Loblolly

Speaking of Larkin (as we usually are), I was delighted to come across the word 'loblolly' in print the other day – the first time I've seen it anywhere but in Larkin's 'Toads' with its 'Lecturers, lispers, losels, loblolly-men, louts...' –

Why should I let the toad work

  Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork

  And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

  With its sickening poison –

Just for paying a few bills!

  That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:

  Lecturers, lispers,

Losels, loblolly-men, louts –

  They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes

  With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines –

  they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,

  Their unspeakable wives

Are skinny as whippets – and yet

  No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough

  To shout Stuff your pension!

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff

  That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like

  Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

  And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney

  My way of getting

The fame and the girl and the money

  All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other

  One's spiritual truth;

But I do say it's hard to lose either,

  When you have both.

I came across 'loblolly' again in something my South African cousin wrote about the early history of Durban. He is telling the story of Henry Francis Fynn, who befriended the Zulu king Shaka Zulu and was given the strip of land that became the city of Durban.
Fynn is about to attempt to cure the wife of an uncle of Shaka's:
'Fynn's prior experience of medicine was as a loblolly boy – a surgeon's attendant – at Christ's Hospital, "when I obtained the smallest particle of knowledge of medicine" [as he writes in his diary].'
He was a resourceful fellow, though, and had read the Hippocratic oath. He effected a cure, and thereby got himself quite a reputation as a healer. 'Lots of folks live on their wits...'

Another Point of View

This morning I tuned in to A Point of View again, in the vague hope that perhaps John Gray had been allowed a second outing. No such luck, of course, but this week it was Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, who is often worth a listen and always amusing. His talk took off from one of the great lines in that great mockumentary Spinal Tap: 'It's such a fine line between clever and stupid.'
  The line is indeed fine: as Orwell didn't say (but nearly did), 'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' However, Gopnik's theme is the Covid crisis, or whatever we choose to call this mind-boggling situation we find ourselves in. 'At no time in modern times,' says Gopnik, 'have we endured so much and understood so little.' Indeed – and one of the great unknowns is whether all we have endured, by way of lockdown and its effects, has even been necessary or salutary. How, asks Gopnik, will we explain to our children 'the noise it has made in our heads'? (And in particular, I would add, how do we explain the extremity of our panic reaction to what was essentially an extremely nasty 'care home virus' rather than a serious threat to the population at large.)
  The silver lining, in Gopnik's view, is that, like earlier pandemics – Black Death, Spanish flu – what comes next will not be 'parched austerity and continuing depression' but a period of 'plushness and abandon'. Well, maybe, but those earlier pandemics were far more serious than Covid, and they took place in times when people were much more familiar with death as an everyday event, and therefore not reduced to paralysing terror by pure timor mortis.
  Anyway,  here's the link to Adam Gopnik's talk. Enjoy.

Ora, Lege, Obedi

It seems more and more people are wearing slogans on their T-shirts these days – often quite long ones, intended no doubt as some kind of self-projecting credo. Being a hopeless logophile, the kind who will happily read a cereal packet, I can't help but want to read these T-shirt slogans as they pass – which, if the words happen to run across a young lady's poitrine, can look a little creepy. And, I might add, the effort is seldom worthwhile.
Yesterday, however, I saw a young woman with a succinct and decidedly different motto on her T-shirt: 'Ora, Lege, Obedi' (pray, read, obey). Well, I thought, that makes a welcome change from 'Just Do It' (a slogan that originated with last words of double murderer Gary Gillmore to his executioners). But where does 'Ora, Lege, Obedi' come from? It is, I discovered, the motto of Whitelands College, which is part of the University of Roehampton. Founded in 1841 as a teacher training college aiming 'to produce a superior class of parochial schoolmistresses', it later attracted the attention of John Ruskin and his chums Morris and Burne-Jones, who beautified the college chapel. Ruskin himself (talking of creepy) inaugurated an annual May Day ceremony, in which the young ladies should elect 'the likeablest and lovablest' of their number to be their May Queen. Ruskin loved that sort of thing...
  I'm sure much has changed at Whitelands since those days, but it seems its students are still happy to sport the college motto on their T-shirts, in bold defiance of the prevailing zeitgeist.

