'Great are the perils of symbolism': Scenes from the Revolution

Things could be worse...
On this day in 1794 (20 Prairial Year II, as it was known at the time), the French revolutionary leader Robespierre inaugurated the first - and, as it turned out, last - Fesitval of the Supreme Being. Appalled by the naked atheism of the Cult of Reason, the 'sea-green incorruptible' had extinguished the cult, executed its leaders, and devised his own national religion, based on the salutary worship of a 'Supreme Being'.
  For the Festival of the Supreme Being in Paris, Robespierre had devised a spectacular ceremony, organised by the artist Jacques-Louis David and staged around a man-made mountain on the Champs de Mars. Huge crowds were assembled for the occasion, and Robespierre dressed with especial care, donning a splendid sky-blue coat.
 'As he looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in the gardens,' writes the historian John Morley, 'he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. "O Nature," he cried "how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale at the idea of such a festival as this!" In pontifical pride, he walked at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand, to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On the first of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devised an allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared. Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable group of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them with lofty wrath. Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre applied a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism and Madness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinned a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy rivals. The miscarriage of the allegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better the churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle...'
 Weeks later, Robespierre's many enemies finally turned on him and his reign of terror ended. Besieged and at bay, Robespierre tried to shoot himself, but the bullet went through his jaw, leaving him alive, in great pain and, for once, speechless. Carlyle describes the scene:
'Robespierre lay in an anteroom of the Convention Hall, while his prison-escort was getting ready; the mangled jaw bound up rudely with bloody linen: a spectacle to men. He lies stretched on a table, a deal box his pillow; the sheath of the pistol is still clutched convulsively in his hand. Men bully him, insult him: his eyes still indicate intelligence; he speaks no word. He had on the sky-blue coat he had got made for the Feast of the Etre Supreme - O Reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that? His trousers were nankeen; the stockings had fallen down over the ankles. He spake no word more in this world.'
 That same day, Robsepierre suffered the fate he had himself decreed for so many thousands in the cause of 'Liberty': he was guillotined.

Election Fever

Here we are then - the day before the Election. As ever, it is Old Nige's melancholy duty to fire up the prognostickation engine and see what emerges...
 Well, it was a stupefyingly dreary and shamefully fatuous campaign - if campaign isn't too strong a word for the shambles the Tories managed to create in their efforts to snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory. They were so bad they managed to make even the imbecile Corbyn look like a real contender. Having clearly decided to go presidential and make it all about Theresa, they hadn't reckoned with her weaknesses or the fact that the more people saw of her the less they'd like her. Since she opted to sleepwalk through the campaign and her people weren't allowed to get medieval with the Corbynistas, there was no real engagement, and the media events were dismal charades, made even worse by grandstanding journalists. The one time the Tories came up with anything of any substance - their perfectly sensible social care proposals - they failed to defend them and instead went straight into a screeching, gravel-spraying U-turn. This did not inspire a lot of confidence.
 But what will happen when the voters (those of them that can bring themselves to vote) enter the ballot box? I think it will be case of history repeating itself: just as the prospect of a Miliband premiership finally proved too ludicrous to be entertained, so will the thought of JC in Number Ten, only more so. The Tories don't deserve to win this, but the alternative is too terrible to contemplate, so it will be a Conservative 'victory', with an increased majority, but way short of anything that could be called a landslide.
 Lord, I'll be glad when it's all over.

Boyhood Birds

The same charity shop that recently sent me back to my young naturalists's boyhood with a Ladybird book and a cigarette card album, has done it again with this one: The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs by T.A. Coward, one of the handsome Wayside and Woodland series. This was the serious bird book of my boyhood, retained by my father from his youth. I used to browse in it at length, enjoying in particular the illustrations - superb colour plates by Archibald Thorburn (reproduced from Lord Lilford's Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands), black-and-white photographs of nests looking worrryingly exposed, and colour plates of eggs in rows against a blank background.
 This book is the first of three volumes, and the fact that I didn't have the other two probably goes some way to explain my extremely patchy knowledge of waders, wildfowl and seabirds - for these I had to rely on my Observer's book and, a good deal later (too late?), the excellent Collins' Pocket Guide to British Birds (R.S.R. Fitter).
 Now I'm living in hope that the charity shop will come up with the other Wayside and Woodland volume of my boyhood - The Butterflies of the British Isles by Richard South.
 [Below: Thorburn's Osprey, reproduced as frontispiece to Coward's Birds]

