Happy Christmas for some

The day started a bit complicated, because something had gone wrong with the heating. It turned out  in the end that something had gone wrong with the electricity supply to the bothy, presumably due to high winds, but once that circuit was isolated, the rest of the system condescended to function. While we were in the cold kitchen debating where the problem might lie, a frantic bumping from the cupboard revealed the presence of a mouse caught in a mousetrap we had pretty much forgotten was there. Soft-heartedly, I transferred it to a mug and took it outside intending to release it a long way from the house. However, I was barely over the threshold when it gave an almighty spring and catapulted itself out of the mug – alas, almost literally, into the waiting jaws of Colman the Rough Cat, who was hanging about hopefully and proceeded to enjoy an unexpected Christmas treat. There’s some people you just can’t help. I suppose I love Colman the Rough Cat a bit more than I do meeces, so all’s well that ends well.

A short(ish) intermission

As so often at the end of the year, I have ended up neglecting the blog - in fact I have only just realised I've been off line for a month, for which, apologies. As usual, there is the general melt-down of the end of term, with many essays to mark, there is also the business of the Christmas book, which is quite time-consuming, there is Christmas more generally, but this year, there was also a party. The Professor announced some time ago that since we were approaching having been married for 25 years, we ought to have a party. A rather small one, since 20^th December (which was also the last day of term, and the Friday before Christmas) is a pretty hellish date on which to have a party. What we in fact did was to bunk down to Edinburgh as soon as my last class of the year was over at 1 o’clock, to meet the Tropical Godparents, and the Professor’s cousins. One of the cousins is a Master of Wine, and thanks to her good offices, we had a private room in the Malt Whisky Society’s premises in Leith – there were sounds of obscure revelling offstage, but we had a little panelled room to the six of us, where we could talk comfortably. Very nice it was too. At some point after the idea first came to birth, I counted up on my fingers, and realised that it was in fact the 24^th anniversary. The Professor meanwhile did the same, and both of us decided not to mention it till what with one thing and another, we realised that the other, in fact, knew, so that was all right. As a trophy of the occasion I organised for my self a very grand pair of earrings. I managed to extract from Ebay for no very large sum two oval cornelian intaglios, pierced end to end (middle eastern, with some age on them if not precisely antique), which gave me the idea. Meanwhile, I had a pair of quite nice and lustrous oval cultured pearls, which had hung on slender gold chains, one of which broke in the middle, and I had a few Roman gold beads I’d bought from an antiquities dealer. The intervention of a reasonably competent making jeweller strung together a small gold bead, an intaglio and a pendent pearl to make a pair of wonderfully archaic looking and rather grand earrings for high days and holidays. We had a lovely time in Edinburgh, and came back on the early train on Sunday. There was quite a lot of scurrying about on Monday, including a deathdealing episode where I lost track of the cloth bag in which was my wallet, among other bits and bobs, and, after running round Turriff in the rain for forty minutes, found it had been handed in at the police station. We live among honest folk.  The weather has turned disgusting, and the wind is screaming about us. Dr Biswell and Mr Wil communicated, saying they had bought a case of wine and battened down the hatches. We are, I think, adequately supplied, and similarly, we have a definite ambition not to go anywhere at all. Happy Christmas, everybody.

An addition to a very unsavoury pantheon

My mother, in the kindness of her heart, has sent another object of worship for Miss Dog. The current collection is most peculiar - the design of dog toys being, clearly, one of the areas where surrealism remains rife. There is the Sea Slug. She ripped this apart a month or so back; the Professor has repaired it, having replaced the lost kapok with strips of fabric cut for rag rug making purposes (so the next time the holothurian comes to bits, it will spill horrid multi-coloured intestines). There is a vulture called Gloria. There is the Right Wing Politician (a rag doll of Senator John McCain, which allows of various silly statements along the lines of 'oh look, there's a right wing politician lurking in the long  grass').  Now, there is a bright blue mule with a silly expression and, rather worryingly, cloven hooves. Miss Dog thinks she is wonderful. I have called her Mavis - for that 'Mavis, the Girl in Blue' is a particularly egregious camp-ism for a member of the police force. It seems to suit her.