Newark

Sorry for the hiatus: it was an exceptionally busy week. Happily, however, most of the busyness revolved around family and pleasure.
  Yesterday I was strolling around Newark-on-Trent with my Derbyshire cousin. Newark is one of those quiet, understated, red-brick Mercian towns that always feel like some kind of spiritual home to me, and always persuade me that England is a sounder, saner, friendlier and altogether nicer country than it might seem to those of us who live down South. Like many such towns, it also has some excellent architecture, both domestic and public, a discernible ancient street plan, and, as its focal point, a fine marketplace and a splendid church. There is also, in Newark's case, the battered ruin of a magnificent castle, looking out over the wide river Trent to parkland and meadows beyond.
  The church, St Mary Magdalene, is one of England's great parish churches. Although it was much restored in Victorian times, it is still essentially and authentically an ancient church, a happy mix of Early English (crossing and West tower) and Perpendicular, with a wide, lofty interior, lit by huge 15th-century windows. Luckily we found it open – but most of the nave and South aisle, and all of the North aisle, crossing, transepts and chancel were roped off and could only be admired from a distance and along very limited sight lines. This was, of course, a disappointment, though in these  Covid-crazed times it is quite something to find a church open at all. Chatting to a verger on the way out, I got the impression, not for the first time, that the doughty volunteers doing their best to open their beloved churches are not at all happy with the Church of England hierarchy's extraordinary eagerness to close them down and keep them closed long after the reopening of other places where people gather together, for secular rather than sacred purposes. Let's hope there is enough vitality left in the body of its worshippers to prevent the C of E from accomplishing its own demise just yet.

'Having renewed his conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home...'

George Stubbs, the greatest painter of horses who ever lived, was born on this day in 1724. Largely self-trained, he learnt the anatomy of the horse the hard way – by long, painstaking dissection of dead horses, in conditions that most men would have found wholly unbearable. But he persevered, published his massive Anatomy of the Horse, and soon found a ready market for horse paintings among an English aristocracy well known for feeling more warmly about horseflesh than humans.
  Stubbs's plunge into equine anatomy followed a visit to Italy, which (he later told Ozias Humphry) he undertook 'to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art, whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed his conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home'. The greatest of his horse paintings is the stupendous Whistlejacket in the National Gallery, which has to be seen at full scale. But Stubbs was not only a horse painter, and Tate Britain has a lovely pair of pastoral landscapes, Haymakers and Reapers, on display, adorned with a gloriously obtuse caption, about which I've written before. Perhaps this has now been updated to lament the absence of any black haymakers or reapers and speculate about the very probably slave-owning squire...

And then...

Having written those words, I walked down to the high street to shop, and, as I was strolling along by the side of the former town hall, down flew a nondescript brown butterfly, which settled on a bush and folded its wings – and, as I drew nearer, I realised that there was nothing nondescript about this one: my friends, it was a Brown Hairstreak! 'Finding an adult Brown Hairstreak is one of the most difficult tasks for a butterfly enthusiast,' writes Ken Wilmott in Butterflies of Surrey Revisited – and he's not wrong. This one was only the third I've seen in my adult life – and in the unlikeliest of locations, far from any blackthorn bushes. It was a bright and vigorous female, and of course she flew off before I could photograph her – but she left me grinning like an idiot for the next hour and more.

Butterflying

The image above is a painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema ('Alma-Tad of the Royal Acad' – about whom I've written before). Titled Ninety Four Degrees in the Shade, it shows a young Herbert Thompson – later to become a distinguished Egyptologist – out butterflying on a hot summer day in the 1870s: note the topee-like sun hat, the long-handled net and the butterfly book, optimistically open at (I think) the Camberwell Beauty. Those were the days, long gone, when people knew how to dress for a country jaunt.
  This has been a memorable and unusually intense butterfly season for me, much of it having taken place during 'lockdown', and many of its best moments being gifted me in unfamiliar and unexpected places. In the course of it, my butterfly obsession reached such a pitch that I decided I really must write a book about it all – especially as I'd suddenly (while butterfly watching on a favourite patch of downland) seen an 'angle' that would make it different from all the other butterfly books of recent years. It will be short and no doubt, like my previous effort, 'odd'. If nothing else, writing it will ease me through the butterflyless months ahead.
  And now I guess I'd better get on and write it – though there are surely a few more butterfly days left. The Chalkhill Blues are still flying (and in places where I've never seen them before), and the Adonis... And, who knows, a Brown Hairstreak?