Category Archives: books

amusements, books, pleasures

Hamlet had a Cat …

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For the cat lovers amongst you …

Hamlet’s Cat’s Soliloquy

To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:
Whether ’tis better for a cat to suffer
The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather
That Nature rains on those who roam abroad,
Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,
And so by dozing melt the solid hours
That clog the clock’s bright gears with sullen time
And stall the dinner bell. To sit, to stare
Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state
A wish to venture forth without delay,
Then when the portal’s opened up, to stand
As if transfixed by doubt. To prowl; to sleep;
To choose not knowing when we may once more
Our readmittance gain: aye, there’s the hairball;
For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob.
Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,
And going out and coming in were made
As simple as the breaking of a bowl,
What cat would bear the household’s petty plagues,
The cook’s well-practiced kicks, the butler’s broom,
The infant’s careless pokes, the tickled ears,
The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks
That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will,
He might his exodus or entrance make
With a mere mitten? Who would spaniels fear,
Or strays trespassing from a neighbor’s yard,
But that the dread of our unheeded cries
And scratches at a barricaded door
No claw can open up, dispels our nerve
And makes us rather bear our humans’ faults
Than run away to unguessed miseries?
Thus caution doth make house cats of us all;
And thus the bristling hair of resolution
Is softened up with the pale brush of thought,
And since our choices hinge on weighty things,
We pause upon the threshold of decision.

amusements, books, history, pleasures, quotes, topographical

Quotes of the Week

A small selection of this week’s strange and interesting findings …

Hogwash entered the room, and, having entered, decided, upon entry, having viewed all there was, and some of what was not, to be seen, to remove himself, once more, from the room by the same route through which he had, so recently, entered.
[Craig Brown, The Marsh-Marlowe Letters, parodying Anthony Powell]

He possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatever at the shortest possible notice: politics; sport; books; finance; science; art; fashion – as he himself said, ‘War, Famine, Pestilence or Death on a Pale Horse.’ All were equal when it came to Bagshaw’s typewriter. He could take on anything, and – to be fair – what he produced, even off the cuff, was no worse than was to be read most of the time. You never wondered how on earth the stuff had ever managed to be printed.
[Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room]

I just love Tudor/Restoration “irregular” spelling …

[I]n 1558-59 St Mary Woolnoth paid ‘one Robert Bennett syngyngeman for servynge in the churche at dyvers tymes from the begynnynge of August tyll Michaelmas’.
[John Harley, The World of William Byrd: Musicians, Merchants and Magnates]

London is a patchwork of the fabulous and the shit.
[Antonia at Whoopee]

Too right!

Finally something bringing us right up to date …

This train reduces CO2 emissions
[Slogan on a Southern Trains emu at Clapham, 19/05/2011]

I’m not sure how this is achieved: presumably the train selectively sucks CO2 from the atmosphere. One suspects they mean “this train causes the emission of less CO2 than other trains/modes of transport. But that’s not what it says, guys!

books, photography, topographical

Rye

Rye, in East Sussex, is another of my favourite places because of its history, its friendliness, its proximity to the sea and to Romney Marsh and of course because of its “olde worlde” charm and picturesqueness.

St Anthony's, Rye
St Anthony’s, Rye, © Copyright by Keith Marshall, 2010.
Following on from my post of a couple of days ago about Fairfield church, I came upon this poem by Patric Dickinson (the poet, 1914-1994, not to be confused with my friend Patric Dickinson who is currently Clarenceux King of Arms and still very much alive).

Rye

It seems solid enough
As you come through the Landgate
And the streets climb up to the church
That, like a stranded ark,
     Straddles the hilltop.

But Time is different here.
The streets are full of beggars
You cannot see, who speak
The tongues of centuries
     To the deaf tourists.

‘We have always been perverse
And unprofessional beggars,
For we want to give, not take,
To offer you this town’s
     Particular nature.

‘It is not what you see
As you trip on the cobbles
And say the houses are quaint,
Nor was it ever like that,
     It is our presence.

‘The town keeps whispering
Its history – fishermen, merchants –
Lifetimes that have been built
From unimportant scraps
     To construct a clement

‘Enclave and sanctuary.
Once you have understood this,
You will feel Rye within,
And be disposed to come back,
     If you ever leave it.’

books, history, personal, topographical

Fairfield

Wanting something to read in bed the other evening, and not wanting anything heavy, I chose at random from the pile of books by the bed. My hand alighted on Betjeman’s England, an anthology by Stephen Games of extracts from the scripts of Sir John Betjeman’s TV films about England.

Now I love the Romney Marsh and Dungeness in Kent, and the nearby small town of Rye. So imagine my enjoyment when the book fell open, quite at random, at the following piece about Fairfield Church in the heart of the Romney Marsh.