Fettled

The good Tony is putting up the wardrobe we acquired from the Professor’s aunt, the one now nesting in a home for the somewhat confused. It’s a much better item of furniture than the one it replaces, with a good deal more infrastructure, and Tony seems to be really enjoying putting it together (a process not yet complete). There was a lot of  ‘that’s neat. It’s nice to see something properly made’, etc. Rational craftsmanship gives him genuine pleasure, which I find endearing. Meanwhile, before dismantling the old wardrobe, a somewhat unsatisfactory object bought from the antique dealer we christened Mrs Villain, I can’t think why, we had to empty it, and it was logical to chuck out items of no further use. Some garments were declared legally dead, or rag rug material, or suitable for the charity shop. But I have to admit that throwing out some of the shoes I will never wear again cost a pang or two. The shoes I wore when I was stepping out in my early twenties, are the ones I have just binned. I looked after them; they were re-heeled and generally kept nice, and are still in good nick. But not new, so nobody else would want them, and with my collapsing big toe joints, I couldn’t conceivably wear them. Time to be sensible. But, though the Marilyn Monroe vertiginous slingbacks and the red lace-up boots from Anello & Davide didn’t quite merit a tear as they went in the rubbish sack, there was a certain mistiness.

Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi

Yesterday I had, I think, the most surprising seminar of my teaching career. I teach a second-year medieval history course, and I take a seminar group last thing on Friday. They tend to be a bit lacklustre, tired, and/or thinking of the weekend, so it tends to be lacking in excitement. However, this particular group of miscellaneous nineteen-year-olds is additionally ornamented by a middle-aged black man. From an earlier chat when he stopped to ask me a question after a lecture, I knew that he’s from a small up-country village in the Congo. I haven’t been rude enough to enquire what freak of fate has brought him to Aberdeen in middle life: we do have a lot of African students, though they don’t generally come our way in history – both because they tended to be practically oriented in their studies, and also because they feel at a disadvantage in Eurocentric history courses. However, a recent curriculum overhaul now insists that students take at least one course per year outside their chosen discipline so we may find ourselves seeing more of them. This particular chap is charming but quite diffident, and has been very silent in class, though I noticed last week he was gaining confidence. In last Friday’s class, we were looking at the monsters and marvellous creatures on the Hereford mappa mundi, aided by a preliminary slideshow about unnatural history in the middle ages. I stuck up a slide of a mermaid with a comb and a glass in her hand, and asked the group what medieval people believed about mermaids. There was the usual thunderous silence (students’ almost total lack of general knowledge is a melancholy reality – apart from the Harry Potter fans, who can at least do basilisks and mandrakes, none of them ever recognise anything). Then my African student piped up, and said, ‘fishermen catch them, you know, and we buy them in the market’. He then proceeded to unfold his tale: apparently, if you catch a mermaid, you cut the tail off and throw her back, because she can grow another tail .The tail is preserved by salting, and what you do is add a small piece to whatever’s in your pot and because mermaids are powerfully magic, you will become irresistably eloquent, or have power over your enemies, or what you will. ‘So you don’t buy fillet of mermaid?’ I said, ‘just a bit for magical purposes?’ ‘That is correct’, he said gravely.  The rest of the students continued to sit mumchance, but the quality of the silence had changed from mere complete absence of thought to mute flabbergastedness.  Things went back to normal for a bit till we got to another of my slides – I was pursuing the idea that a number of  descriptions of monsters sound like traveller’s tales and trying to attract their attention to the difficulty of formulating an accurate description of something utterly unfamiliar. I’d given them Ctesias’s description of a satyr, a man covered in hair and dwelling in Africa, and followed it up with a picture of a chimpanzee with a quizzical expression looking particularly human. My African student piped up again, with a truly wonderful story. He told us that there was a bit of his local jungle where one didn’t hunt because kings were buried there. A rash and unprincipled individual  went there with his gun, and shot a monkey. As he went to pick up his catch, a chimpanzee emerged from the bush, carrying a gun, and addressed him severely. ‘That’s no monkey’, he said, ‘that’s a human being’. He insisted that the man nick himself, and the chimp did the same, so that they could compare their blood to that of the dead monkey. ‘You see’, he said, ‘that is human blood’. He put his hand on the dead monkey’s chest, and when he lifted it, the bullet was lying on the surface, and the monkey was breathing again. He told the man that his punishment was to be lost in the forest for three days. My student, who was about twenty-five at the time, was part of the search party who went looking for the missing hunter. When he turned up three days later, he said the searchers had passed him repeatedly but couldn’t see him, and conversely, he hadn’t been able to attract their attention. By this time, the rest of the students were looking sort of stunned. ‘Which goes to show it can be very difficult to tell the difference between humans and animals’, I said, trying to wrest the class back on course. We finished my slides, returned decorously to the Hereford map, and looked for Yales and Blemmyes and Bonacons till the hour was over. But it’s a terrific story, and I can’t help wondering what the other students made of it.

