Technical Note

 Having suffered a bombardment of spam in Comments lately – the recent revelations about penis enlargement (triggered by 'Chubby Checker'?) were the last straw – I've had to introduce word recognition as a line of defence. As far as I can make out, it wasn't there before? If it was, I guess it's back to the drawing board, and I'd be grateful for any suggestions of what more I could do...

Johnny Nash Was Right

 'There are more questions than answers' sang Johnny Nash, whose death was announced yesterday. I always liked his songs, with their mellow pop-reggae sound, but they were not generally repositories of wisdom. However, he was dead right about there being 'more questions than answers' (and also right that 'The more I find out, the less I know' – as any seeker after knowledge will attest, each new piece of knowledge is liable to exposes new areas of ignorance, just as each answer will, or should, generate new questions). 
  We live, sadly, in times when there are more answers than questions, more assertion than interrogation – a sad imbalance greatly increased by the internet and social media. The deadly alliance of the executive and The Science that is now running this country seems to believe it has the answers to how to deal with Covid, and it's not listening to even the most pressing questions – questions such as Does lockdown work? Does it save lives or, in the longer term, increase the death toll? Is Covid-19 a threat to the entire population or only to certain vulnerable categories? How much of the apparent increase in 'cases' is a function of increased testing, and what does it actually signify? Is there a better way to deal with this (ex-)epidemic, as increasing numbers of scientists are suggesting, amid mounting evidence that the government's approach is not working? It's an encouraging sign that the leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition is asking what is the scientific basis for the latest proposed round of lockdowns in the Midlands and North – and encouraging too that those parts of the country are becoming increasingly restive as their economies face destruction. But will the government/The Science take any notice?
   That's a long string of questions, and no answer yet. 

Enter the Hogweed

 I am indebted to my friend Susan in New York for alerting me to a piece in the New York Times – headlined 'A Toxic Alien is Taking Over Russia' – that contains the glorious sentence 'Enter the hogweed'. This conjures up startling images of the giant hogweed yomping over the steppe in the manner of John Wyndham's mobile, carnivorous Triffids. And indeed, when the giant hogweed started getting noticed in England around 1970, it was likened to a Triffid in many a newspaper headline. 
  'It had been growing in Britain for more than 150 years,' writes Richard Mabey in Flora Britannica, 'an awesome but apparently well-mannered curiosity of Victorian shrubberies and ornamental lakesides, with no more than a hint of troll-like mischief in its huge, looming umbels ... Then, in 1970, it broke cover.'
   I first noticed it, probably in that year, growing by the water along the Cambridge 'backs', and an impressive sight it was. The thing grows to 12ft and more, with a thick, speckled stem and cartwheel-sized flowerheads. It is not a pretty sight, though undeniably sculptural, and it is not only invasive but toxic, direct contact with the plant causing an unpleasant rash.
   Our giant hogweed, Heracleum mantegazzianum, is a different species from the Russian menace (Heracleum sosnowskyi), but they are close relatives, and all giant hogweeds are good for a little public panic from time to time, and the odd newspaper headline. 
  One of Mabey's Flora Britannica contributors writes of giant hogweed growing along the river Kent in Cumbria. 'Occasionally it escapes onto the roadside verge and causes a frisson of anxiety in the local newspapers, which describe the dangers of handling it ... When gas pipes were being laid across the A6 nearby, a warning notice, 'Danger, Heavy Plant Crossing', was displayed at the foot of one of these escapees.'

Real, Classic Poetry on Radio 4!

 Yesterday afternoon Radio 4 broadcast a drama, written by Michael Simmons Roberts, about Milton's Lycidas. What's more, there's a second one coming, about Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. Yes, real poetry – and by dead white European males – on Radio 4! Can such things be? it seems they can, and I'm delighted.
   The Milton drama told the background story of the composition of Lycidas pretty well, with plentiful quotation from the poem. Young Milton was perhaps a little miscast, coming over as too lightweight and, indeed, modern-sounding – but who's quibbling? This was a welcome foray into real, classic poetry on a network whose output on that front is largely banal and/or crashingly 'woke' and 'diverse'.
   For myself, I've never warmed to Lycidas, which, for all its technical brilliance, seems to be a textbook demonstration of how the strictly correct classical elegy doesn't work in English: our best elegies are warmer and looser, far less 'classical' – notably Gray's great Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and indeed In Memoriam. Samuel Johnson was no fan of Lycidas, distrusting its artificiality, and opining that 'it is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.' A sweeping judgment, as so often with the good Doctor, but there is truth in it.
   Anyway, I'm looking forward to In Memoriam. 

'We have seen him long enough upon stilts...'

