Mr Joad's 'buzzing bluebottle'

As well as being a 'botanophile' (as he terms it, to distinguish himself from a proper botanist), Jocelyn Brooke was also a keen maker of fireworks, an interest he developed while still at school. Once, 'quite unwittingly, I nearly blew up Professor Joad. I was at Bedales by this time, and had become friendly with Julian Trevelyan, to whom, in the holidays, I sent a parcel of home-made fireworks. Mr Joad, who was staying with the Trevelyans, was detailed, it seems, to ignite one of my maroons. Either Mr Joad was too slow, or the fuse was too short: the maroon, at any rate, exploded with an annihilating report within a few inches of the philosopher's nose. Had the distance been only slightly less, the BBC might have been a different (and doubtless inferior) institution.'
  C.E.M. Joad - all but forgotten now - was in his day one of the most famous public intellectuals in a country notoriously suspicious of public intellectuals. And looking at the example of Joad, one can see why. If he hadn't existed, a satirical novelist would surely have invented him.
  A brilliant student (double first from Balliol etc), he moved smoothly (and fashionably) from Syndicalism to Guild Socialism to Fabianism, until he was expelled from the Fabian Society for sexual misbehaviour at a summer school. He entered the Civil Service, bent on infusing it with a socialist ethos, before moving on to Birkbeck College, where he became a great populariser of philosophy and a prolific author.
  Along the way Joad had married, settled in the delightful hamlet of Westhumble in Surrey, and fled to Snowdonia at the prospect of conscription (this was the Kaiser War, and Joad was, of course, a convinced pacifist). When the coast was clear, he returned, then a couple of years later left his wife and three children for the first of a long string of mistresses. Sexual desire he regarded as 'a buzzing bluebottle that needs to be swatted promptly before it distracts a man of intellect from higher things'. He was a firm believer in the all-round uselessness of the female mind, and had no interest in women who (mysteriously resistant to the combined firepower of paunch, pipe and whiskers) wouldn't go to bed with him.
  In the Thirties, Joad effectively won the famous Oxford Union debate on the motion: 'This house will in no circumstances fight for King and Country' (this just after Hitler became Chancellor). And he indulged an interest in the supernatural, going on ghost-hunting expeditions with Harry Price, though Joad's publications in this field were coolly received by the Society for Psychical Research.
  With the Hitler War came Joad's big break, when he talked himself onto the new radio discussion programme The Brains Trust, by means of which he became a national celebrity, famous for his catchphrase 'It all depends what you mean by...' Joad hugely enjoyed his fame, but it all ended in scandal - not over his sexual behaviour, but over train tickets. Having foolishly boasted in print that 'I cheat the railway company whenever I can', he was shortly thereafter convicted of travelling without a ticket on a train from London to Exeter, fined, and sacked by the BBC. His career as a celebrity philosopher was over, but he still found time to renounce his long-standing agnosticism and return to the bosom of the Church of England before he died.
  And now we have to make do with Alain de Botton...

PS

I had a feeling, even as I was writing it, that yesterday's Last Swifts post might have been tempting (benign) fate - and sure enough, my homebound train last night passed through a veritable swirling swiftstorm between Mitcham Junction and Hackbridge. I counted 19, but there must have been many more, all very lively, swooping, screaming and feeding. And then I spotted two more this morning, high up over Balham...
The 40 percent Swift decline figure I do find surprising, but as it's endorsed by Malty (see comment below Last Swifts) it must be true. Perhaps it's just that ever since childhood I've lived, like Worm, among houses eminently suitable for swifts - and sparrows - to nest on, so they've always been there. (A chap from the RSPB on the radio the other days described House Sparrows as 'extremely rare' in town, which is nonsense.) If we want to help swifts - and swallows and martins and sparrows - Building Regulations should be adjusted so that all newbuild houses offer suitable nesting places. Sorted.

