The Election that Matters

 After an election marred by voter fraud, a clear winner has emerged. Yes, it's the Kakapo, the world's bulkiest parrot, which has just been named New Zealand's Bird of the Year 2020. A flightless bird which thinks it can escape predators by pretending to be a shrub, and has a habit of climbing up trees and falling out of them, it is self-destructively prone to making bad choices (rather like the New Zealand government, which seems happy to destroy its economy and cut itself off from the whole world in response to Covid). 
The Kakapo is perhaps best known from the much-viewed footage of a male becoming sexually aroused by the sight of a human head (no Biden gags here, please). This is the second time the really rather cute Kakapo has won New Zealand's ultimate avian accolade. Fair play to it, but if I had the vote, I'd definitely have gone for my old favourite, the irrepressible Tui. 

Monet 180 Giverny 10

 Born 180 years ago today was the great Impressionist painter Claude Monet (christened Oscar-Claude). For myself I find a little Monet goes a long way, but on a dank and dismal day like today it's cheering to recall the visit I made to the famous gardens at Giverny ten years ago. It was something I did not expect to enjoy very much, but in the event it surprised me. To quote myself: 

'The next day (in company with my brother and the others) I did something I never thought I'd do – visit Monet's house and garden at Giverny. I continued to think I'd never do it when we descended from the hills, having climbed up from the valley and walked through miles of misty woods, into a village swarming with visitors, taking photographs of everything as they strolled along the (very picturesque) street and forming long queues to get in to the house, their numbers augmented by the arrival of an endless stream of coach parties. We retreated to take an early lunch, after which – by a double miracle – the sun had pierced the morning mists and was shining gloriously, and the queues had temporarily gone. Seizing our chance, we went in...
I have to report that, though the place was still fairly overrun, it was ravishing. The garden on a sunny autumn day is just the kind of garden I love most - richly, abundantly planted, full of colour and interest, artifice and nature beautifully blended. The immense profusion of michaelmas daisies naturally had me looking out for butterflies, and, as well as plentiful whites, I spotted several red admirals, a brimstone and a couple of speckled woods. As for the house – yes, rather on the ravishing side too, with an abundance of fascinating and beautiful Japanese prints that I wasn't expecting. Yes, Giverny can feel like Monetworld, international HQ of MonetCorp - and yes, I'm not a huge fan of Monet overall – but that house and garden somehow retain something enchanting despite the visiting hordes (who were back in force by the end of our visit). If Monet had planned the whole thing – if he'd envisaged his own global megapopularity and the pulling power of Giverny – he could hardly have got it righter. It works.'

(Nigeness, October 10th, 2010 – a post that also contains an account of getting locked out of a Norman provincial hotel.)

Robes and Noses

 I have received an email from an American company selling clerical vestments, informing me of their pre-Thanksgiving sale and showing me what they have on offer. Stiffly posed models do their best to look natural in, among other outfits, Senior Fluted Trinity Choir Robes, White Baptismal Robe with Dove, the Cassock with Band Cincture Package (a little 'High' for me), Clergy Alb with Cotton Cincture, and the Premium Square Neckline Surplice (which looks more my style).  If by any chance I get a sudden late-life vocation, I'll know where to go.
Actually I've always rather fancied sitting down at my study desk (if I had one) writing a weekly sermon, but I gather there's rather more to the job these days. Maybe I could beguile the weeks of lockdown by sitting around in a Premium Square Neckline Surplice writing sermons...
This offer, I suppose, is the sort of thing that turns up when you cheerfully 'accept all cookies' as you roam about the internet, though I cannot imagine how this particular company could have got wind of my existence. 
Talking of roaming about the internet, here's something very odd – and funny – I came across on YouTube. Enjoy... 

Vanessa and Atalanta

 I've written before about the surprising origins of the name Vanessa – invented by Jonathan Swift, no less – but I hadn't fully realised the Swiftian origins of the Latin name for the Red Admiral until I read about it in Peter Marren's excellent Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies. 
It was not the Swede Linnaeus but the Dane Johann Christian Fabricius who gave the Red Admiral its grand binomial, Vanessa atalanta. He clearly took 'Vanessa' from Swift's poem 'Cadenus and Vanessa', which Marren describes pithily as 'an autobiographical love poem dressed up as a fairy story of nymphs and shepherds'. ('Cadenus' is an anagram of Decanus, a Dean, Swift's ecclesiastical rank.) But what of Atalanta? She is a figure from Greek mythology, a formidable virgin huntress and athlete who was notably reluctant to marry – and her name appears once with Vanessa's in 'Cadenus and Vanessa' – 
'When lo! Vanessa in her bloom
Advanced, like Atalanta's star.'
Surely Fabricius happened on those lines and had his inspiration – there was Vanessa atalanta, ready-made.
Handel wrote an opera Atalanta. Here is a rather lovely aria from it : 'Care Selve' (dear woods) –

As it happens, I saw a handsome Red Admiral this morning, in a local byway that in my boyhood was known (for no good reason) as Murder Alley. The Admiral was taking a quick hit of nectar from a very late bramble flower before flying off and away. It might be my last butterfly of the year – but I've already thought that about a Peacock in Derbyshire and a local Small White, so who knows?

