The Poet Pours Himself a Drink

The greatest description in all literature of the mixing of a G&T is surely the first six lines of Philip Larkin's Sympathy in White Major, written (or signed off) on this day 50 years ago...

When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge,
I lift the lot in private pledge:
He devoted his life to others.

While other people wore like clothes
The human beings in their days
I set myself to bring to those
Who thought I could the lost displays;
It didn't work for them or me,
But all concerned were nearer thus
(Or so we thought) to all the fuss
Than if we' d missed it separately.

A decent chap, a real good sort,
Straight as a die, one of the best,
A brick, a trump, a proper sport,
Head and shoulders above the rest;
How many Iives would have been duller
Had he not been here below?
Here' s to the whitest man I know -
Though white is not my favourite colour.

It's a rather strange poem, the clarity and plain speaking of the two outer stanzas contrasting with the more elliptical and meditative second stanza. Like Self's The Man, the poem ponders one of Larkin's recurrent themes - selfishness and selflessness. Specifically, whether the life Larkin leads is especially selfish and whether others, who appear more selfless, truly are.
 For extraneous reasons - Larkin's posthumous reputation as a 'racist' - the last two lines read oddly now, but back in 1967, of course, 'white' could be used unblushingly as a synonym for decent, honest and upright. As for the synaesthetic title, this is adapted from Gautier's Symbolist poem Symphonie en Blanc Majeur - a poem with which Larkin's has nothing else in common.

End of Season

Sorry to be back on the butterflies so soon, but this will probably be the last lepidopteral post of the year - the weather is turning tomorrow, and September looms. Today, though, was warm again and, off and on, sunny, so I headed for my favourite hillside to see what I might find. I was hoping - hoping more than expecting - that I might see that lovely, late-flying chalk downland specialist, the Silver-Spotted Skipper.
 What greeted me was a glorious abundance of Adonis Blues - yes, again; I've never known such a year - and large numbers of that other, paler blue beauty, the Chalk-Hill Blue. There were also lots of busy little Brown Arguses, Small Heaths galore, and of course Meadow Browns everywhere (including a rather pretty aberration with creamy white patches on the forewings - I took a photo, but it was no good). But no Silver-Spotted Skippers - until, suddenly, from nowhere, there was one on the path, just a couple of yards ahead of me, its wings neatly folded to show off those silver spots (more spangles, really, than spots) against that subtle olive-green ground. Not for the first time this butterfly season, but perhaps for the last, I felt that sudden surge of joy and gratitude that every true butterfly lover knows.
 In the next couple of hours, I saw four more of these beautiful Skippers, all nectaring on Scabious. A glorious end to a wonderful season.

A Shorter Boswell

Here's a nice little book I picked up for almost nothing today at our local 'environmental fair', an annual event on which the wizened hippies of South London and beyond descend to savour the convivial Green vibe, the live music and the queue for the beer tent. For myself, my main objective was to buy some of the excellent local honey and a few other odds and ends - and to scan the book stalls. The above volume was my reward - A Shorter Boswell, edited with an introduction by John Bailey [not to be confused with the much later John Bayley], author of Dr Johnson and His Circle. Published by Nelson in 1925, A Shorter Boswell was in its 25th printing by the time of my copy (I'd guess late Fifties or early Sixties), so clearly a successful book, one of Nelson's The Teaching of English series. I guess it's a survival from the days when Boswell's Johnson was routinely taught in schools - as it wasn't even in my schooldays, more's the pity.
 Anyway, this little book contains nearly 200 choice passages from the great biography of the equally great man, and it seems to me perfectly adapted to settle in on my bedside bookshelf.

Potterism

Another excellent Point of View talk by Roger Scruton on Radio 4 this morning - this time on J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. In my opinion, he over-praises their literary merit - when I tried one I found it literally unreadable - but his wider point about the impact of 'Potterism' is well made. I hadn't joined the dots between the magical thinking of Potterism and the 'soft socialism' of the snowflake generation, but it seems to make perfect sense. You can listen to the talk via this link...

All This Useless Beauty

Today was a warm and sunny day at last, after altogether too many cloudy ones, so I headed straight for Box Hill in the hope of seeing an Adonis Blue or two.
 I've written before about this dazzlingly beautiful little butterfly - arguably our most beautiful, at least for fans of the colour blue (like me). No other British butterfly is so intensely blue - it's like the iridescent blue of those big Morpho butterflies that grace every tropical butterfly house, but subtler, and often tending towards turquoise. The Adonis Blue is quite unmistakable (and unphotographable), and always a thrilling sight to see - and today I was blessed with a prodigious abundance of them. In the fields below the Box Hill viewpoint, so many were flying that I gave up counting - if I'd carried on, I'd have been well into triple figures by the time I headed back to the viewpoint and down the leisurely dip slope.
 I've never in my life seen so many Adonis Blues, or anything like as many. This was an afternoon to remember - one to inspire, in Nabokov's words about the ecstatic joy of being among butterflies, 'a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern'. And there were even some slightly battered Chalkhill Blues as well - my first of the year.
 As if that wasn't enough, as I got off the return train, I looked up into the afternoon sky and saw a plane laying a vapour trail that happened to bisect the faintly visible new moon. As I was enjoying this sight, a familiar shape flew into view - a swift! Surely my last of the year.

As Orwell Didn't Say...

'The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.'
 This quotation, allegedly from George Orwell's 1984, is all over the social media at the moment, no doubt in response to the current wave of historical iconoclasm in the US. (Sometimes it's 'a people' instead of just 'people', which makes better sense.) The sentiment is one that Orwell, who knew plenty about the historical iconoclasm of the Soviet Union, might well have endorsed, but it seems he never wrote those words - certainly not in 1984 and, as far as anyone can discover, not in any other of his works.
 This appears to be one of those plausible misquotations/ misattributions that come from nowhere, as if by spontaneous generation, and spread, for a while, like wildfire. It doesn't really matter much: just as the internet enables these false quotations to suddenly emerge and spread, so it enables the vigilant to call them out promptly. However, if any of my erudite readers have any ideas or information about where this 'Orwell' quote came from, or indeed if it occurs in some obscure corner of his works, I'd be glad to know. One for you, Dave Lull?
 Meanwhile, here's another relevant quotation that I believe is genuine: 'I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.' That's George MacDonald Fraser, best known as the author of the Flashman novels.  Or is it?

Harriet Like Harman

On Radio 4 this morning the ghastly Harriet Harman was looking back over her career in an interview with the ever courteous Peter Hennessy. It was the usual self-justifying spiel - The Perils of Little Hatty in the World of Big Nasty Men - and the only 'revelation' was that she now believed she would have beaten Ed Milliband to the Labour leadership if she had stood. Why didn't she? Well, by that time, you see, her self-esteem had been so thoroughly ground down by the patriarchy that it didn't occur to her that a woman, a mere woman, could hope to beat all those men. Yeah, sure.
 What struck me, though, as I clung to consciousness, was that Ms Harman has taken to dropping the word 'like' randomly into her discourse, in the manner of an inarticulate teenager rather than the QC she is. Does she realise she's doing this? Is it deliberate, a feeble attempt to sound like one of the common people? She never quite managed the full glottal stop (unlike those masters of the dropped 't', Messrs Blair and Osborne) - too nicely brought up, I daresay - so perhaps she's simply gone for the, like, easier option. I do hope she doesn't keep it up.