KENT

FAIRFIELD CHURCH, ROMNEY MARSH
From the Shell series Discovering Britain with John Betjeman
Random Film Productions Ltd
ITV, Spring 1956 (exact date unknown)
Director: Peter Woosnam-Mills

Romney Marsh, on the Sussex border of Kent and close to the sea. Romney Marsh, where the roads wind like streams through pasture and the sky is always three-quarters of the landscape. The sounds I associate with Romney Marsh are the bleating of innumerable sheep and the whistle of the sea wind in old willow trees. The sea has given a colour to this district: it has spotted with silver the oak posts and rails; it gives the grass and the rushes a grey salty look and turns the red bricks and tiles of Fairfield Church a saffron yellow.

For a moment, when you see Fairfield Church there on the skyline, you think it must be a farm or a barn. There’s no road to it – only a footbridge and a path. And in the church, you feel you’re on an island in the marsh.

Inside, it’s like walking underneath an upturned ship. (Those great beams are made of Kentish oak.) The communion rails go round three sides of the altar as they used to in many churches two hundred years ago; and since in those days, just as much as now, people were literate, they hired a local inn-sign painter to paint, in yellowish-gold letters on a black background, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments.

The church is still kept up and used, though it’s miles from anywhere, and that’s what gives it atmosphere.

Another thing that endears Fairfield Church to me is that it’s been spared electric light and the surgical basins in the roof that go with it. How pleasant those Victorian oil lamps are and how well they fit in with the scene.

Let’s go into one of the high, white box pews. And sitting here in the quiet waste of marsh, islanded by grass in water, let’s think ourselves back two hundred years. The place can’t have looked very different. The parson read the service from that lower desk where the candle is, he climbed to the pulpit to preach, and if you found yourself not attending to the sermon, there was always a text to remind you of where you were and of the reverence due to this loved and lonely house of God.

Fairfield Church: it’s about ten miles from Tenterden in Kent and therefore sixty-three miles south-east of London.

I’ve been to Fairfield a number of times and it is even now just as fascinating and delightful as Betjeman paints it, despite several heavy restorations in the last 200 years. Fairfield really is in the middle of nowhere, and probably always was as there was never anything much by way of village there. There is still no electricity but the church is used, at least sporadically.

For me Fairfield has a further attraction. It is dedicated to my patron saint, Thomas Beckett (Thomas of Canterbury), ca. 1118 to 29 December 1170; murdered at the behest of Henry II and canonised by Pope Alexander III in 1173.

The church, which is tiny, is on a slight rise in the middle of a rather wet sheep field, and when you go into the church you have to remember to shut the door behind you so the sheep don’t follow you. I have been there and found several sheep sheltering in the porch!

Yes, it is one of those idyllic and idiosyncratic English places!

There’s more on the architectural structure of Fairfield church here.

Stephen Games (Ed.), Betjeman’s England (John Murray, London, 2009)

amusements, books

Pure Silliness

My brain has gone on strike. I cannot get it into the right gear to write anything even remotely resembling thoughts. See it can’t even write proper English!

So instead I decided I’d share with you a really very stupid, silly, not to say crap, piece of dogrel verse I penned a couple of years ago, when work was especially horrid.

Sisyphus Rolls His Jelly
 
The mountains of treacle
Grow up to the skies;
The mouldings of jelly
Grow big in pigsties;
But my toothpicks, my toothpicks
Stay tiny and slight,
No wonder my job
It is stressful and shite.

See I told you it was a pile of old tripe.

Now I’d better let my brain have a a lie down.

amusements, books, current affairs, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

A mixed bag of quotes this week …

When the British government set up the loss-making groundnut scheme in Africa in 1947, a law was passed which contained a paragraph that read: ‘In the Nuts (unground) (other than ground-nuts) Order, the expression nuts shall have reference to such nuts, other than ground-nuts, as would but for this amending Order not qualify as nuts (unground) (other than ground-nuts) by reason of their being nuts (unground).’
[Nigel Cawthorne; The Strange Laws of Old England]

We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion … This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith. In this sense, there is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple. The doctrine is compassion. Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need. So long as we practice these in our daily lives, then no matter if we are learned or unlearned, whether we believe in Buddha or God, or follow some other religion or none at all, as long as we have compassion for others and conduct ourselves with restraint out of a sense of responsibility, there is no doubt we will be happy.
[Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama]

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
[Voltaire]

‘A long time ago.’
‘I didn’t have white hair in those days,’ said Granny. ‘Everything was a different colour in those days.’
‘That’s true.’
‘It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.’
‘The sunsets were redder.’
‘There were more old people. The world was full of them,’ said the wizard.
‘Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really.’
[Terry Pratchett; Equal Rites]

[S]he was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.
[Terry Pratchett; Equal Rites]

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
[WC Fields]

I screwed in the first one. I realised how hot it really was that day. I screwed in the second one. Now I was sweltering, and my wrist ached like I’d manually pleasured a rugby team.
[Antonia at http://yetanotherbloomingblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-darlings.html]

beliefs, books, current affairs, history, people, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

Another good selection this week as I’ve been catching up on all sorts of bits of reading.