 

Saints who are also Dogs

This blog has been prompted by doing some work on Byzantine Jerusalem. In about 510 AD, a bloke called Theodosius was travelling about in the Holy Land. He says, 'in the province of Asia there is the city of Ephesus,  which contains the Seven Sleepers, and their puppy Hyrcanus at their feet'. The story of the Seven Sleepers is known to me, a sort of Christian Rip van Winkle narrative.  A group of Christian youths hid inside a cave outside Ephesus around 250 AD, to escape emperor Decius's persecution of the Christians. They woke up again 180 years later during the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius II, and were seen by a variety of people before dying and going, doubtless, to heaven. The whole narrative caused me to reflect on dog saints. To be sure, the puppy Hyrcanus is not officially designated a saint, but all the same, he might be quite a good patron saint for Ellie, who has not, as yet, been known to sleep for 180 years, but most assuredly likes her bed. I rather like him being called Hyrcanus - implying large and fierce - which in fact suggests that he was little and squashy. Are there other Dog Saints? In the apocryphal Old Testament, we have Tobit's Dog, who perhaps doesn't do anything beyond being a dog, but might be thought of as a role model. In the Greek Orthodox church, there is a strong tradition that St Christopher - he who carried the Christ Child across a raging river - was not merely a giant (as western tradition allows) but a Cynocephalus, a dog headed monster. Additionally, there's a number of remarkable medieval icons of a dog headed St Christopher to prove it. In the west, the middle ages produces the story of the Holy Greyhound ( I believe the most legitimate version is known as St Guinivere, but I could be wrong). A purely folkloric narrative of the loyal dog who tries to protect a child and is misunderstood. Ellie would, I am sure. tell me that she knew all about being misunderstood, but to be perfectly frank, achieving saintly status by sleeping for 180 years is slightly more within her grasp than being bold and pro-active, so perhaps we should dedicate Ellie to St Hyrcanus.

Beautiful Food

It has been Day of Decorative Dinner. First of all, we picked the small, sour apples off the various trees around the place, and since they don’t cut it as eating apples, and the Professor’s on a diet, made apple jelly, adding thereunto crimson crab-apples. The result glows in its jars like giant cornelians. The Two Nice Girls produced a pumpkin, or squash, this week which is a subtle greyish-turquoise on the outside, and bright orange within, from which I have made a orange soup (not without difficulty, since in its raw state, it’s as hard as wood). Also on today’s hit list was a Romesco cauliflower, that is, one of those beautiful bright green Art Deco ones, in which the florets rise into little spikes. This is in the process of becoming a cauliflower gratin. I hadn’t planned it that way, but it’s added an extra dimension to my  operations to be dealing with one gloriously coloured item after another.

Campi Phlegraei

We left the Vinegar Works this evening under the most extraordinary skies. The Professor, who has had to bone up on the science of all this of late, said knowledgeably that it was to do with dust particles. The effect was somewhere between Walt Disney and an eighteenth-century aquatint of the eruption of Vesuvius, a band of clear eau-de-nil on the horizon, three quarters of the sky filled with rolls of blazing pinkish-orange clouds, and clear bright blue above. It changed, naturally, in the hour and a half it took us to get home, but there was another fine moment when the jagged black saw of Bennachie was silhouetted against an incandescent orange sky, with some puffs and drifts of opaque black cloud which made it look like a live volcano. Not that one wants a live volcano, exactly, but it was all very much what most eighteenth century aesthetes seem to have meant about the Sublime, including being magnificent without being personally inconvenient.

