'The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more...'

 Last night on BBC4 (the only TV channel that does anything to justify the licence fee), I watched a rather wonderful documentary from 1977 called The Queen's Realm: England. Described as 'an aerial anthology of English landscape, poetry and music', it was directed and produced by Ed Mirzoeff and curated and contributed to by John Betjeman, who is very much the presiding spirit of the film. The aerial footage is impressive, and must have seemed quite cutting-edge at the time. It's all filmed from a helicopter – no drones then – presumably using the then novel Steadicam. Landscape, townscape and seascape, all flow by, all artfully mingled with judiciously chosen music and poetry; the effect is often beautiful and sometimes very moving. The poets featured include, among many others, Shakespeare (the John of Gaunt speech opens the film), Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, Hopkins, Clare, Housman, Auden, Larkin and, of course, Betjeman – all immaculately read, by Michael Hordern and Richard Pasco, Prunella Scales and Junet Suzman, and, of course, old Betj himself. 
  What was most striking about the film was that – leaving aside some unchanging and unchangeable landscapes – it was showing us a lost land, a country so very different from the one we now live in, despite the relatively short distance in time. It was a country where factory chimneys still belched smoke, and industrial buildings from earlier times were still in use, where a building's purpose could be read from its appearance – no anonymous out-of-town hangars then – where fields still grew and harvested crops rather than solar panels and wind turbines. It was still a country, clearly, that made things, and one where people did recognisable jobs with simple names and clear purposes, unlike our increasingly abstract present, where so much that was solid has melted into air – a world in which, if you ask someone what their job is, chances are you won't understand the answer (if indeed it means anything). This was a world before computers in every home and office, before mobiles phones, before even the Sony Walkman. It was decidedly a more human world, and a simpler one, more innocent perhaps. I found myself mourning it, and wishing undone so much of what has happened since – even the internet itself, which might well prove to be the most destructive invention ever unleashed by mankind on itself. And yet I love it, and would, I fear, be lost without it. Damn it, if it wasn't for the internet I wouldn't be here, i.e. writing on this blog, which in turn wouldn't be here. This is all getting too vertiginous...
  Oh yes. One of the poets featured, whose work I didn't recognise and had to identify via Google (yes, that internet again) turned out to be Laurence Binyon, about whom I have written before, here and here. This was the passage featured in The Queen's Realm – it's the first stanza of a longer (too long) poem called 'The Burning of the Leaves':

'Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock's fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.'

The Queen's Realm is available on the BBC iPlayer, for how long I don't know.  

Alarm? What alarm?

 I was not looking forward at all to receiving the 3pm alarm that was supposed to be going out from somewhere within The Government to every smartphone in the land, so I was relieved when the hour came and nothing happened, no message, no sound, not on my phone nor on Mrs N's.
Call me an anarcho-libertarian but my heart does not warm to the thought that any government has the power to send anything to every smartphone in the nation – and now it seems they can't, even after months of preparation, planning and prepublicity. This incompetence has its reassuring side, but it was also one of the things that worried me about the original plan. Imagine, for a start, the potential for false alarms, mistimings and (in a geographically limited alarm) alerting the wrong people in the wrong place. Much more worrying are the possibilities of hacking a not fully secure system: imagine what havoc the likes of Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion might wreak if they could muster the brain power (which happily seems most unlikely), imagine what bad actors from, say, China or Russia might do...  Still, early reports suggest that a considerable swathe of the smartphone-owning population failed, like me and Mrs N, to hear a peep from The Government. I hope they now abandon this silly and potentially dangerous experiment. 

