Day of the Brimstone

After many days of cloud, gloom and cold here in the suburban demiparadise, yesterday was, for a wonder, sunny and bright, with a spring-like warmth in the air. Maybe today, I thought as I set out for Cheam, I'll see my first Brimstone of the year. And so I did, rather sooner than I expected - a bright and handsome male was flying East along the high street of Carshalton, zipping along in the typical fast-moving, zigzagging manner of the newly awakened Brimstone renewing his acquaintance with the world. Having checked out the Fox and Hounds, he headed off down Westcroft Road towards the Grove park...
 This heart-lifting sight - marking the true beginning of spring and of the butterfly year - was to be repeated no fewer than seven times in as many minutes in the course of my short train journey. The ivy-clad embankments were alive with patrolling Brimstones - and there were to be more when I got to Cheam: one flying along the village high street there (spotted from inside Waitrose), then two more in the course of my short walk to my son's house, where another one flew past as soon as I got there. That makes to total of 12, a round dozen, in little more than an hour - I don't remember when I last saw so many in such a short time, let alone on the day of their first appearance. Let's hope it is a sign of an abundant butterfly year to come.

For today

Music of mourning from another Belgium, another age. Lekeu - a composer who deserves to be much better known - wrote this extraordinary piece at the age of 21 in response to the death of his mentor César Franck. Three years later Lekeu too was dead.

Norway - My Kind of Country!

It's happened! For the first time since records began (i.e. in 2008), I have more readers in Norway than anywhere else on Earth. The US and the UK are now eating Norway's dust as Nigemania sweeps the land of fjords and Vikings, Grieg and Munch, oil money and natural beauty, freedom and prosperity outside the EU - what's not to like (apart from the criminally high price of booze)? I've never been there but I'm sure it's my kind of country (apart from the criminally high etc.). And it seems this is their kind of blog - I've no idea why (was it the Norwegian paperclip man?) but I'm very glad. To mark the happy day that Norway took the lead, I've posted the above Norwegian painting - the very jolly Daughters of Rain by Hans Dahl.

First Cut

The first day of spring (the second first day this year), and a landmark of the gardening year - my first mow of the lawn. I always enjoy cutting the grass - the effect is so transformative, the effort so slight - and the first cut of the year is always special. The grass was pretty long in places, but the ground was a dry as could be expected at this time of year so the mowing was quite easy. The only irksome aspect of the whole thing was, as ever, the tendency of my cheapo Mow 'n' Vac (yes, honestly, that's what it's called) to shed its cuttings box or one of the flimsy bits of plastic that count as blades.Then there's the unpleasing noise of the thing, and the need to keep the trailing electric lead out of the way. In fact I have half decided to dispense with power mowing altogether this year and buy a good hand mower. I only have a fairly small lawn, it would be good work for the upper body - and how wonderful to restore the nostalgic sound of a hand-pushed mower to the neighbourhood soundscape. I'm going to have a look online and see what I can find...
 Mowing the lawn always puts Larkin's Cut Grass into my mind (even at this time of year). Today I was pleased to find that I still have it by heart. Short as it is, it's about the best my sieve-like memory can manage these days. I promise this will be the last Larkin poem for a while. Maybe.