Spit and Polish

We have found a whole new match between us and what Tony likes to do. An ex-army man either loves to polish or cannot be made to do so, and he turns out to be the first sort. We have inherited Peter’s good aunt’s dining furniture, all well made, good in itself, and just a bit down on its luck. Some of the chairs have been catching the sun for decades and the mahogany has bleached: the whole thing seems to appeal both to Tony’s liking for things shined-up, and his considerable talent for bodging – with the aid of scratch-restoring wax,  damp-ring-removers and so forth (items of the higher brown-furniture-care which are mysteriously available in the Banff ironmongers, leaving us genuinely puzzled by who buys the stuff), he is polishing, restoring, darkening down the blonded bits, and generally hauling them back to a state of  looking quietly good, and when he has finished with the wood, he will reupholster the seats. We have some grey linen brocade put by for the purpose. This is all very nice for us, of course, but it’s an added bonus that it evidently gives him tremendous satisfaction.

Meanwhile, I have finally got rid of my cold. Godmama has given me hempadu to take, which is Malaysia’s answer to this sort of thing, another friend has given me calcium and magnesium, and the Professor is on at me to take echinacea. If I keep on with all of them, soon I will be able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, no doubt.

Mysterious Largesse

We got home from work the other day to find that the local council had left a Food Waste Bin on our doorstep. This was ever so slightly mysterious, since, in the thirteen years we have lived here, the council has never made the slightest attempt to uplift anything from the house, let alone food waste. Everything gets taken down to the recycling centre, by us. Still, we are reasonably grateful for a new compost bucket – it hasn’t needed the Cooncil to teach us about making good use of organic material, we’ve been making compost for years. We are generating slightly more food waste at the moment than usual, as it happens, because the Two Nice Girls who grow and deliver our weekly box of organic veg love rather more roots than we do. We have introduced the sheep to the pleasures of the giant oriental radish: there is a limit to the amount of pickle any household can absorb, and one or two huge flavourless cabbages have also gone sheepwards. I don’t know. I’ve been trying at intervals for years, but I’ve never evolved a way of making red cabbage really attractive. I also have a limited tolerance for celeriac (you can make celeri-remoulade, then you can make it again, and after that, well, you’re a bit stuck, really) and I can’t see the point of kohl-rabi. Considering how much the Two Nice Girls charge, it still seems a pretty good deal. It was down to the Two Nice Girls, incidentally, that I made one of the strangest soups of my adult life.  It was a beetroot soup, which is one of the nicer things to do with beetroot (along the lines of potage Crécy, only redder). I thought it might add a certain something if I dropped in a cinnamon stick. It did. The effect might have been less unusual if I’d subsequently remembered to take the cinnamon stick out before I liquidised the damn thing.  Cinnamon is very good for you, which is just as well, really.

And so it goes on

I continue to labour beneath an extraordinarily sticky and prolonged virus. There really hasn't been a lot of spare energy for anything, though I hope it's breaking up at last. Meanwhile, life proceeds. Monday began with a phone call at ten to seven; a rough Aberdonian voice demanding. 'Faur are ye?' ('faur', being in local dialect, 'where'). I pulled myself together and established that The Aberdeen Shore Porters Association (est. 1497) had acquired thae modron Satnav which had duly taken them to the grain store on the Fraserburgh road and left them there. Satnavs aren’t much use for a postal area, comprising six places, of a square mile or more. Some minutes later, they turned up, overshot the drive (having I suppose lost the habit of navigating by applied intelligence) and ended up coming up to the back of the house, somewhat to their annoyance. I pointed out, reasonably patiently, that in order to get their mighty truck to the front door they would have to back the best part of 100 yards, as well as turning it through forty-five degrees, an enterprise perhaps best avoided in a vehicle that size. They conceded it was perhaps best to download from where they were, and did. The reason they were there was that they were bringing stuff from the Professor's good aunt in Edinburgh, an extremely nice woman who has sadly become a bit clouded in her intellectuals, like Miss Cat. She is now in a home for confused gentlewomen where she really seems as happy as she can be, because she is no longer anxious in the way  she was when living alone, and the staff are pleasant and helpful. Her daughters are moving into her flat, and were keen we should take some of the furnishings. I completely understand their point of view: on the one hand, not wanting stuff to go to waste and if possible staying in the family, on the other, wanting to get the decks clear enough that they could live in it in their own style.  We were keen too; the house (and even the garden) is full of stuff which we remember people by in one way or another, and there was one item surplus to the cousins’ rearrangement of the flat which was pretty much perfect as a remembrance: as most of readers will know, our dining table,an item to which the Professor is unreasonably attached because it belonged to his great-grandfather, is also a menace. Fine thing that it is, it’s a parlour table with legs in the middle and two wings, so if we have two guests they end up sitting down to find a table leg in their way, spill wine across the table, then there is mopping up and apologies. The Good Aunt’s table is a proper dining table with two legs, each on four feet. Great Grand-Papa’s table will become my worktable with the computer, printer, Miss Cat’s hot-spot and so forth, my current worktable, which is made of cedar and which I bought in the Dens Road in Dundee about 25 years ago, will get stashed in the attic till someone wants it, and so things move on. I like the idea of having the Good Aunt’s table and chairs.  We don’t use the dining room every day, so when we do, we can think, ‘this is the Good Aunt’s table’, and think kindly of her. And of course, the sacred great-grand-parental parlour table will remain with us, doing new duty.

