Living in Hope

I am going to be away for a few days, in Derbyshire and Kent, so might not be able to blog before the weekend (though you never know...).
Perhaps I shall improve on my meagre butterfly tally (Worst Year Ever!), which was increased over the past couple of days by a single Small Heath, my first Meadow Brown of the summer, and two fresh specimens of that dark beauty,
the Ringlet (left).

'A man who can scarcely talk of a principle he has not violated...'

'Milton has perhaps a more elevated gloomy sublimity that belongs to hell and chaos - but no man equals Homer and Shakespeare in that inspired spirit, that raciness of nature, which animates and distinguishes every thing they mention. Every thing in Homer is enlivening and vigorous - you fancy all glittering in the heat of the day, gilded by the setting or silvered by the rising Sun; but all Milton's mighty cherubin or seraphin seemed to draw their flaming swords, or clash their sounding shields, as if they shone through a darkened glass - dingy, red, solemn, terrible.'
 Reads like Keats, doesn't it? But it's Haydon again (Benjamin Robert Haydon, see below), writing in his diaries a few years before he met Keats. No wonder the two men took each other for kindred spirits when they did meet, and Keats was so exalted by the encounter that he was moved to verse. It could have been a fine and enduring friendship, had it not been for Haydon's behaviour in pestering his generous young friend for money at every opportunity, despite knowing that Keats was himself hard pressed and embroiled in endless difficulties over his inheritance.
 Haydon was, despite the pious ejaculations that punctuate his writings, quite blind to his own faults (those ejaculations generally boil down to thanking God for allowing him to make progress on whatever Great Work he was creating - compare and contrast the prayers of Samuel Johnson). Like many who are blind to their own faults, Haydon was all too alive to those of others - and woe betide those who fell foul of him (as almost everyone did at some time or another). Here he is in full flow on Leigh Hunt (who recently made an appearance on The Dabbler):
 'This is a man who can scarcely talk of a principle he has not violated. Did he not induce his Brother under a sacred promise to put his name to two bills of 250 each, and while I and his Brother were fagging about all day in the dirt, in order to raise the money that John might not go to prison, he never came in till three hours after his promise, because it was likely to rain! In domestic matters to his wife he is a tyrant. His poor wife has led the life of a slave, by his smuggering fondness for her Sister. He likes & is satisfied to corrupt the girl's mind without seducing her person, to dawdle over her bosom, to lean against her thigh & play with her petticoats, rather than go to the effort of furious gratification. His wife's Sister, the Aunt of his four little children - is it not cruel to keep his wife on the perpetual rack of waning affection, to praise the Sister for qualities which his wife has not, and which he knew she had not when he married her? This private conduct must be mentioned because in private conduct a man shews his real character, being the situation in which he is uncontrouled. He will do the most dishonourable things. I put my name once to a bill of 45 which I owed him - he scratched out 45 & made it 55, because he wanted more, and then appealed to my friendship after the bill was gone! He affects contempt for ribbons & Stars, yet I have seen his face shake at the mention of Lord Erskine bearing a title. If there is to be a revolution and such men are to get at the head of affairs, God help us...'
 And there's more - and Leigh Hunt is not the only target. How sad that a man with such gifts and such a sensibility as Haydon - a man capable of inspiring the friendship and admiration of Keats - should have spent so much of his energy in indignant vituperation and relentless cadging from all who crossed his path.

Bees and Bellflowers

The tall and very beautiful bellflowers that we call Canterbury Bells seem to be having a very good year, the excessive rain causing them to grow even taller than usual (and fall over even more often than usual - this is a plant that is only too glad to lie down flat whenever the opportunity arises). Yesterday I was admiring the Canterbury Bells in our garden - more abundant this year than ever before, I think - when I noticed one with a dark spot at the centre of the flower, in the depths of the bell. A nice variant, I thought, and took a closer look - and discovered that the 'dark spot' was a cluster of three very small dark stripey bees, to all appearances dead, but in fact still just capable of stirring, at least to the point of aimlessly waving a leg or two. They were heavily dusted with pollen, and their pollen sacs clearly full to bursting. Another two bees were similarly trapped in another bellflower nearby, so I imagine this might be a fairly common occurrence, though I'd never seen it before.
  What had happened? Well, the larger bellflowers ask rather a lot of the foraging bee, which, to get its fill of pollen, must make its way from top to bottom of the flower's long style. I suspect that these bees, already sluggish from the unseasonal cold and damp, made it to the bottom and found themselves too weary and heavy laden to manage the return journey. There's an explanation of bellflower pollination with this strangely restful video, apparently filmed beside a babbling brook.
  By the way, after much deliberation, I decided to leave the trapped bees in situ. They didn't look in any fit state to survive a rescue. This morning, two of the group of three were still in place, apparently dead, while the other pair had gone - probably just shaken out by the wind.