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

Alas, Poor Yorick

The other day, on one of my charity shop prowls, I picked up a very handsome edition of Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey for a ridiculously low price. It was published in 1929 by The Scholartis Press, a short-lived venture founded by the lexicographer Eric Partridge. Beautifully printed and bound, edited from the second edition and the original MS by Herbert Read (who also supplies a long Introduction), this will look far better on my shelves - and read better - than my old Penguin Classics edition.
 It was on this day in 1768, less than a month after his Sentimental Journey was published, that Sterne's strength failed and he finally succumbed to the 'consumption' that had plagued him for years. Leaving behind more debts than assets, he was buried with little ceremony or expense in the churchyard of St George's, Hanover Square - but that was not the end of the story. There are several versions of what happened next, but it seems certain that 'resurrectionists' dug up Sterne's body and delivered it to an anatomist, who was busily dissecting it when an onlooker recognised the face of the famous Laurence Sterne. According to some reports, he fainted away from shock and the dissection was abandoned. Certainly, the body - or a decent amount of it - was rescued and reburied at St George's.
 There Sterne's mortal remains lay in peace until 1964, when the land was sold to the gloriously named Utopian Housing Society, who were obliged to dispose decently of all the bones they found before they could start building. Hearing of this, the Sterne enthusiast Kenneth Monkman - who had rescued and restored Sterne's home, Shandy Hall, in the Yorkshire village of Coxwold - was determined to rescue what he could of Sterne and reinter him in the village where 'Yorick' had been Perpetual Curate. Monkman insisted that any remains found in or near Sterne's burial place were to be examined by him, as a representative (and founder) of the Laurence Sterne Trust, before they were disposed of.
 So, early on a June morning in 1969, Kenneth Monkman and a representative of the Utopian Housing Society were on hand to watch the excavation at St George's. At first, rather few intact bones emerged, apart from a possibly Sternean femur - but then a skull was dug up that had had its top neatly sliced off. This was surely the skull of the anatomised author. To make sure, Monkman dashed home to collect a bust of Sterne said to be the most accurate ever made. With the help of a surgeon, skull was compared to bust and it was concluded that they made a perfect match - the skull of Yorick had been recovered.
 Now Laurence Sterne's remains lie, as they should, in the churchyard of St Michael, Coxwold - a rather fine church with an octagonal tower, and pews and pulpit installed by Sterne himself. And Shandy Hall, run by the Laurence Sterne Trust, is open to the public during the summer months. Worth a visit if you're in the area.

Larkin Again: Two Ways of Looking at a Toad

'I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours,' said Jerome K. Jerome. Clearly it also fascinated Philip Larkin, but he preferred actually doing it, building a successful career in academic librarianship while in his 'spare time' becoming the best English poet of his generation. His ambivalent attitude to work was best expressed in his well-known poem Toads, written on this day in 1954...

'Why should I let the toad work
          Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
          and drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
          With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
          That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
          Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts -
          They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
          With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines -
          They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
          Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
          No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
          To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
          That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
          Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
          And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
          My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
          All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
          One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
          When you have both.'

Toads is a fine example of Larkin managing to sound blokily matter-of-fact and conversational while performing all manner of tricks of rhyme and metre and deploying some quite fantastical vocabulary. 'Losels', by the way, were 'losers', good-for-nothings, wasters, while 'loblolly men' were medical orderlies on board ship, doling out loblolly, a thick gruel, to the sick and injured.
 Larkin (for the purposes of the poem) concludes that work is not the only toad squatting on him; there's something inside him too that he knows will always hold him back from the heroic gesture  - 'Stuff your pension' is for him the 'stuff' of dreams.
 Sure enough, eight years later, Larkin is still working, and the toad is no longer any kind of crushing burden, but rather a welcome companion, helping him through life - or as the death-obsessed poet succinctly puts it, 'down Cemetery Road'. In Toads Revisited - like Toads, a poem of nine short-lined quatrains - Larkin paints such a dismal picture of life without work, shuffling around the park among 'palsied old step-takers, Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters, Waxed-fleshed out-patients', that returning to work seems a positively delightful prospect...

'Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on, 

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me, 

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters, 

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets - 

All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime, 

Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them, 

Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
No friends but empty chairs - 

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer, 

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.' 

'Turning over their failures By some bed of lobelias' - the only Lobelia rhyme in English verse? Probably... Of course, both Toads and its sister poem are drenched in Larkinian irony and humour, and should not be read as any kind of 'statement' (statement, that is, of anything beyond the poem). However, both embody an ambivalence - a mixture of dull resentment and reluctant gratitude - that many of us must have felt in our working lives. For myself, when the time came, I found it easy and liberating to slip out from under the toad and make my own way down Cemetery Road, whistling as I go. 

Norway's Nearly Man

Today - as if you didn't know - is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Johan Vaaler, the Norwegian who didn't invent the paper clip. This is, admittedly, a slender claim to fame, but the thing about Vaaler is that he almost did it, and he is still often erroneously cited as the 'inventor of the paper clip'. What he did was to invent the version illustrated above - and go to the trouble of patenting it - while, unknown to him, the fully evolved double-loop paper clip was already being manufactured in Britain by the Gem Manufacturing Co. It was never patented, but has remained the definitive, unsurpassable paper clip (or, as the French would have it, trombone). The Norwegians, however, have a special feeling for the paper clip, and during the Nazi occupation, when all obvious national symbols were banned, many took to wearing a paper clip on their lapels as an emblem of resistance and solidarity. That's a better legacy than clipping together sheets of paper.