And Then

The trouble was, the cold didn’t go away: after three weeks of fast and furious adventures round different bits of my skull and upper respiratory tract, the bloody thing is clinging on. Hence, among other things, neglecting the blog. Since last heard from, I have done quite a lot of teaching, But otherwise, the really terrific thing that happened is that our friends from Carolina turned up, along with the Man from Maryport who has not graced these portals in far too long (indeed, not since this blog's previous incarnation). We had a very splendid day out last Saturday:  up to the Spey, that beguiling river, a bit of a walk along its swift course, then lunch at the 19^th century woollen mill, which, apart from an unpretentious café offering soup, quiche, and tray bakes, has a fine complement of Steel Age machinery. One of the most attractive features of 19th century industrial complexes, apart from the heady scent of machine oil, is that you can pretty much see how they work after looking at them for a bit: the logic is apparent. Then it was over the hills and far away, via Dallas (the original Dallas) to Pluscardine Abbey. High moorland, heather, blue skies, birches, driving ten miles without seeing another car (equally, driving ten miles without much of a clue as to whether one was driving in the right direction due to total absence of signage…) . All in all, a temporary flashback to the Golden Age of Motoring as represented by Shell Guides. We did contrive to find Pluscardine in the end. The monks were in retreat, so  we had a look around, and visited the shop: if the brothers are otherwise occupied, as they were, you write down in a book what you’ve bought, and leave the money.  I can think of various farms here and there around Aberdeenshire which, similarly, leave out a pile of eggs in boxes, or whatever, a tariff, and a tupperware box. A small and elementary lesson in trust, and the point of being good. By the way, the Professor has mended the Twisby: re-stuffed its horrid stomach, and patched it. It is not a bit grateful.

It’s a Wonderful Day for an Auto da Fé

Last Friday, Dr Brennan the Artist and the junior half of the Huntly Two swooped by for the night (the older of the Huntly Two was otherwise engaged). We had a jolly evening, as usual, talking about art (Huntly 2² is interested in Sargent), and this and that, fuelled, in the case of Dr Brennan and myself, by not a little tasty Montepulciano. This may explain why, when he eventually went to bed, he failed to observe that a Twisby had crawled up the bedside lamp and was squinnying menacingly out of the top of the shade. Twisbies are of course entirely synthetic, so he was alerted to this fact by a horrid smell some time later. The result of all this is that the resident Twisby has a hemispherical hole in its saggy and regrettable stomach, also a neat round hole in its grey outer integument. We have tried to tell it that it is still better off than the Twisby which went to Kuala Lumpur with the Godparents, took to consulting black magicians, and was handed over to the secular arm. Or possibly the Muslim arm, it being Kuala Lumpur, but whichever it was it was pretty dashed vengeful. We are left in a slight quandary, with respect to our own hollowed-out Twisby. Do we re stuff, and repair it with fabric which doesn’t quite match, which will not improve its temper, or carry on the good work …? Or teach it to intone ‘we are the hollow men  …’, etcetera, to upset our guests? Meanwhile, I have possibly fallen victim to malign influences of a Twisbotic nature, because I have caught a cold. This may on the other hand have a perfectly natural explanation, the sheer shock to the immune system of meeting about 50 people after a shy and retiring summer in which I scarcely met anyone at all. Whichever, it seems to be passing over quite fast as colds go, all of which suggests that it was a really good idea to go on holiday last month.