Last Swifts

I might as well face it - I've probably seen my last swift of the year. Or swifts, to be precise - a pair of them circling lazily over Hackbridge on Monday evening. Since then, nothing...
At least the Great Disappearance of the last weekend in July proved a false alarm. The swifts were back in the early days of August, and twice last week I saw a dozen and more, but by last weekend they had dwindled to zero again, and if the pair I saw on Monday were indeed my last for this summer, they have gone a good fortnight earlier than last year. And who can blame them heading for the warm South after a dismal summer like this one?
Still, I'd be interested to hear if anyone else still has swifts. Let's postpone the evil day when these mysterious and beautiful birds are gone...
There's a fine piece about them by Mark Cocker here.

The Biggest Problem in the World

Sorry to get serious, but hearing an interview on the radio last night with a Tunisian woman got me thinking...
  I've long suspected that the Biggest Problem in the World - the one that underlies all the world's other Big Problems - is not over-population or hunger or poverty or environmental depredation (I'm leaving out 'climate change' this time, even though Radio 4 is about to explain to us that Britain will soon be just like Madeira, with avocadoes hanging from every tree) or ethnic conflict or authoritarian rule or the absence of democracy - no, the Biggest Problem in the World is Corruption, which creates poverty and hunger (and, often, environmental depredation), destroys individual autonomy, undermines the institutions that make civic society possible, erodes the rule of law, takes away all hope of justice, redress or self-advancement from the poorest, and makes democracy meaningless.
  The tendency of  liberal democratic Western opinion to see social progress in terms of a struggle for democracy seems to me a huge error - what would benefit people far more, and what many are in fact struggling for, is rather an end to corruption. Without corruption, institutions and infrastructure work and people can get on, make a living, buy and sell without endless extortions and payouts draining away the fruits of their enterprise, making the power elites richer and the poor unable to help themselves. Without corruption, great swathes of the globe that are now poor, hungry and desperate would be doing fine. To adapt Clinton's one memorable statement (apart from 'I did not have sex with that woman') - it's the corruption, stupid. The uprising in Tunisia that launched what we foolishly call the Arab Spring was sparked not by activists hungry for Jeffersonian democracy but by a street trader who had finally had enough of corrupt officials taking away his livelihood, and burnt himself to death in his desperation.
  Now Tunisia has democracy, and the result is an Islamist government which (among other ominous developments) intends to scrap clauses in the constitution that protect the status of women. And why did people vote the Islamists in? Precisely because they thought that, being religiously motivated, they would be less corrupt than the previous lot. Well they might be - we'll see - but their idea of democracy sure ain't ours, and the thought of a wholly Islamist Middle East ranged around an isolated Israel is not a happy one.

'... and Meadow Browns of course': A Lesson

'Against the hot blue sky, the terraced knoll loomed enormous, its summit lost in a shimmering heat-haze. The grassy flanks seemed to radiate a reflected heat, enfolding us in a weighted, thyme-scented silence, enhanced rather than disturbed by the monotone of a thousand insects. On the banks at the hill's foot, the cropped turf was gemmed with the small downland flowers, many of which I had never seen before: rockrose, milkwort, centaury...'
  Thus Jocelyn Brooke in The Military Orchid - a memoir (which I'm reading at the moment) built around his passion for wild flowers, especially orchids. He is recounting a first boyhood visit to the downs above Folkestone which kindled a lifelong love of chalk downland flora. 'Rockrose, milkweed, centaury...' I couldn't visualise Centaury and meant to look it up, but was distracted by the name. Apparently it does derive from the obvious source - Centaur - and from a legend that it was Chiron the Centuar who first divulged the secrets of Centaury's healing powers (it's still widely used in herbal medicine).
  The chalk downland flora were in their high summer glory yesterday when I took a walk in the Surrey Hills with my cousin down from Derbyshire. Blue scabious and yellow hawkweed over knapweed and wild marjoram, bird's-foot trefoil and clover... And the lovely pale Chalkhill Blues were flying in uncountable numbers, along with Common Blues - disappointingly no Adonis - and the odd Brown Argus. Gatekeepers were everywhere, and Meadow Browns of course. A pale-looking specimen flew past which I instantly identified as yet another Meadow Brown - but my cousin, not so sure, watched it land and called me over for a closer look. Yes, I confirmed with one glance of my expert eye, a paler-than-usual Meadow Brown. But then I took a proper look...
 Yes, it was pretty pale, but the eye on the forewing that was just showing was altogether too small and lustreless - and why were those wings staying so firmly closed? That's not Meadow Brown behaviour. The obliging specimen stayed put, quite immobile, long enough for me to consult my trusty field guide and conclude that this was no Meadow Brown, but a Grayling, a species I hadn't (knowingly) seen in years. When it eventually, reluctantly took to the air and flew weakly away for a few yards, then dropped to the ground again in the identical pose, wings tight shut, slightly off-vertical, the identification was confirmed, and I had learnt a lesson: Use your eyes! Look properly, even if you think you know what you're seeing.
 Amid all the butterfly spotting (and misidentifying), we were also taking an interest in the flowers - among which was a pretty little item with small pink, five-petalled flowers. We took one stem (came off in my hand, honest) home to identify. Yes, it was Centaury. Now I know.

