The Archers, Radio 4's strangely addictive 'everyday story of country folk' (it's no such thing of course) and, like most who fall under its spell, I intensely dislike a great deal about it. It's always a love-hate thing, and the hate is always at its strongest immediately after a 'special' episode, i.e. one of those in which they decide to arbitrarily kill off a character. The elaborately overhyped 'special' that marked The Archers' 60th anniversary has, sure enough, left me seething. In it, having quite skilfully constructed a cheering tale of birth and reconciliation, the writers then threw it away with the ludicrous story of the fatal trip to the roof of Lower Loxley, culminating in the most blood-curdling scream heard since the heyday of Hammer horror - this was Nigel Pargetter falling to his death from the roof of his ancestral home, and I am frankly furious about it. Not only was this part of the episode very badly written, with characterisation thrown to the wind (and it was a windy night up there on the roof, also frosty) and what was going to happen laboriously telegraphed at every step - it also deprived us listeners of one of the more attractive male residents of Ambridge, where most heterosexual men are drudges, boobies or crooks (or, increasingly, asexual). Even after years of marriage to the ghastly emasculating Lizzie, Nigel, a basically decent chap, was still full of spirit and fun - and now the harpies who run The Archers have killed him off, for no reason at all. As when they did the same to John Archer, I now intend to boycott the programme - though I know it won't last, I'll be drawn back in. I always am.