Well, that's a relief.
Old Nige's prognostickation engine called it correctly (if cautiously), and the native good sense and decency of the electorate prevailed. Phew. Now I can stand down the prognostickation engine for five years, with any luck.
Meanwhile, I devoutly hope the Labour party will consign Corbyn, McDonnell and co to what radicals like to call the 'dustbin of history', leave this shameful episode in the history of the party behind, and re-form as a decent and credible Loyal Opposition. That is what's needed now.
And with that, I retire from the political arena again.
Friday, 13 December 2019
Thursday, 12 December 2019
Mistle
I have just seen something I've never seen before – a mistle thrush actually eating mistletoe berries.
I take this for a good omen.
I take this for a good omen.
David Bellamy RIP
Sad to hear news of the death of David Bellamy, the naturalist, broadcaster and campaigner who was a major presence on TV – and a major force for good – until he fell foul of the Climate Inquisition for daring to voice some doubts over what was then called 'global warming'. This heresy (along with his almost equally heretical support for the Referendum Party) effectively cost him the remainder of his career and cast him into the outer darkness where 'deniers' like him belong, according to BBC protocols (and a range of other interested parties).
I always had a soft spot for Bellamy, partly because he was a local lad (Sutton and Cheam, just down the road from Carshalton) who, like me – and indeed the great Ray Mears – spent his early years exploring the wildlife of the North Downs. He deserved better – far better – than to be hounded out of public life for expressing an unwelcome view. Broadcasters – and, worse, scientists – have since learnt the lesson from cases like his: keep your head down, toe the line, remember 'the science is settled'.
The ebullient Bellamy did more than most to spread the love of natural history, and he was a tireless campaigner in countless sound environmental causes (he was even imprisoned for his activities once, in Australia). In a just world, he'd have ended up revered and beatified like the secular saint David Attenborough. But a just world it is not. Let's hope that he is now blissfully roaming the celestial North Downs.
I always had a soft spot for Bellamy, partly because he was a local lad (Sutton and Cheam, just down the road from Carshalton) who, like me – and indeed the great Ray Mears – spent his early years exploring the wildlife of the North Downs. He deserved better – far better – than to be hounded out of public life for expressing an unwelcome view. Broadcasters – and, worse, scientists – have since learnt the lesson from cases like his: keep your head down, toe the line, remember 'the science is settled'.
The ebullient Bellamy did more than most to spread the love of natural history, and he was a tireless campaigner in countless sound environmental causes (he was even imprisoned for his activities once, in Australia). In a just world, he'd have ended up revered and beatified like the secular saint David Attenborough. But a just world it is not. Let's hope that he is now blissfully roaming the celestial North Downs.
Wednesday, 11 December 2019
Old Nige's Prognostickation
I fear it's time for my biennial excursion into the increasingly depressing world of politics. During the course of this fatuous and interminable election campaign (six weeks?! Who needs six weeks of this?) I've done my best to avoid the day-by-day news coverage and keep my mind on the big picture. And what a 'big picture' it is! Call me a sentimental nostalgist, but I never thought it possible that in this country a Tory government (or any government) would be facing a main opposition party led by quasicommunist antisemites and a second opposition party whose stated aim and principal policy is to overthrow a clear democratic mandate. Even if I had managed to envisage such a scenario, I could never have foreseen that said main opposition party might be in a position to steal the election and form a government with their quasicommunist antisemitic selves at the helm. And yet the tone of most of the coverage of this election has been much the same as for any other, with a carefully maintained illusion of equivalence between the main parties, and no serious discussion of the national catastrophe that would undoubtedly follow such a 'victory'.
In these dismal circumstances, I have dutifully cranked up Old Nige's Prognostickation Engine yet again – and I'm happy and relieved to report that it's predicting a fairly comfortable win for the Tories, with an outside possibility of something more like a bluewash. Of course, I might not have done quite enough work on recalibrating the imbecility filters after the last time... But I remain confident that, in the end, the electorate (apart from that London lot, of course) still have more sense than to let the likes of JC anywhere near the levers of power.
In these dismal circumstances, I have dutifully cranked up Old Nige's Prognostickation Engine yet again – and I'm happy and relieved to report that it's predicting a fairly comfortable win for the Tories, with an outside possibility of something more like a bluewash. Of course, I might not have done quite enough work on recalibrating the imbecility filters after the last time... But I remain confident that, in the end, the electorate (apart from that London lot, of course) still have more sense than to let the likes of JC anywhere near the levers of power.
Tuesday, 10 December 2019
Emily Dickinson's birthday thoughts
Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830.
Here are her characteristically pungent and succinct birthday thoughts:
Birthday of but a single pang
That there are less to come —
Afflictive is the Adjective
But affluent the doom —
Here are her characteristically pungent and succinct birthday thoughts:
Birthday of but a single pang
That there are less to come —
Afflictive is the Adjective
But affluent the doom —
Monday, 9 December 2019
'The complexion of a murderer in a bandbox'
This is not a quiz, but the passage below – the first paragraph of a book – invites some questions:
What is the writer on about? What could possibly be the subject of this book? And who on earth could the author be?