 

We Are All Guilty (or not)

 A harrowing night's television last night, with My Family, The Holocaust and Me with Robert Rinder on BBC1, swiftly followed by Berlin 1945 on BBC4. Both programmes, unsurprisingly, got me thinking about questions of historical guilt... 
  At present the area of historical guilt that is being most vigorously agitated is slavery – by which is meant the relatively short-lived triangular trade that was suppressed a couple of centuries ago. It seems to me that whenever historical guilt for slavery is discussed, a small troop of elephants is milling about in the room. Chief among them – because it is the one form of slavery that we might conceivably be able to do something about – is present-day slavery in all its forms. This, it seems, may be safely ignored in favour of the perceived sins of the British and Americans of several centuries ago. Another large elephant is the long (and continuing) history of slavery in the Islamic world. And then there is Belgium, whose turn-of-the-(20th)-century wealth was built on slave labour in the Congo. And, in the 20th century, slave labour in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Slave labour in Japan during World War II is perhaps a special case, as it was enslavement of prisoners of war (in total defiance of the Geneva conventions, etc.). The German use of slave labour in that war was another matter, involving the enslavement of its own (ex-)citizens, and it permeated the German economy to a quite extraordinary extent: there is barely a German brand you can name that doesn't have a history of using slave labour – from ThyssenKrupp right down to Dr Oetker. As for the Soviet Union, its economy was dependent on slave labour in the gulag system for decades – and that had nothing to do with the war. 
  Of course you could argue, quite reasonably, that present-day Belgians, Germans, Japanese, Russians etc. cannot be held accountable for what happened in the past, in different times and different circumstances and under different regimes. And yet this forgive-and-forget attitude does not, it seems, extend to the much more historically distant triangular trade. Present-day British and Americans, uniquely, must be held accountable for the sins of their great great great great great etc. grandfathers, in very different times and circumstances and under very different regimes. Maybe I'm missing something here, but this doesn't seem to me to make much sense (except perhaps as another episode in the long slow suicide of the West)...

Cenotaph

 Watching today's remembrance ceremony from Whitehall was a weird experience: no public, a handful of veterans, the few participants all standing two metres apart, even the ranks of the military bands drastically thinned. Such are these strange times. I couldn't help wondering what the wartime generations would have made of a nation brought to its knees by a virus that, er, kills old people. If Covid had appeared during either war, would anyone even have noticed? (They noticed the postwar Spanish flu all right, but that was vastly more serious and killed young adults on a huge scale.)
  This year marks the centenary of the erection of the permanent cenotaph on Whitehall, and of the interment of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey – both brilliantly creative ways of commemorating the war dead and focusing the nation's grief. Lutyens's beautifully understated cenotaph is an almost abstract construction, essentially a blank monolith onto which memories and grief can be projected – no figurative sculpture, no triumphalism, no flamboyant display of emotion. Lloyd George had envisaged a 'catafalque', but Lutyens's final structure is more eloquent – an 'empty tomb' (the literal meaning of 'cenotaph').
  Curiously, Lutyens first came across the 'cenotaph' idea when he was working on Gertrude Jekyll's garden at Munstead Wood. He had designed a garden seat there in the form of a single block of elm set on a stone, and Charles Liddell, a friend of both Lutyens and Jekyll (and a librarian at the British Museum, and a cousin of Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll's Alice), christened it the 'Cenotaph of Sigismunda'. That was back in the 1890s, but clearly the word had lodged in Lutyens's memory. The Whitehall cenotaph that he brought into being years later was a direct response to his experience of the devastation wrought by the war in France, which Lutyens visited in 1917. This convinced him that a new kind of war memorial was needed, one that eschewed naturalism and expressionism in favour of an eloquent reticence. He was so right. 

Alan Garner!

 With a big tip of the hat to Chris Hale, I pass on this astonishing image of the author of The Stone Book Quartet. I guess he must have needed the money (and was clearly no whisky drinker if he liked it with ginger ale – but did he really? We'll never know). 
I found Garner's endorsement even more improbable than this more famous one, featuring dear Kingsley and the long-suffering Elizabeth Jane Howard in their well appointed drawing room – 

What a shame Philip Larkin never did an ad for Gordon's gin. 'Very Philip Larkin, very drunk'?