Enough

'Enough Is Enough'

Now listen here, chaps. We all enjoy a little murder spree from time to time - I know I do! But really, this time you've gone too far. Three in two months! That is altogether too much.
  Of course, it's good to see young people taking their faith seriously. But it's so easy to get carried away and overstep the mark. There are limits, you know.
 I think it's time you paused for reflection (those of you who are still alive!) and took a good look at yourselves. You've let everyone down, you know you have. But above all, you've let yourselves down.
 This must not happen again. And I want to make it very clear that, if it does, there will be consequences. Serious consequences. I can't say what they will be just yet, but they will be... serious. Oh yes. I might even have to cancel our cultural exchange visits to Syria, and I know how much some of you enjoy those.
 So, I urge you to think long and hard about what I have said...
 And now, we'll sing a chorus of 'Don't Look Back in Anger'. All together now!

The Seabird's Cry

Here's my review of Adam Nicolson's new book, from this month's edition of Literary Review, Britain's finest etc, etc...

The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers
By Adam Nicolson (Collins 400pp £16.99)

Adam Nicolson’s new book is, in his own words, ‘an exploration of the ways in which seabirds exert their hold on the human imagination’. It ranges far and wide – across the world’s oceans, through literature, anthropology, social history and folklore, through the author’s own experiences, and deep into recent scientific discoveries that have transformed our knowledge  of how these still mysterious birds live when they are not, briefly, visiting our world.
  At the centre of it all is Nicolson’s own intense engagement with seabirds, the roots of which lie deep in his childhood experiences of watching the birds on the Shiant Isles, three tiny Hebridean islands that his father, Nigel Nicolson, bought in the 1930s. Adam felt and still feels the awe that seabirds have always inspired in those who have shared some part of their world with them – the awe appropriate to the only creatures that are at home in the air, in and on the sea, and on land (though the least of these, in most seabirds’ lives, is land). The astonishing extent of these birds’ mastery of the skies and oceans is only now becoming apparent, thanks to ever lighter and more efficient tracking devices. An albatross, for example, ranges across six million square miles of ocean and can fly 7,000 or 8,000 miles in a few days, while expending almost no energy, such is its mastery of the ‘windscape’ in which it lives.
  The Seabird’s Cry explores ‘the lives and loves’ of ten birds, or groups of birds, each of which ‘displays a different facet of the central question: how to exist in all three elements’. They range from the deep-diving guillemots and razorbills and the ferocious gannet to the shearwaters that live their lives in a ‘huge and narrow slice of air, a yard or two high, 20,000 miles wide’, from the coast-hugging cormorants and shags to the kittiwakes and albatrosses that have all but abandoned dry land.
  That phrase from the subtitle, ‘the lives and loves’, is significant, for the ruling idea of this book is that of the Umwelt (a notion I first came across in John Bleibtreu’s extraordinary The Parable of the Beast, a title long overdue a reprint). The Umwelt is the animal’s individual subjective world, its sensory universe, its unique ‘meaning world’. The term was first used by a remarkable Estonian biologist, Jacob von Uexküll, whose work inspired Konrad Lorenz and that great observer of seabird life Niko Tinbergen.
  Von Uexküll is one of a small company of scientists, including the flamboyant Ronald Lockley and the auk’s-egg obsessive Alfred Newton, who people these pages. As you might expect of a book that takes its title from a Seamus Heaney poem, there are literary presiding spirits, too: the chapter on albatrosses, for example, looks beyond the obvious Coleridge to Herman Melville’s vivid account of his first meeting with an albatross and Baudelaire’s ‘vastes oiseaux des mers’. Homer (the subject of Nicolson’s masterpiece, The Mighty Dead) is everywhere, perhaps most eloquently in Nicolson’s account of how once, when he was limping back to land in his storm-battered sailing boat, a kittiwake suddenly appeared, ‘elastic, vibrant, investigative, delicate’, as if sent to guide him home. Just such a seabird appears to the half-dead Odysseus as he battles through stormy seas in flight from Calypso. In Homer the bird is Leucothea, the white goddess, and she saves Odysseus’s life with the gift of a holy veil – but she is still, also, a seabird of the material world, drawn from nature.