Modern Tess

We live in strange times. When I came across a link on Frank Wilson's indispensable Books, Inq. blog labelled 'Thomas Browne, 17th-Century Author, Draws New Interest', my first thought was that - like Thomas Tallis - Sir Thos had had a mention in Fifty Shades Of Grey, and suddenly the Religio Medici was walking off the shelves and they couldn't print Hydriotaphias fast enough to satisfy the vast army of 'mummy porn' aficionadas ('Mummy is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for Balsams...'). But no - it turned out, happily, that this was a far more innocent and firmly grounded revival of interest in the works of Sir Thomas Browne.
 However, one literary author who has benefited from the Fifty Shades effect is Thomas Hardy, whose Tess of the D'Urbervilles is (in its first edition - three volumes, set you back a few grand) the first gift given by the ghastly Mr Grey to his unfortunate female victim, Lord knows why (and I've no intention of finding out). Sales of Tess have, by all accounts, tripled as a result of Mr Grey's endorsement, and I have lately been noticing young women reading it on train and Tube. Heaven knows what they will make of it - but then Heaven knows what I make of it really, after rather more readings than is entirely healthy (I studied it for A-level). I think Deeply Flawed Masterpiece about sums it up. Certainly, for all its beauties, its great set pieces and emotional power, it is marred by some pretty awful writing. But if you've got through Fifty Shades that is probably no impediment at all.

The Wife of Martin Guerre

I've just read The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis - another gift of the blogosphere, for I doubt I would ever have heard of it if it wasn't for having come across admiring references to it on various American literary blogs.
Janet Lewis was the wife of the eminent critic Yvor Winters, and a considerable poet and novelist in her own right. The Wife of Martin Guerre is a novella published in 1941 that reimagines the intriguing case of a 16th-century Frenchman who disappeared for eight years, then reappeared and resumed his life (and his wife) - only this time, apparently, it was not the real Martin Guerre, but an impostor... It's the story told in the French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre and the American Civil War movie Sommersby, not to mention several musicals and stage shows. But nobody tells it like Janet Lewis. Her achievement, in a 90-page novella, is to create an entirely convincing medieval world - the world of a relatively wealthy Gascon peasant clan - and an entirely convincing medieval heroine in Martin Guerre's wife, Bertrande de Rols. Janet Lewis pulls off the great imaginative feat of making Bertrande at once wholly of her time, thoroughly alien in her medieval (essentially religious) way of thinking - into which no trace of modern sensibility obtrudes - and entirely sympathetic, so that by the time the story comes to its shattering conclusion we feel deeply for her, are fully involved in her impossible dilemma and her sad fate. This plain tale plainly told in spare, lucid prose - precisely the kind of short fiction that is so easily overlooked and undervalued - works a subtle, special magic on the reader. Or it did on me - I think The Wife of Martin Guerre will haunt me for a long long time.
 If it sounds like your kind of thing, hurry along to Amazon, where it is available for as little as 5p.