Chugga chugga chugga

I was talking to someone this afternoon, about getting the new term launched. Since my last blog, there has been oceans of administration, menacing floods of emails headed 'colleagues are reminded' , and so forth, buckets of no fun and mostly depressing. Now term has properly started and one is actually teaching, it becomes possible to recall that this is often interesting and sometimes rewarding - students, as people, are fine. It's students presenting as x number of eight-digit numbers which can be a bit tricky But still, we have got there, and the metaphor which occurred to me was those antique self powered rail trolleys one saw in Buster Keaton films and the like.  Two chaps pushed a bar alternately, and eventually, the platform they were standing on set off along the track.Term is a bit like that. A devil of a job to get started, but once it is moving you just have to put your back into it.

Hello again

We are back from a week’s jolly in Norfolk with the quondam-tropical Godparents. This was on the whole a hoot. We took the car down, and it struck us, as it has struck us before, taking the A17 through the fen country to the immediate NW of the Wash, what a wildly sinister area it is: apart from the sullen acres of cabbages mitigated only by an occasional church spire, the rectories suggest axe-wielding vicars, the grim little mansion houses, squires who have fled, taken to drink, or become werewolves. At one point on the road there is a sign to a development of holiday homes, and we looked at one another: who, and for what, would choose to take holidays in this desolate territory? Another indication of its uncanninness. We passed a field in the region of Sleaford lit with cheerful yellow, which at first glance, made a nice change from cabbages. Er …Yes, definitely. Daffodils. This is the third week of September, for Pete’s sake. Then you cross a lovely swing bridge over the Nene with a little gazebo perched atop, and suddenly you are in Norfolk. No more spires, churches have squat, square, or sometimes round, towers, there are deep banks of trees, flint-and-brick houses, and it is all very attractive. We went, among other expeditions,  to Holkham, a palace built for some perverse reason out of yellow lavatory brick, to Norwich, where Godmama found a gratifying variety of bric à brac which comes more expensive in Edinburgh which he will sell there, and I got a haircut, to Houghton, where Sir Robert Walpole’s pictures have been temporarily returned from Russia to the rooms which were designed for them – always interesting –,  to King’s Lynn, which is pretty awful, and to a perfectly charming Shell Museum. A nice balance of adventure, exploration, some grand houses, some unexpected finds, and country walks. We returned via North Yorkshire, the Borders drove-road from Moffat, and Glenshee. Now we are up to our ears in administration, but at least we feel that we have had an interesting and fortifying time.

Nature again

We stopped off in Turriff on the way back from Aberdeen to do the shopping, and as we made our way back towards the car, I was most surprised to see a red squirrel. It appeared to be tackling a half-crushed Malteser (we were in the lane behind the school). I didn't recognise it at first, partly because I wasn't expecting to see one, and partly because its tail was much lighter than the rest of it which made it look very odd.  Still, red squirrels are nice, and urban red squirrels are an attractive prospect.

Nature Notes

There have been things I was delighted  to see in the last few days. One was flame-flower, aka tropaleum speciosum, the small, scarlet relative of the nasturtium which tends to enliven old Scottish yew hedges and such: I had some, but when dear Tony thoroughly dug over the bit of bed it was in I assumed he had done for it. But it's a Scottish gardening maxim that once you've got the stuff you've got it for good, and lo, it has reappeared. I can't at all work out how it's attached to the ground but it's flowering like anything. Something which, by contrast is flowering for the first and probably last time is torch ginger. This is a relative of the culinary ginger, and lurks in the big pots in the greenhouse. For some years it has produced large and not particularly relevant leaves, but this year, we have had an unusual amount of sun which has been rewarded with wonderfully exotic pyramids of pale yellow flowers. Something I was much less pleased to see this evening, however, was a visiting bat in my study. I hadn't known there were any here, and given the draconian nature of bat protection legislation, I was not at all pleased. Also of course I wanted this particular bat to find its way to the great outdoors, which it did in a while. Miss Kit thought it was fascinating but I couldn't work up much enthusiasm myself.