 In 1786, Fanny Burney was offered a position she would have been wise to refuse, but could hardly have done so at the time – to join the Court of George III as assistant Keeper of the Robes to his Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strellitz. She endured four years in this surprisingly demanding and severely constraining role before falling ill and securing her release. Her diaries of this period are of great interest to historians, as Burney had a ringside seat during some very turbulent times at Court, but they are often painful to read, as she is so clearly in the wrong place and suffering decidedly shabby treatment. 
   Towards the end of her time at Court, she has an unexpected encounter, outside St George's Chapel at Windsor, with James Boswell, who loses no time in urging her to escape and resume her old life. 'His comic-serious face and manner have lost nothing of their wonted singularity,' Burney notes, 'nor yet have his mind and language.' To move the subject away from herself, she asks after 'Mr Burke's book' (Reflections on the Revolution in France). 
   '"Oh," cried he, "it will come out next week: 'tis the first book in the world, except my own, and that's coming out also very soon; only I want your help ... you must give me some of your choice little notes of the Doctor's; we have seen him long enough upon stilts; I want to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam – all these he has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam: so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself."'
   This is Boswell as irresistible force of nature, but Fanny manages to sidestep his demands again, and he returns to the charge on the other front, exhorting her to retire immediately from the Court. And then it's back to Sam, as Boswell produces a proof sheet of his Life of Dr Johnson from his pocket to show her. When he realises she cannot admit him to her apartment, he insists on reading it to her there and then. 
   'There was no refusing this; and he began, with a letter of Dr Johnson to himself. He read it in strong imitation of the Doctor's manner, very well, and not caricature. But Mrs Schwellenberg [Fanny's tyrannical supervisor] was at her window, a crowd was gathering to stand round the rails, and the King and Queen and Royal Family now approached from the Terrace. I made a rather quick apology, and, with a step as quick as my now weakened limbs had left in my power, I hurried to my apartment.'
   Though Boswell renewed his pleas for Johnson's letters to her the next day, Burney held firm, regarding them as 'sacred' and not to be published. As a result there are but two references to Fanny in Boswell's Life of Dr Johnson – a sad lack.   

Chubby Checker

Today is the 79th birthday of Chubby Checker (born Ernest Evans), singer and dance craze specialist. His breakthrough hit in the States was The Twist (cover version, fact fans, of a song by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters), but it was the following year (1961) that he took Britain by storm with Let's Twist Again. I was there to see it, and I can tell you the effects were dire: suddenly our parents' generation were gamely trying out this crazy new dance, shakin' their booties like there was no tomorrow – though the impression was more of someone awkwardly trying to towel the small of their back with an invisible bath towel. It was terrible to behold, and the madness spread throughout our normally staid population, as far even as the racier members of the royal family. It was a foretaste, I suppose, of our own age, in which many seem content to retain the tastes, dress and attitudes of teenagers well into their middle years. It was certainly, like so many things in the middle-class England of my younger years, excruciatingly embarrassing.  
   Chubby, bless him, went on to popularise the Limbo, the Hucklebuck, the Pony, the Fly, que sais-j' encore. Then, in 2013, his name was suddenly back in the news when he successfully sued Hewlett-Packard over a WebOS application. It claimed to estimate penis size from shoe size, and it was called – yes – the Chubby Checker. 

Nashe's Terrors

 Bedtime reading should, ideally, be engaging but restful (an adjective that was Ronald Firbank's highest term of praise for any work of art), not over-stimulating and never seriously disturbing. So I don't know how The Terrors of the Night ended up on my bedside pile; it could hardly be more unsuitable. This is a short work from 1594 by Thomas Nashe, republished as a Penguin Little Black Classic. Here's a taster:

The night is the devil's Black Book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions. Even as, when a condemned man is put into a dark dungeon, secluded from all comfort of light or company, he doth nothing but despairfully call to mind his graceless former life, and the brutish outrages and misdemeanours that have thrown him into that desolate horror; so when night in her rusty dungeon hath imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keepeth his audit in our sin-guilty consciences, no sense but surrenders to our memory a true bill of parcels of his detestable impieties. The table of our hearts is turned to an index of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us. 
  The rest we take in our beds is such another kind of rest as the weary traveller taketh in the cool soft grass of summer, who thinking there to lie at ease and refresh his tired limbs, layeth his fainting head unawares on a loathsome nest of snakes.

  Nashe's prose is lively stuff, even by Elizabethan standards, and always makes exhilarating reading, though perhaps best taken in relatively small doses. He wrote a rollicking proto-novel called The Unfortunate Traveller (which I read and enjoyed years ago) and a wide range of polemical pamphlets and other short works, with names such as An Almond for a Parrot, Have with You to Saffron-Walden and Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell. He also wrote a pornographic poem called A Choise of Valentines, otherwise known as Nashe's Dildo. Here are a few choice lines, voiced by a woman who has discovered a more than satisfactory substitute for her lover:

My little dildo shall suplye their kind,
A knave that moves as light as leaves by winde;
That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale,
But stands as stiff as he were made of steele,
And plays at peacock twixt my leggs right blythe.

   However, Nashe was also capable of something closer to the sublime, as in his most famous poem, the 'Litany in Time of Plague', which reads like a tolling bell –

Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss,
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys,
None from his darts can fly.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade,
All things to end are made.
The plague full swift goes by.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkes will devour;
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave,
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds ope her gate.
Come! come! the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree
To welcome destiny.
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us! 

  The beautiful line 'Brightness falls from the air' – the line that obsesses the young Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Portait of the Artist and that Eliot dilated upon – is thought by some to be a transcription error for 'Brightness falls from the hair', which in the context does indeed make rather more sense. Could it be that one of the great lines in all of Elizabethan poetry came about by mistake? It's an intriguing thought – but who would want the 'correct' reading now?