Roger Scruton

The death of Roger Scruton, at the now relatively young age of 75, comes as sad news indeed. There will be well deserved tributes galore to this great conservative thinker and writer. I will only add that reading his England: An Elegy was an eye-opening experience for me, one that made me really think about England, and love and appreciate it all the more for the fact that it was slipping away. A poignant and personal book, published in 2000, it was also sadly prophetic of the way things would go over the next 20 years. RIP.

A Curious Monument

One of the best walks in Wellington takes you around the beautiful Botanic Gardens (which can be reached in minutes from the city centre by a steeply climbing 'cable car' – actually a funicular railway) and downhill back into the city through the wonderfully scenic Bolton Street Memorial Park, the oldest cemetery in Wellington. Here is to be found, among much else, the monument shown above. 
This curious essay in a late classical revival style, feebly carved and with undertones of homoeroticism and fascism, commemorates, of all people, Henry Edmund 'Harry' Holland, the second leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, who died in 1933. Presumably it's intended to represent Holland's endeavours to 'free the world from unhappiness, tyranny and oppression', but I don't think it can be accounted a success.
 I have never seen Ramsay MacDonald's grave, but I very much doubt that it bears much resemblance to the Henry Holland extravaganza.

Review

A very nice review of my book by Christopher Hart in today's Daily Mail.
Here's a link to the online version –
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-7870289/Britains-buried-treasures-Exquisite-works-art-tucked-away-tiny-village-churches.html
– though of course I'd recommend buying a copy of the paper.

Closed

Wellington Central Library – pictured above 'in happier times' – presents a forlorn spectacle now, the building abandoned and surrounded by hoardings. This closure is due to the need for 'earthquake strengthening' – always a concern in Wellington, as elsewhere in New Zealand – and the work is clearly going to take a long while. A shame, as I've always enjoyed visiting this library, one of the best and most attractive central libraries I know – and one that, happily, still has a traditional, book-centred feel. Unlike many English public libraries, it's well staffed and well stocked and seems very efficient.
  They take their public libraries seriously in New Zealand. The first were established as early as the 1840s, almost as soon as organised European settlement began, and later Carnegie money encouraged the building of more and more good public libraries. New Zealanders seem to be keen readers – hence not only the thriving library service but also the remarkable profusion of second-hand bookshops, at least in Wellington. I'm looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with these at the earliest opportunity...

Deja Zoo

Yesterday we all visited Wellington Zoo again.
I wrote about these attractively sited zoological gardens four years ago, on my first New Zealand visit. Here's the link:

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/01/to-zoo.html

The difference this time was that the weather was cold and grey, and I had acquired the lobster colouring a couple of days earlier, when the sun was shining and I had rashly gone for a swim without first anointing myself. The sun is still fierce here, though on the afternoon of our arrival it was no more than a dull flat disc of orange-red in a grey-green sky – an effect caused by the pall of smoke from the Australian bush fires.
Today was sunny again, and I had a little game of soft-ball cricket with the grandsons. Their first (and more than a little misleading) taste of the great game...

Outside Every Fat Man...

On the long long flight(s) to the city of the Agapanthus and the Pohutakawa, I finished One Fat Englishman, an early (1962) novel of Kingsley Amis's that I hadn't read for forty-odd years. It chronicles the misadventures of the appalling Roger Micheldene, an English publisher on a business trip to America, as he lurches from one drunken party to another, from one high-risk joyless sexual encounter to another, and from self-pity to self-loathing, while indulging a steadfast contempt for all things American. Entirely selfish and driven by compulsive lechery, insatiable gluttony and an unquenchable thirst, the aptly named Roger is clearly a grosser, fatter, even more appalling self-portrait of Amis – a self-portrait, you might say, in a convex mirror. All of this would be unbearable, were it not that One Fat Englishman is just so damn funny. Amis is a master of comic prose, incapable (at this stage of his career) of writing a dull or inelegant sentence, and he's no slouch at constructing comic narrative either. Narrated in the third person, but seen entirely through Roger's jaundiced eyes, this novel is, as much as anything, a glorious compendium of prejudices not so very different from Amis's own, expressed with jaw-dropping directness and deadly comic spin. I found myself laughing several times in every chapter, often on a single page – what more can you ask of a comic novel?
Roger Micheldene's ruminations contain one of Amis's best-known quotations, a reworking of Cyril Connolly's 'Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signalling to be let out':
'Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.'
One Fat Englishman is also probably the only novel title to have been written on the ample flesh of its author: Amis's exasperated first wife wrote on his back as he lay torpid on a beach 'One Fat Englishman: I Fuck Anything' – and photographed her handiwork.


Scrolling desperately through the inflight 'entertainment' offers, I found nothing I wanted to see or hear, and much that I would pay good money to avoid seeing or hearing – until I eventually found a small selection of classical music. Here I discovered Mio Caro Handel, a collection of Handel arias sung by Simone Kermes, a singer blessed with a quite amazing voice, perfectly suited to Handel. Listening to her was sheer joy.

Another small highlight: Stepping outside the hotel in Singapore into a wall of tropical heat, I stayed just long enough to have a look at the flower bed planted against the hotel exterior. This was planted mostly with big showy tropical flowers, but there was a border of much smaller yellow daisy-like flowers, and on these a number of tiny oriental blues of various species, with nothing of the tropics about them, were busily feeding. My travel-weary heart was instantly lifted.

Then, at Auckland airport, a man – a lanky, balding, dishevelled American who looked as if he'd lived a little (or rather a lot) – came dashing after me as I stepped out to take a breath of air, tapped me on the shoulder and told me I was the living image of Jimmy Stewart, a man he had himself had the pleasure of meeting. He'd been on the fringes of the movie business and knew them all, and I, he could assure me, was, as stated, the living image of J. Stewart. Well, I am not, but this has happened to me before – and it is invariably an American who somehow contrives to see me as Jimmy Stewart to the life. Odd.

2020

New Year's Day is nearly over in New Zealand, and I'm not long off the plane and struggling to stay awake – but Happy New Year everyone!