False Alarm

We thought for a while that we’d been rather clever. This is a great year for mushrooms: the woods, where Miss Dog is walked when we have time, are full of them. There are some highly suspicious shiny lipstick red ones, varnished looking yellow ones, brown ones of all shapes and sizes, and a whole range of whitish grey excrescences on old treetrunks. We were inclined to admire the display in general, but were also rather pleased to see a lot of little egg-yolk yellow chaps poking up through the moss. Chanterelles are very nice, so we filled our pockets and took them home. Alas, investigation via Google suggested that they might be the false chanterelle, not the edible kind, so we chucked them, on the better safe than sorry principle – the other day the Professor met a couple of Poles in the wood who were happily collecting all sorts of fungi, but really, I think you have to be brought up to it. By the way, it’s been a funny year for plant life more generally; rather moist with low light levels, which has benefited some things while disadvantaging others. My geraniums haven’t been very good at all and the roses have been terrible, but the begonias are twice their normal size. When they eventually die down I think they’ll be leaving corms the size of saucers. All the better for next year.

Adventure becomes mundane

Once in a while, the BBC’s bland little bulletins can stop you in your tracks: I was brought up short by a casual sentence in something today: ‘the melting sea ice has also opened up new shipping routes. Russia is now advertising the Northern Sea Route, which cuts the journey time from China to Europe by up to two weeks’. Centuries of Arctic exploration and discovery, the world of Barentz and Bering, Nansen and Amundsen, the long dream of finding the North-West Passage, a route over the top of Europe which suddenly it seems just to have materialised, not as an occasional venture of the insanely brave, but an advertised route to be undertaken by container ships.

Antique Solutions

I had a sad accident yesterday. I was wearing a favourite thing, a loose shirtlike linen overgarment in a particularly nice shade of dark turquoise – the sort of thing I love these days because it is a lovely colour and it has pockets and I no longer go anywhere without reading glasses. I put my hand into one of said pockets and came out with a damp, sorry mess of blackened paper tissue and the remains of a malfunctioning pen, which had, unfortunately, given its all all over the pocket. I rushed upstairs, soaked the garment in cold water, then stain remover, then washed it, then left it in more stain remover overnight. Then I suddenly remembered our Norwegian friends had left us with an archaic product they strongly recommended, a bar of oxgall soap, vix, made with the gall of an ox. Do not say ur, yuck, or eeew. Ox gall is a strangely useful substance, which I’ve had in the house before to help with making marbled paper, which it does. A day of being rubbed with oxgall soap and left to sit hasn’t removed the black blobs entirely, but they seem to be so reduced I have some real hopes that when the fabric is dry, the marks will not obtrude. Three cheers for old fashioned methods. Incidentally, I was also thinking kindly of the Norwegian houseguests today for a completely different reason – they left me a container of vegetable broth in the freezer, and I ended up deploying it today with a couple of lettuces and a lot of peas which were fresh but had, some of them, been picked a little late. A bit past being a special pea risotto or whatever, but they made a very nice soup, so thank you, both.

We Acquire An Aunt

The Professor came across a naïve painting the other day which took his fancy, and ended up buying it. It’s of a nice, Jane Austenish little lady circa 1810, attired in chaste, provincial finery ‒  a plain white dress with a fichu modestly filling in the neckline, wearing no jewellery, but possessed of a spangled white turban that one suspects was the secret joy of her heart. She is now in the drawing room, and looks as if she has always been there. Her face is very well painted, but the body is so slight in relation to the head that it has an air of caricature. She has an intelligent, noticing look, and she will do very nicely as The Ancestor’s maiden aunt. She doesn’t look, somehow, as if she married.

