The Master

I was in Chelsea Old Church earlier today, looking at some monuments, when I came across this memorial tablet to Henry James (whose ashes are buried elsewhere, in Cambridge Cemetery, Massachusetts). Beautifully lettered and beautifully worded.

Danny Dyer Shows the Way Forward

Last night I watched the second and concluding programme in that must-see history series Danny Dyer's Right Royal Family. This, in case you hadn't heard, was made in the wake of the shock revelation, on Who Do You Think You Are?, that cockney geezer Dyer is a descendant of Edward III (as are 99 percent of English people living today, but never mind that – Danny was well impressed with his royal pedigree).
  Danny Dyer's Right Royal Family, in which DD learnt a bit about history (all new to him, apparently) and how royals and such carried on in the olden days, was not terribly informative – but it was comedy gold. Dyer is a likeable and hugely engaging presenter, with a style all his own and a vocabulary (mostly of rhyming slang) to match. It's now obligatory for presenters of popular history programmes to dress up in period costumes and try their hand at olden days activities, and it's usually a pain in the fundament – but with Danny it was actually fun to watch (especially, of course, the now notorious codpiece fitting). I laughed more at this programme than at any recent BBC 'comedy'. And I have a suggestion for the BBC: sack the unwatchably winsome Lucy Worsley from all her various history gigs, and give them to Danny Dyer – the world would be a better, happier place. 
  Watching Right Royal Family actually affected my dream life last night, and I seem to have wasted some part of my sleeping hours dreaming up new formats to showcase Danny Dyer's talents. When I woke up, I had the name of one of them fresh in my mind: it was Danny Dyer's Cockney Spittle Farm. I haven't the faintest idea what that was about, but I wouldn't care to pitch it to the BBC execs.

Heart Flutter Things

I had never heard of Marie Kondo until I recently heard a news story to the effect that her popular decluttering programme was having such an impact that charity shops were overwhelmed by donations and having to turn them away. I haven't observed this phenomenon in the charity shops around here, but no doubt there is something in it.
  Marie Kondo's decluttering vocation cam to her very early, at junior school, where she preferred tidying the bookshelves to all other activities and would clamour to be named class bookshelf organiser. It was while shelf-tidying at school that she had a kind of revelation. As she relates it, 'I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying, telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realised my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying.'
  This insight is, it seems, closely related to Shinto thinking (Kondo spent five years as a miko [attendant maiden] at a Shinto shrine). The aim of Kondo-style decluttering is to get rid of all but the things that truly give you pleasure, the kokoro tokimeku mono (literally 'heart flutter things'). This seems sound enough, in its minimalist way – but Marie Kondo has, I understand, decreed that we should have no more than 30 books in our homes. Thirty books! I suppose, if pushed, some of us might be able to come up with a list of 30 books that we particularly treasure, that we reread often and that seem essential to who we are – but to throw out all the rest and have no other books around us is unthinkable.
 Most homes these days have few books anyway (and those mostly bad). I was delighted last night, half-watching Grand Designs, to see that, in the finished house, there was a substantial (and movable) bookcase, holding a few hundred books, many of them apparently classics. A rare sighting in the open-plan glass boxes that Grand Designs specialises in. 

Midwinter Waking

We've all had mornings like this...

Paws there. Snout there as well. Mustiness. Mould.
Darkness; a desire to stretch, to scratch.
Then has the – ? Then is it – ? Nudge the thatch,
Displace the stiffened leaves: look out. How cold,
How dried a stillness. Like a blade on stone,
A wind is scraping, first this way, then that.
Morning, perhaps; but not a proper one.
Turn. Sleep will unshell us, but not yet.

Philip Larkin wrote Midwinter Waking on this day 65 years ago. Ostensibly it describes, by a remarkable feat of identification, some kind of animal (perhaps a hedgehog?) half-waking from hibernation to find that it's still winter. However, it does remind me of many a winter waking of my working life – when, alas, there was no going back to sleep; the day had to be faced...

Only Connect

I was walking yesterday in southwest Oxfordshire, around Langford – a flat, rather uneventful country of large arable fields and straight enclosure roads, but well furnished with picturesque stone-built villages and a wealth of interesting churches. Their interest is largely architectural and antiquarian (lots of Norman and even Saxon work), with little to excite a monument man like me. However, the graveyards were rich in moss-grown Baroque chest tombs, and the churches contained some beautifully lettered brass memorial plaques from the seventeenth century, and a number of good wall tablets. Of these the most impressive was in the north chapel of Broadwell church (above). This commemorates one George Huband, who died in 1668.

