Swift Resolutions

 Patrick Kurp's post this morning, on growing older, put me in mind (and him too, I'm sure) of Swift's 'Resolutions When I Come to Be Old'.  One of his most direct and straightforwardly human pieces of writing, it dates from 1699, when Swift was only 32 and Gulliver's Travels was 27 years in the future:

-Not to marry a young Woman.
-Not to keep young Company unless they reely desire it.
-Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
-Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.
-Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.
-Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People.
-Not to be covetous.
-Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.
-Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses.
-Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others.
-Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it.
-To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly.
-Not to talk much, nor of my self.
-Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.
-Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman, et eos qui hereditatem captant, odisse ac vitare.
-Not to be positive or opiniative.
-Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.

Number five is a strange kind of resolution, especially as being with children can be one of the great pleasures and consolations of old age. However, other than that, they strike me as pretty sound – especially, perhaps, the last one. Sadly, by the time Swift reached his old age, he was suffering from dementia. 'I shall be like that tree,' he is supposed to have said, pointing to a stag-headed specimen. 'I shall die at the top.'

A Bit of Sunday Music (and Etymology)

 Once upon a time, the fondly remembered Dabbler blog used to carry a regular feature called Lazy Sunday Afternoon, in which the great Mahlerman would introduce us to some glorious piece or pieces of music that we (I, anyway) had somehow spent all our lives missing.
   Here, in the spirit of Lazy Sunday Afternoon (but without Mahlerman's erudition), is a piece of music I caught on Radio 3 the other day and would like to share. It's a very beautiful (I think) aria from Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade, a musical drama that was premiered in Venice in 1734 – 'Mentre Dormi':

  One of my great pleasures in recent years has been discovering the music of those Baroque composers I never bothered with in my youth, dominated as my listening then was by Beethoven and the Romantic heavy brigade. This ignorance or prejudice (widely shared at the time) has had the happy effect of leaving me with an ever growing number of great composers to discover (or at least to explore their works much more deeply). Vivaldi is just the latest, and I've recently been wallowing in his L'Estro Armonico (having bought the double CD by Fabio Biondi's Europa Galante) – an astonishing collection of violin concertos with an intriguing name.  'Estro' means something like inspiration, or talent, or gift or bent, whim or fancy. Its root meaning, from the Greek 'Oistros', is a gadfly: Socrates used the word to describe himself, irritant that he was. Anglicised as Oestrus, the word then extended its meaning to cover a vehement impulse or frenzy, and thence to sexual arousal and, in biology, the period of sexual receptivity in many female mammals. It is also the root of Oestrogen, the female sex hormone. And to think Vivaldi could have just called his collection 'Twelve Concertoes'. 

My Top Picks, etc.

Those nice people at Amazon have sent me my weekly reading list. 
My Top Picks are
Captain Underpants: Three Pant-tastic Novels in One by Dav Pikey
and The Lost Spells by Robert McFarlane (a nature writer I know is a Good Thing but I find in practice unreadable). 
An interesting pairing.
And then come the books specially Recommended for You:
Sweet Sorrow, 'this summer's must-read from the bestselling author of One Day' (er, no thanks),
and Yotam Ottolenghi's Flavour (hmmm).
There we are – another triumph for those all-knowing algorithms.

Meanwhile, down at my local Sainsburys, the Argos concession – which recently declared its proud support of the LGBT+ community with rainbow-coloured bunting – is now using its bunting to declare its equally proud support of Black History Month. Quite what form this support takes, or could possibly take, is hard to imagine – Argos is, after all, nothing more than a retail counter attached to a warehouse. But we should not be surprised by any of this: the Woke agenda has been greedily subsumed into corporate culture and PR (which doesn't make it any less dangerous). It is one of the many ways in which the new managerial elite is reminding us of who is in charge and what attitudes we must strike if we want to get on in this craven new world. 

A virtuoso of self-loathing

I haven't hope. I haven't faith.
I live two lives and sometimes three.
The lives I live make life a death
For those who have to live with me.
Knowing the virtues that I lack,
I pat myself upon the back.

John Betjeman was a virtuoso of self-loathing – and one who was penetrating enough to know that his self-loathing was also a form of self-regard ('I pat myself upon the back'). The stanza above comes from a longer poem, 'Guilt', and I happened upon it in a new book on Betjeman that I'm reading for review (so had better not say much more). 
Here is 'Guilt' in its bleak entirety – 

The clock is frozen in the tower,
The thickening fog with sooty smell
Has blanketed the motor power
Which turns the London streets to hell;
And footsteps with their lonely sound
Intensify the silence round.

I haven't hope. I haven't faith.
I live two lives and sometimes three.
The lives I live make life a death
For those who have to live with me.
Knowing the virtues that I lack,
I pat myself upon the back.