  Nicolson, a fine descriptive writer, is drawn to the otherworldly beauty of seabirds, but he is also fascinated by the science, expounding lucidly the dramatic advances of recent years in seabird research. And, unlike some of our more rhapsodic nature writers, he is clear-sighted about the horrors of life in a seabird colony, where, as well as predation from outside, cannibalism is often rife and the struggle for survival ferocious and unrelenting. He tells the grim tale of a species called the Nazca booby, which lives a life of ‘comprehensive dysfunction’, beginning with sibling murder and often graduating to apparently psychotic persecution and lingering murder of vulnerable young birds in the colony. However, there is, happily, another side to seabird life, as best exemplified in the long, blameless lives of albatrosses, perhaps the only truly monogamous birds in nature. (They, however, don’t have to contend with life in an overcrowded colony.) Nicolson traces plenty of examples of what is clearly altruistic behaviour among seabirds, to counteract what often appears to be sheer malice.
  Sadly, Nicolson has to end this celebratory book with a look at the headlong decline in seabird populations overall – down 70 per cent in the past 50 years. Mostly, of course, this is the price of sharing the planet with us humans, but it is also we humans who have the power to save the situation, or at least ameliorate it, and we are finally beginning to do so. There are grounds for hope, at least enough for Nicolson to end this wonderful book on a hopeful note. The Seabird’s Cry (beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer) will, I think, become a classic of bird literature.

Fifty Years On...

So, here we are, a full half century on from the making of the Beatles' album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The BBC is celebrating the anniversary on a grand scale, as you'd expect - it's 'iconic' and obvious, there's lots to be said about it, many people love and revere it and, yes, it's a very fine album. But is it the best ever, as many still claim? Was it the best Beatles album? (I certainly found Rubber Soul more exciting at the time.) Was it even the best album of 1967?
 Bryan, for one, thinks not, nominating John Wesley Harding and The Velvet Underground & Nico as better choices. Quite right too, I'd say - and 1967 was also the year of Songs of Leonard Cohen, Nico's Chelsea Girl, Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello, the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday (not to mention their first Greatest Hits album - one of the greatest Greatests), Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk, Scott Walker's first solo album and the Grateful Dead's eponymous debut. Does that amount to a great year? Not as great as 1966, I'd say (see Best Year Ever?). And we had to wait until 1968 for one of the three greatest albums ever made - Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. The other two? Well, I'd say Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde, both from 1966. Whatever, those were surely golden years, all three of them - and probably 1969 too...

Machair and Covfefe

June is here, in a blaze of sunshine in these parts - a promising first day of the 'meteorological summer'. Turning over my calendar, I find a picture of a handsome bee called Bombus distinguendus, the Great Yellow Bumblebee. This once widespread species, I learn, is now found only on the far North coast of Scotland and on a few of the isles, where it lives on the machair.
 Machair? This was a new one on me. It means a particular form of extremely flower-rich coastal grassland, in which the Great Yellow's favourite flower, the Red Clover, grows in prodigious abundance. The word 'machair' in Gaelic simply means 'fertile plain', and it was not used by scientists until the 1940s. Being scientists, they are still wrangling over its precise definition and over different classifications of machair.
 Ah well, it's good to start the new month - the new season - with a new word (and a bumblebee).

Indeed, not one new word but two, for last night Donald Trump somehow coined the neologism 'covfefe'. I like it - it has a similar sound to that fine English word 'kerfuffle'. Perhaps El Trumpo was groping for a word to describe the lamentable state of the UK election campaign...