Clive Alive

Well, it seems the recent talk of Clive James's impending demise was premature - at least according to Clive.
Let's hope he is indeed around and enjoying life as best he can for a few more years yet. But let's hope also that, before he does reach 'his terminus', he gives an interview in which he is free to talk about his life, work and thoughts in a much more unstructured way than tonight's Meeting Myself Coming Back allowed. Being chronologically structured and built around clips from the archives, tonight's interview was closer to This Is Your Life than Face To Face, and didn't allow much of a conversation - or indeed monologue - to develop. Clive was, as ever, great value, once he'd got the feel of the show, but all the time there was a frustrating sense of something much bigger and better fighting to get out. I hope some smart producer at Radio 4 - or, better, Radio 3 - was listening and sensing the potential for a great and memorable interview...

Thought for the Day

'About midway in my ministry, which extends roughly from the peace of Versailles to the peace of Munich, measured in terms of Western history, I underwent a fairly complete conversion of thought which involved rejection of almost all the liberal theological ideals and ideas with which I ventured forth in 1915. I wrote a book [Does Civilization need Religion?], my first, in 1927 which contains almost all the theological windmills against which today I tilt my sword. These windmills must have tumbled shortly thereafter, for every succeeding volume expresses a more and more explicit revolt against what is usually known as liberal culture.'

Thus the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr - who, as it happens, was also born on this day (in 1892) - cheerfully confessing to the evolution in his ideas that set him completely at odds with his younger self. It's always refreshing, isn't it, when thinkers - or anyone else - are ready to jettison earlier ideas and follow where their thought leads them, even if it is to the opposite shore from that on which they once firmly stood.

Machado - Outra Vez

Noting that today is the anniversary of the birth of the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, I was just about to launch into a blog post on the subject when I thought - hang on a minute, this feels familiar... Sure enough, I wrote about Machado de Assis on this day three years ago - and here's the proof.
  I guess the longer a blog goes on, the more posts accumulate - and the older the blogger gets - the higher is the risk of repetition. On the other hand, would anyone notice? Three years is a long time in Blog Years. But don't worry - I don't intend to make a habit of repeating myself. Or make a habit of repeating myself.

A Transformation

A house a few doors down my road has been standing empty for a while, between owners. As a result, the front lawn - to all appearances an unremarkable patch of suburban sod - was left unmown for a few weeks. The transformation was extraordinary. Suddenly this ordinary lawn became a sea of tall Ox-Eye Daisies, soaring above ground cover of clover and medick. Fringed by red and white Valerian, which had taken over the flower beds, along with blue and white Canterbury Bells, this was a delightful sight, aesthetically and ecologically a vast improvement on the shorn norm.
Sadly that norm has been restored now, with one brutal mow that took down all the Ox-Eyes and restored the lawn's respectable appearances. But where had that effusion of Ox-Eyes come from? Usually a neglected lawn down my way becomes a mass of dandelions, lamb's-tails and lush long grass - not tall Ox-Eyes. I suppose there are two likely possibilities - that this lawn was a surviving patch of the original downland turf in situ, perhaps 'improved' with some lawn grass, or, more likely, the original owner of the house decided to lay turf from the downs (this would have been around 100 years ago, when such things were easily done). This turf had carried on for decades maintaining its convincing impression of a suburban lawn - until suddenly, left alone for a few weeks of early summer, it seized the opportunity to reassert itself with that dramatic flush of Ox-Eyes. I hope it gets another chance some time in the future...
The sight of those Ox-Eyes reminded me of walking among the suburban villas above Trouville a couple of years ago and finding patches of Pyramidal and Bee Orchids on every manicured lawn. Nature - it always comes back.