With breastplate of self-righteousness
And shoes of smugness on my feet,
Before the urge in me grows less
I hurry off to make retreat.
For somewhere, somewhere, burns a light
To lead me out into the night.

It glitters icy, thin and plain,
And leads me down to Waterloo –
Into a warm electric train
Which travels sorry Surrey through,
And crystal-hung, the clumps of pine
Stand deadly still beside the line.

'Waterloo' comes as something of a shock, a touch of bathos, and 'sorry Surrey' is a bit tricksy – and unfair on my home county. But 'Guilt' is still a powerful piece of work, and a very long way from the cheery nostalgia and easy charm of Betjeman's more popular poems. He was always a much more complex and interesting poet, and man, than the avuncular teddy bear beloved of the TV chat-show circuit – for which persona, and for his popular success, he also, inevitably, hated himself. 

One of Norway's Finest

Today, with my loyal Norwegian readership in mind, I mark the birthday of one of Norway's finest 19th-century painters, Frits Thaulow, born on this day in 1847. I've written about him before, mostly in connection with his Dieppe years, and I never tire of Jaques-Emile Blanche's bravura portrait of him with his statuesque wife and children (above). 
   Although Thaulow was Norway born and bred, he spent much of his painting career elsewhere, first in Denmark – where he worked in Skagen before it became famous for the Skagen Painters – and then in France, where Paris didn't suit him, but various lesser towns did, especially Dieppe. His work can be filed under Impressionism, and his strong suit was landscape, especially landscapes with plenty of water in them.  Or indeed watery townscapes: here is one of his Venice paintings, Under the Rialto Bridge –

And here is a typical riverside scene from somewhere near Dieppe –

Thaulow also had a penchant for crepuscular mood pieces, as in this Ambiance du Soir. I wonder where it was painted – any guesses?

And this one carries the title Kveltstemning, Dieppe – which my Norwegian readers will know means Evening Mood, Dieppe. However, I'm pretty sure that is not Dieppe: neither of Dieppe's old churches looks at all like the one looming through the murk here, nor do those gabled houses look right for Dieppe  

Anyway, happy 173rd birthday to a good painter and, by all accounts, an excellent man. 

Experts and Tags

'I don't know much about science, but I know what I like.' 
That line was quoted by Val MacDermid on Radio 4's Broadcasting House this morning. Apparently it's from Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers. 
   It does seem remarkably apposite in these Covid-deranged times, when every man and woman is his/her own expert in fields of science whose very existence he/she probably never suspected until recently. We pick, of course, the bits of 'the science' that match our preformed view of what's going on, the research findings that seem to prove us right.  It's open season for confirmation bias – and no wonder in times like these, when there is so much information out there and yet no one really knows what the heck is going on. 
   Addicted as I am to Latin tags (the sure sign of a man who has otherwise forgotten all the Latin he ever learnt), the phrase 'Experto crede' has been rolling around in my head for some while. With 'experts' as thick on the ground as the autumn leaves, that's hardly surprising. Experto crede – believe the expert, right? Well, yes, except that this is 'expert' in its older sense of one who has experienced (it's the same root, obvs): not one who has mastered a body of knowledge but one who has actual experience of what he's talking about – which, of course, rules out whole swathes of present-day expertise. I shall return 'experto crede' to the ragbag of tags (the tagbag) and move on. Claudite iam rivos, pueri – sat prata biberunt...

A Year in the Life of a Book

 It was on this day last year that I announced to a startled world that my book, The Mother of Beauty, was finally available to buy. 
   What happened next? Well, I was delighted that the book got a warm reception from many individuals whose opinions I value, and pleased that it seemed to be selling steadily, if at low volume, on Amazon. I sent out a few copies for review, more in hope than expectation – among them, belatedly, one addressed to the books editor of the Daily Mail, who I did not expect to show the slightest interest. In fact she responded very positively, so I got some extra copies printed in case of need, then headed off to New Zealand for a month with the family there. Next thing I knew there was a rave Book of the Week review in the Mail – and, as a result, all available copies sold out in two days, leaving me to organise a hasty reprint by remote control from Wellington. This lost me three weeks of sales (so much for 'hasty'!) and led to some desperation among readers anxious to buy the book. An American publisher that happened to have the same imprint (but published books on unorthodox sexual relationships) was so bombarded with inquiries that it had to put up a big disclaimer on its website. 
  Hey ho. A few more reviews followed, my book got a mention in the Church Times (and, I gather, a sniffy review in the Church Monuments Society gazette – I haven't seen it). Things gradually settled down, and now sales seem to be close to flatlining – which is unfortunate, as a belated (too late!) extra reprint has left me with three or four boxes of The Mother of Beauty on my hands. If anyone would care to relieve me of a copy or two, you can do so either by way of Amazon, or, if you'd prefer not to further enrich Jeff Bezos, direct from me at nigeandrew@gmail.com. Remember – Christmas is coming...