Is It the Boson?

So, the Higgs Boson, the (ridiculously)  so-called 'God particle', has been discovered - or has it? Reading this, I can't say I'm much the wiser, but it does put me in mind of the closing lines of The Hunting of the Snark...

'“It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,
   And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
 Then the ominous words “It’s a Boo-”

Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
 A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like “-jum!” but the others declare
 It was only a breeze that went by.

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
 Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
 Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
 In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away —
 For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.'

Suzanne Lenglen: Tennis As She Was Played

With Wimbledon in full swing, let's take a look back at one of tennis's greatest stars - the glamorous, exuberant French player Suzanne Lenglen, who died on this day in 1938, aged just 39. She died of pernicious anaemia, having been diagnosed with leukaemia and lost her sight shortly before her death - the culmination of a lifetime dogged by illnesses, everything from jaundice to whooping cough to chronic asthma. And yet, through it all, she dominated her game as no woman had before, and brought women's tennis firmly out of the shadows.
 Her dominance of Wimbledon, in particular, was complete: she won the women's singles title every year from 1919 to 1925, except 1924 when ill health forced her to withdraw. (To put this in perspective, the next Frenchwoman to win Wimbledon was Amelie Mauresmo, 81 years later, in 2006.) And it wasn't only her brilliant play that attracted attention - her style of dress, with bare forearms and calves, was considered decidedly 'fast', as was her endearing habit of taking sips of cognac between sets. Lenglen seemed certain to win her seventh Wimbledon title when, owing to a misunderstanding, she kept Queen Mary waiting in the Royal Box for her appearance. When she realised her mistake, Lenglen fainted clean away, and withdrew from the tournament. Ah those different times...
 Happily some footage of La Langlen survives, including this not entirely satisfactory account of her great match against the young American Helen Wills at Cannes in 1926. More interesting perhaps is this little film, How I Play Tennis, which not only illustrates her technique but also shows the almost balletic grace and elegance with which she played. Though she was no great beauty off-court, in play Lenglen was clearly something else, something exhilarating and really rather beautiful.

Dabbler Alert

I see I've popped up on The Dabbler again.

Armless Fun

With the unspeakbly grim English non-summer rolling on into another month, it's time to lift the spirits with a bit of harmless fun...
On Radio 4's 'antidote to panel games' the other day, there was a round in which the teams were invited to come up with song titles from which one letter had been dropped, thereby changing everything - e.g. Boiled Bee and Carrots, My Grandfather's Cock, Bras in Pocket, etc. Surely this could profitably (profitably?) be extended to the titles of novels.
Thus we could have Henry James's Portrait of a Lad (not to mention The Golden Owl). Or Proust's In Search of Lost Tim (illus. Edward Ardizzone). Edith Wharton spraying the jokes around with The Hose of Mirth. Then there's Ford Madox Ford's invaluable handbook The Good Solder (aka The Saddest Tory). Graham Greene's entertaining Travels with My Ant. And of course Philip Roth's touching profile of Britain's leading Richard Madeley impersonator, The Human Stan...
Now I must take my medication and have a lie down. Over to you - there must be many more...

One for Mr Piper

Also on the Kentish walk was this fine ruin of a church - St Mary, Eastwell. It was largely demolished in the Fifties after the nave roof fell in, probably as a result of tank manoeuvres in the adjacent landscaped park. What remains has the kind of striking romantic beauty that would surely have had John Piper setting up his easel, had he happened to pass this way.
Piper, he of the dark dramatic washes and turbid skies, once painted some characteristic views of Windsor Castle, which George VI looked over and remarked amiably: 'You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.'
Anyway, St Mary, Eastwell, is a Piper crying out to be painted. Some enterprising computer type should develop an app to Piperise your photographs, turning your snapshot of a country church into something along these lines. It would liven up those holiday snaps no end...

From Painted Faith to Millennium Mural

And then there was the Kentish walk. This was a fine ten-mile church crawl around the Stour Valley, between the North Downs and Ashford, and the walk was bookended with suites of wall paintings that could hardly have been more different.
 The medieval paintings in the chancel at St Mary's church, Brook (left) are still impressive, though little more than a shadow of their 13th-century multicoloured glory, a remnant of a lost world of painted faith.
 Having begun at Brook, the walk ended at the isolated church of St Cosmas and St Damian at Challock. Here, amazingly, are three sets of 20th-century wall paintings. In the 1950s, in response to the loss of the church's stained-glass windows to wartime bomb damage, two art students, Rosemary Aldridge and Doreen Lister, painted the north chapel with cheery, vapid rural scenes and episodes from the lives of Cosmas and Damian, and a couple of years later the up-and-coming John Ward was invited to paint the chancel with scenes from the life of Jesus. On display in the church at present is a letter in which he fondly remembers how, with his friend and fellow artist Gordon Davies, he enjoyed the summer painting at the remote church, sleeping in the sexton's hut and relying on the nearby farmhouse for supplies (shades of J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country).
 Then, in 1999, Ward was invited to paint a Millennium mural on the north wall of the nave, facing the door. This depicts Christ - looking rather like a gaucho in his wide-brimmed hat - riding casually into, er, Challock. As with the gospel scenes in the chancel, the action is set in the local landscape, with the villagers looking on, participating, or going about their business. The overall effect of these 20th-century murals - there are some images here - is agreeable enough, but to compare them with the medieval paintings at Brook is to realise just how world-changingly far the Sea of Faith had receded in the course of the intervening centuries. For good and ill.

What I Did on My Holidays, by Nige

Up in Derbyshire the other day, I was strolling with my cousin when the subject of R.S. Thomas came up, and I related (hazily) what happened when the craggy poet met the undulating Liz Taylor ('And have you tried plaice?'). Now, back home after my too short Derbyshire sojourn, I find my original post on that bizarre encounter reissued in The Dabbler. There's a nice piece of synchronicity.
   High point of my latest visit to God's Own County (no protests from Yorkshiremen, please) was a walk along Lathkill Dale in glorious unexpected afternoon sun. The dale is one of the most variously beautiful of them all, with grand hanging woods, riverside lawns and slopes of flower-rich pasture. After much hopeful scanning of the sunlit pastures, we spotted numerous lively Common Blues, a single Large Skipper on a grasshead, and a tattered and faded Dingy Skipper (increasing by three my meagre species tally).
  And of course I had a look around the Best Bookshop in the World (aka The Bookshop, in Wirksworth), where, after a slow start, I found Stefan Zweig's novella Chess, Auden's For The Time Being (with The Sea and the Mirror), Iain Sinclair's booklet on the Millennium Dome, Sorry Meniscus - and The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L. Carr by Byron Rogers, the same Byron Rogers quoted in When R.S. Thomas Met Liz Taylor. Synchronicity again.
  The morning after that sunny afternoon in Lathkill Dale came the headline-making electric storms that swept the North and, to a lesser extent, the East Midlands. Lesser but quite enough, thank you. We revisited the fine permanent display of Joseph Wright's paintings in the Derby County Art Gallery. That's a Joseph Wright above - his charming alfresco portrait of The Hon. Brooke Boothby (which lives at Tate Britain) - not, in case you were wondering, me on my holidays. You wouldn't catch me with a volume of Rousseau.