'In this strange "goose-weather", when even the snow and the black-fringed clouds seem like old theatrical properties, dead players' cast-off rags, "the complexion of a murderer in a bandbox, consisting of a large piece of burnt cork, and a coal-black Peruke", and when the wind is so cold that it seems like an empty theatre's "Sea, consisting of a dozen large waves, the tenth a little bigger than ordinary and a little damaged", I thought of those medicines that were advised for Melancholy, in the anatomy of this Disease, of mummies made medicine, and of the profits of dust-sifting.'
[The embedded quotations, by the way, are from a 'List of Theatrical Properties', in The Tatler, number 42.]
The writer is clearly in thrall to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy – and, at the end of the chapter, quotes the passage from Sir Thomas Browne that ends 'Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cureth wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsam' – which at least gives the chapter a kind of circularity. But what is the subject of this book, and who is the writer? Well, the subject is English Eccentrics, and the author is Edith Sitwell, who has still several pages to write before – by way of the great 'Battlebridge Dust and Cinder-Heap', the Pandemonium Theatre Company, 'the clicking noises made by earthworms' ['recently discovered by the physiologist O. Mangold'], the 'morning worship' and vocalisations of lemurs, and attempts to teach human speech to chimpanzees – she finally arrives at the subject of Eccentricity, and the first of her English Eccentrics at last hoves into view.
'Eccentricity exists particularly in the English,' Sitwell observes, 'and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.'
I've always tended to go along with Leavis's sniffy judgment of the literary Sitwells – Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell – as belonging more to the history of publicity than of literature (I don't know why, as I'm sure I disagree with Leavis on most things). However, I owe a debt to Sacheverell, whose long introduction to Mrs Esdaile's English Church Monuments, 1510-1840 is the best, and by miles the most engaging, introduction to the subject, and was one of my chief inspirations in writing my book.
And now I'm giving Edith a try, and so far am greatly enjoying English Eccentrics. Reading it feels more like reading Burton or Browne than anything of the 20th century. I know too little of Edith Sitwell's other work to reach any great conclusions, but, for all her modernist experiments in verse, she seems, in this book at least, to demonstrate a thoroughly 17th-century sensibility – a rare thing in the twentieth.
She was in many ways, however, of her own time, with her own place in 'the history of publicity', and with some surprising connections – here, by way of a coda, is Dame Edith talking, very astutely and sympathetically, about Marilyn Monroe...
What is the writer on about? What could possibly be the subject of this book? And who on earth could the author be?
'In this strange "goose-weather", when even the snow and the black-fringed clouds seem like old theatrical properties, dead players' cast-off rags, "the complexion of a murderer in a bandbox, consisting of a large piece of burnt cork, and a coal-black Peruke", and when the wind is so cold that it seems like an empty theatre's "Sea, consisting of a dozen large waves, the tenth a little bigger than ordinary and a little damaged", I thought of those medicines that were advised for Melancholy, in the anatomy of this Disease, of mummies made medicine, and of the profits of dust-sifting.'
[The embedded quotations, by the way, are from a 'List of Theatrical Properties', in The Tatler, number 42.]
The writer is clearly in thrall to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy – and, at the end of the chapter, quotes the passage from Sir Thomas Browne that ends 'Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cureth wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsam' – which at least gives the chapter a kind of circularity. But what is the subject of this book, and who is the writer? Well, the subject is English Eccentrics, and the author is Edith Sitwell, who has still several pages to write before – by way of the great 'Battlebridge Dust and Cinder-Heap', the Pandemonium Theatre Company, 'the clicking noises made by earthworms' ['recently discovered by the physiologist O. Mangold'], the 'morning worship' and vocalisations of lemurs, and attempts to teach human speech to chimpanzees – she finally arrives at the subject of Eccentricity, and the first of her English Eccentrics at last hoves into view.
'Eccentricity exists particularly in the English,' Sitwell observes, 'and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.'
I've always tended to go along with Leavis's sniffy judgment of the literary Sitwells – Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell – as belonging more to the history of publicity than of literature (I don't know why, as I'm sure I disagree with Leavis on most things). However, I owe a debt to Sacheverell, whose long introduction to Mrs Esdaile's English Church Monuments, 1510-1840 is the best, and by miles the most engaging, introduction to the subject, and was one of my chief inspirations in writing my book.
And now I'm giving Edith a try, and so far am greatly enjoying English Eccentrics. Reading it feels more like reading Burton or Browne than anything of the 20th century. I know too little of Edith Sitwell's other work to reach any great conclusions, but, for all her modernist experiments in verse, she seems, in this book at least, to demonstrate a thoroughly 17th-century sensibility – a rare thing in the twentieth.
She was in many ways, however, of her own time, with her own place in 'the history of publicity', and with some surprising connections – here, by way of a coda, is Dame Edith talking, very astutely and sympathetically, about Marilyn Monroe...
Sunday, 8 December 2019
70 and one day
Well, yesterday's events only deepened my sense of thankfulness for everything. A Surprise Party that wasn't entirely unexpected turned out in the event to be a magnificent surprise indeed, thanks to Mrs N's (and others') titanic efforts of clandestine organisation and preparation; its lavish scale; and the number and range of guests, several of whom were indeed surprise presences, and very wonderful surprises. From the moment I arrived and took in the scene before me, I entered a kind of blissful dream-like state, a high from which I'm only now coming down. Things will return to something like normal in due course, I dare say... Meanwhile, a huge and heartfelt thankyou to the redoubtable Mrs N and to all those who were there yesterday and are reading this. And for all the birthday wishes so many have sent. It was a day to remember.
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