  As I read through the finely lettered epitaph, a name suddenly struck me. Huband rejoices in being 'immediatly descended from that ancient Family of the Hubands of Ipsly in Warwickshire'. Ipsly, Ipsley... Of course, the very place (now counted as being in Worcestershire – it's on the county boundary) where, in Church Lane, Geoffrey Hill was inspired to write three fine late poems.
  One of the pleasures of monument-bibbing is the finding of unexpected connections – usually between families or individuals – but here was something new: an obscure place name in an epitaph connecting across the centuries with our last great poet. Here's In Ipsley Church Lane 1 –

More than ever I see through painters’ eyes. 
The white hedge-parsleys pall, the soot is on them. 
Clogged thorn-blossom sticks, like burnt cauliflower, 
to the festered hedge-rim. More than I care to think 
I am as one coarsened by feckless grief. 
Storm cloud and sun together bring out the yellow of stone.

But that’s lyricism, as Father Guardini 
equably names it: autosuggestion, mania, 
working off a chagrin close to despair, 
ridden by jealousy of all self-healed 
in sexual love, each selving each, the gift 
of that necessity their elect choice.

Later, as in late autumn, there will be 
the mass-produced wax berries, and perhaps 
an unearthed wasps’ nest like a paper skull, 
where fragile cauls of cobweb start to shine. 
Where the quick spider mummifies its dead 
rage shall move somnolent yet unappeased.

The Gove Tutorial

Since my encounter with Gordon Brown some years ago, politicians have rarely strayed into my dream world. Last night, however, for reasons unknown, I was treated to a double (or triple) visitation. First came Jacob Rees Mogg in all his glory, indeed in rather more glory than usual, as he was sporting a florid waistcoat worthy of Disraeli himself. His uncharacteristically jaunty apparel was matched by his jaunty demeanour as he strolled, nodding affably to right and left, through the pleasant streets of a town that somewhat resembled Cambridge.
  Indeed it must have been Cambridge (dream Cambridge), as the next thing I remember is being one of two students in a cosy tutorial being conducted by none other than Michael Gove – or rather Michael Gove with a touch of Norman St John Stevas. Sitting back in a deep armchair, he was being tremendously polite and affable (and slightly camp), but at the same time oddly enigmatic. The subject of the tutorial appeared to be the development of the classical city. At one point my fellow student, a rather attractive young lady, asked why he was focusing on the classical city. Oddly Gove/Stevas fell silent in the face of this query and seemed mildly discomfited, so after an awkward interval I chipped in with something that seemed to be fit the bill – heaven knows what, but I finished with a flourish on the word 'paradigm'. Gove/Stevas seemed pleased.
 And there it ended, or what I can remember ended. I've no idea what any of it signifies, but I sincerely hope neither Theresa May nor Jeremy Corbyn invades my dream world any time soon. 

Frit and Waddy

In Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (see below), Barbara Comyns uses some curious words. One is 'frit', which she employs throughout to mean 'frightened'. This is a Midlands dialect word which came to wider attention when Mrs Thatcher, a Lincolnshire lass, used it in the House of Commons in 1983 to accuse the then Labour deputy leader Denis Healey of being 'frit' at the prospect of an election. Last month the Beast of Bolsover, Dennis Skinner, returned the compliment by describing Mrs May as being 'frit' in her dealings with our bosses in Brussels. One of his better interjections.
  Another word Barbara Comyns uses several times is the adjective 'waddy'. From the context, it seems to mean some undesirable quality, a kind of silliness perhaps:
'Peregrine was a good driver, but sat rather forward and crouched over the wheel and talked about driving as if he wasn't really used to it. This seemed rather waddy to me.'
'... what I meant was, Charles seemed to have a kind of Peter Pan complex, that he had no responsibilities, and I was a waddy sentimental Wendy, full of mother-complexes, and middle-class comforts...'
 I can't find this word in any dictionary or anywhere online, and have never come across it before. Is it dialect? (Comyns grew up in Warwickshire.) Is it some kind of Thirties slang? (It sounds rather like it.) Has anyone got any information on 'waddy' and what it means? Over to you, Dave Lull? Jonathon Green?...