Barry Humphries

 Sad to hear that Barry Humphries, that man of many parts (some of them rather revolting), has died. He had achieved a good age (89), but even so, as well as grieving his family and friends, his death subtracts from the gaiety of nations. And we can be absolutely sure that he will have no comic successor: his comedy teetered perilously close to the edge even in the more relaxed climate of his peak decades; it would have plunged straight over the edge of the permissible today. The creation that first brought him to notice in this country, the archetypal 'ocker' Barry Mackenzie (in a strip cartoon in Private Eye, drawn by the excellent Nicholas Garland), was a man of unreconstructed attitudes, to put it very mildly, with an endlessly inventive way with Australian profanities. Humphries was so steeped in the murkier byways of Australian slang that he could effortlessly coin new expressions that fitted perfectly into the lexicon. Indeed, there's surely a potential thesis for someone in identifying Humphries' contributions to the Australian language – it must be vast. Maybe it's already been written...
  While Humphries achieved his comic apotheosis in the rise and rise of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, his love of inventive profanity found new expression in the character of Sir Les Patterson, Australian cultural attaché, whose sole professional remit seemed to be the promotion of Tasmanian Blue cheese, a large portion of which was often secreted hygienically down the front of his trousers. With his hideous leer, stained (with God knows what) suit , bulging belly and florid complexion, he was every bit as appalling as our home-grown grotesque, the long forgotten Frank Randle – but, unlike Frank (who had only catchphrases and a drunk act), he had a wonderfully inventive way with language, managing to plumb depths unknown even to Barry Mackenzie. Some of this is preserved in Sir Les's indispensable (to drunken satyromaniacs abroad) book, The Traveller's Tool (1985). I had a copy, which I lost long ago, but I certainly remember it as being quite hair-raisingly, eye-wateringly filthy, and displaying, shall we say, a less than respectful attitude to the legions of oriental ladies who attended to Sir Les's urgent priapic needs. The Traveller's Tool was never reprinted, and is now only available at an exorbitant price. It hardly needs saying that such a book today would not even have made it over the publisher's threshold, let alone found its way into print. The publisher, by the way, was the perfectly respectable Michael O'Mara, and there was no outcry when the book came out. We recognised what comedy was in those days, i.e. something whose business was only to make you laugh – and The Traveller's Tool certainly did that, turning the initial gasp of horror into genuine laughter by the sheer inventiveness of the language and the utter shamelessness of the leering Sir Les's depravity. 
  Humphries created many other characters too, and the most interesting of them, I think, is the one that was Peter Cook's favourite, Sandy Stone, a decent, quiet man living a solitary, rather sad life in a Melbourne suburb. The polar opposite of Sir Les, Stone was a character Humphries worked on over the years: 'Slowly the character has deepened,' he said in interview in 2016, 'so I began to understand and appreciate him, and finally feel myself turning into him.' Indeed, Humphries began to play him without make-up and wearing his own dressing gown. Clearly he could identify with both Sandy Stone and Sir Les; no doubt (says the amateur psychologist) they represented opposite poles of his divided personality. The complete Sandy Stone soliloquies, published in 1990 as The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, might even prove to be Humphries's most lasting work. 
  And there was more: Humphries was fascinated from boyhood by the Aesthetic movement, and became a major collector of 1890s art and books. Like his friend John Betjeman, he had a particular interest in his near-compatriot, the artist Charles Conder (who is mentioned here), and at one time owned the largest collection of Conder's works in private hands. 
  Like many people of huge talent and strong drive, Humphries kept performing for rather too long after his wit had lost its razor-sharp edge – but what a talent it was, what a wit, and what a man. There will never be another. RIP. 

The Sequel

 I spoke too soon. After granting me three days' grace, the bug returned with a vengeance, hitting me with undiminished force and leaving me, after the fever had passed, with a cough that is worse than ever. Hey ho. At least the enforced leisure has given me time to work on a long cherished side project – a much needed (well, by some of us) index of names and places for The Mother Of Beauty – and I think I have enough of my woozy brain functioning to make a decent job of it. I'm finding the exercise enjoyable, even therapeutic, and will have more to say when it's completed.

  What's more, the weather has picked up a little, with a good deal of sunshine offsetting the bitter East wind (Mr Jarndyce would not be happy*). My spirits have been lifted by seeing a few more butterflies – a pair of bright and lively Holly Blues in a sheltered patch of shrubbery by the Tesco car park (from which one can enjoy a splendid view of the Cathedral), a somnolent Peacock and – always a great moment of any spring – my first Orange Tip. Spring is here, summer will come.