Tax is imposed by parliament, people and corporations do not pay it voluntarily. The state coerces as much money as possible in the form of tribute to pay for the services and goods the state feels that it requires.
[brianist in a comment at http://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/]

The [fifth] duke [of Portland (1800-1879)], a notable eccentric landlord, gave each of his workmen a donkey and an umbrella, so they could travel to work in all weathers. He insisted that they should not salute or show him the slightest deference, and had a roller-skating rink especially constructed for their recreation.
[Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia; Pimlico Books (2001)]

Divorced, unemployed, and pissed
I aimed low in life – and missed.
[Prof. Ray Lees quoted in Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia]

Then we got softer clay and both of us turned out some quite nice little bowls and pots. It’s fearfully exciting when you do get it centred and the stuff begins to come up between your fingers. V[anessa Bell] never would make her penises long enough, which I thought very odd. Don’t you?
[Roger Fry to Duncan Grant quoted in Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia]

My dear, could you advance me a quid? There’s the most beautiful Gl passed out stone cold and naked as a duck in my kitchen.
[Nina Hamnett quoted in Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia. The image on the right is a torso of Nina Hamnett by sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska now in the Tate Gallery; Modigliani is supposed to have said (and Nina Hamnett oft repeated) that she had “the best tits in Europe”.]

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
[Will Rogers]

Relax. There are no gods and you are not going to burn in hell.
[Atheist in America at www.flamewarrior.com]

Each age finds in its favourite crimes images of what it would most love/hate to do. Our own generation of overworked, guilty, child-dominated couples makes of child-abduction the ultimate horror, perhaps because with a dark part of themselves they wish their children dead. The favourite Edwardian murder was undoubtedly centred upon adultery in the suburbs.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

If any demonstration was needed that the battles of Ypres, Mons, Verdun, the Somme had been lunatic, it was provided in summer 1917 at Passchendaele, when Sir Douglas Haig launched an attack against the Messines Ridge south of Ypres. It was a repeat performance of the other acts of mass-slaughter: 240,000 British casualties, 70,000 dead, with German losses around 200,000. By a second attack, in November 1917, on Cambrai, Haig took the Germans by surprise and gained about four miles of mud. Ten days later the German counter-attack regained all their lost ground. If ever there was an object lesson in the folly of war, the sheer pointlessness, here it was shown in all its bloodiness.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

books, memes, personal

Silly Book Meme

2 Comments

OK, just for fun … this is what you do …

  1. Grab the book closest to you right now. No, don’t choose, pick up the closest book.
  2. Open it at page 56 and choose the fifth sentence.
  3. Write the sentence in comments below and don’t forget to tell us what the book is.
  4. Then copy these rules to your blog or Facebook status.
books, current affairs, history, science

And the Managers are Still in Charge of the Loony Bin …

This is a long quote and deserves a post all of it’s own.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory [1945], had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?

The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1911 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.

Powell was a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water. By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.

[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Well, no change there then!

As so often in his two books, The Victorians and After the Victorians, AN Wilson gets his rapier right to the heart of the matter. Although both books are chunky paperbacks (both weigh in at some 500 pages) they are well worth reading – and eminently readable. AN Wilson gives a rather more perceptive, and admittedly slightly jaundiced, view of the history of Britain between the 1830s and 1950s than one finds in the standard texts. He delves under the political and economic covers, especially around the underlying reasons for both world wars and (at least for me) puts a completely new spin on modern British history.

amusements, books, history, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, here’s this week’s selection of oddities encounter in the last few days …

‘Look at the bird.’ It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.
‘Must be an old nest they’re repairing,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Can’t have got that advanced this early in the season.’
‘Looks like some kind of old box to me,’ said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. ‘Is it an old … clock?’ he added.
‘Look at what the bird is nibbling,’ suggested Lu-Tze.
‘Well, it looks like … a crude gearwheel? But why —’
‘Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo.’
[Terry Pratchett; Thief of Time]

Hindsight, the historians’ parlour-game, can lead from false premise to false conclusion. Because we see the fateful consequences of our forebears’ actions, we can wrongly suppose that, had they done differently, things would have been better.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

The clergy were seldom rich, but they were treated as if they were gentlemen: very often they were. Nearly all of them had degrees. High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, they were disseminated throughout the land. If they were even half good at their jobs, they and their wives and families mixed with everyone in their parish. They were extraordinary agents of social communication. It meant that almost everyone in England was within five miles of a man who could read ancient Greek.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic rails.
[Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room]

In the highbrow world you “get on”, if you “get on” at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.
[George Orwell]

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
[Akira Kurosawa]