* The reference is to John Jarndyce, owner of Bleak House in the novel of that name, and benevolent guardian of Esther. Whenever he was troubled or anxious, he would blame the East wind. Nabokov called him 'one of the best and kindest human beings ever described in a novel'. 

Nothing

 Apologies for the (relative) blog silence; I have been doing nothing. Perhaps I should elaborate on that. Last Thursday evening I was clobbered by a quite dramatic, but mercifully short-lived, 'bug' of some kind, which left me somewhat wiped out (and with a very tiresome cough). At the weekend I took myself off to Derbyshire to spend some recuperative time with my cousin. We practised, as best we could, the ancient Italian art of dolce far niente, exerting ourselves only to cook, eat and attend to the animals. On Sunday, however, we did take a walk on Stanton Moor, a pleasing landscape of heather, gorse and birch, not to mention the Nine Ladies stone circle. The day was bitter cold and the skies leaden – no feeling of spring at all, though the plants were dutifully doing their thing and the more muscular among the bumble bees were managing to take to the air. That evening, tuning in with numb fingers to the Countryfile weather forecast, that indispensable work of speculative fiction, I was amused to discover that Sunday had been the warmest day of the year. Clearly Derbyshire hadn't got the memo.
Anyway, I am better for the rest, though the cough persists, and I hope to be a little more communicative in the days to come.

It's That Book Again

Look what's turned up in the Lichfield Cathedral bookshop...

Actually I donated them, to be sold in aid of cathedral funds.
Hurry hurry, while stocks last!

(Apologies for the dreadful photo: the book in question is The Mother of Beauty by one Nigel Andrew.)

Max on Royalty

 Leafing through Max Beerbohm's Works and More – the volume that contains his brilliant essay 'Dandies and Dandies', which I've mentioned before (here) – I happened upon 'Some Words on Royalty'. With a (faintly improbable) Coronation drawing ever closer, I thought I had better have a look at it. It is the opening essay of More, a collection garnered 'from inilluminable catacombs – to wit, files of the Saturday Review, the Daily Mail, the Outlook, Tomorrow and The Musician'. 'Some Words on Royalty' purports to be an account of the recently published memoirs of Count –––––, who was for years a trusted minister of the late Emperor –––––– of –––––––, until, 'in 188–, he was ousted from favour by the machinations of a jealous and not too scrupulous cabal'. It includes, among other juicy material, an account of how the Emperor, wearying of the daily carriage ride in which he showed himself to his subjects, had a lifelike wax automaton of himself made, programmed to turn to either side and wave in the approved regal manner. This proved entirely convincing, and, when an assassination attempt was made on the automaton, the Emperor was acclaimed far and wide for his absolute composure and sangfroid. 'According to the memoirs, the Emperor himself, in a false beard, was standing near the assassin, and was actually arrested on suspicion, but managed to escape his captors in the mêlée and reached the palace in ample time to bow from the balcony'.
  After briefly wondering whether the wax automaton ruse might usefully be employed by our own royal family, Beerbohm finally delivers what are recognisably 'some words on royalty' – and very sensible they seem to me:
'There are some persons who would fain abolish altogether the institution of royalty. I do not go so far as they. Our royal family is a rather absurd institution, no doubt. But then, humanity itself is rather absurd. A State can never be more than a kindergarten, at best, and he who would fain rule men according to principles of right reason will fare no better than did poor Plato at Syracuse. Put the dream of the doctrinaire into practice, and it will soon turn to some such nightmare as modern France or modern America. Indeed, fallacies and anomalies are the basis of all good government. A Crown, like a Garter, implies no 'damned merit'; else were it void of its impressive magic for most creatures. Strictly, there is no reason why we should worship the House of Hanover more than we worship any other family. Strictly, there was no reason why the Children of Israel should bow down before brazen images. But man is not rational, and the spirit of idolatry is strong in him. And, if you take away his idol, that energy that would otherwise be spent in kowtowing will probably be spent in some less harmless manner. In every free public there is a fund of patriotic emotion which must, somehow, be worked off. I may be insular, but I cannot help thinking it better that this fund should be worked off, as in England, by cheering the members of the royal family, rather than by upsetting the current ministry, as in France.' 

God save the King!