Phew

We thought our little Miss Kit was really taking a turn for the worse, and hauled her vet out to see her – she has been utterly miserable and run down for a few days, pulling bits out of her fur till she looked moth-eaten, with her skin twitching and shivering. His interim diagnosis was, to all our surprise, a flea. Miss Kit has never had fleas. I use a fine tooth comb on her regularly and there is not a sign, I protested. But, I am told, if a cat has never had fleas and one turns up, there can be a terrific allergic reaction. Anyway, Hamish said practically, start off by seeing if that’s it before getting into anything gloomier. He gave her an anti-inflammatory to deal with the itch on an immediate basis, and prescribed a back of the neck flea treatment. These I think are utterly no fun and irritate the skin, but once it dried, she was suddenly miles better, and is now scarfing down her food and generally cheerful again, enormously to our relief. Her large friend is not being entirely good at the moment - she has taken to plootering about in the mud on the edge of the pond and charging back in to distribute what seems unnatural quantities of mud about the house. Her feet are quite large, but there are only four of them, and somehow her mud-distributing capacity seems almost beyond the bounds of nature. She remains cheerful in herself. It was National Canine Naughtiness Day a while back, marked by a series of small crimes, most of which I now forget, but since then she has been really quite good. She is rather touchingly solicitous of Miss Kit's generally tottery state.

Not being entirely good

We went to a party on Sunday. It was a very large party. There was champagne by the bucket, pink pompoms, a white marquee, and many, many people in jolly summer clothes. It was off and on, a nice day. We made conversation (‘how beautifully blue the sky the glass is rising very high Continue fine I hope it may And yet it rained but yesterday Tomorrow it may pour again I hear the country wants some rain … ‘). Then there was the conversation about Not Being Able to Sell One’s House (putting it on at 150% of what it’s worth might have something to do with it, chum, one thought privately, while gratefully accepting another drink from an ambient colleen with an expensive bottle). Then … oh, you know. What a nice time we’re all having and doesn’t so and so look well. An hour and a half passed. There was no sign of anyone moving towards the long tables set out for lunch. Everyone, in the way of parties, was talking louder and louder (at least half of those present were older than us, and many  of them a little deaf). The Brownian motion of party circulation brought us together, and not too far away from the open door of the marquee. We looked at each other. Discreetly, we put our glasses down on a nearby table, and drifted out to look at the flowers. The Professor put his mobile to his ear, and drifted a bit further, with the air of one looking for a signal. Twenty yards, and we were out of the sightline of the marquee, round the corner of the house, and ungratefully shanking it up the drive. Very bad of us, really, but I’m sure we weren’t missed.

Not good news

Miss Kit is not very well – and has not been very well for some time as you all know. Having been away for a fortnight, we came back and saw her, as one does, with fresh eyes, and reckoned it was time she had a professional once-over. She’s got so scared by the vet’s after some bad experiences we got a vet to come and take a look at her here yesterday, to see what she was like in a normal state and not stressed out of her wits. This was, unfortunately, not reassuring. It’s possible that she has toxoplasmosis, about which something might possibly be done (though a long, long, course of antibiotics had no effect other than upsetting her). It’s also possible that she has fallen victim to what journalists are calling Robotic Cat Syndrome, which sounds like a highly hilarious YouTube lolcat post, and isn’t. It’s an utterly mysterious cat disease which popped up in north-east Scotland around the turn of the millennium: its victims are rural cats, mature to elderly, living between Inverness and Aberdeen, and its official description is ‘slowly progressive lymphohistiocytic meningoencephalomyelitis’. In other words, a slowly degenerative disease of the brain and nervous system. It’s highly unusual because by and large, diseases of cat’s brain and nervous system are rapidly degenerative, viz. about a fortnight from something apparently wrong to the sad phone call, and Miss Kit hasn’t been right in herself for a year; the problem with her spine and lower back seems now to be taking a more ominous form. She shows one of the most characteristic symptoms, which is carrying her tail rather stiffly straight out, which I put down to damage to her lower back, but also has the stiff, toddling walk, which is what gives the syndrome its popular (or unpopular) name, though not currently in an acute form, ears pricked forward anxiously, and an increased affectionateness of a reassurance-seeking kind. ‘Mild behavioural changes and the rigid extension of the tail were the most consistent early signs of the disease’, say the researchers. I have wondered for a while if she was going blind because of the way she bumps into twigs and things in the garden, but the vet thinks this is more probably a degree of mental confusion – i.e. she can see the twig or whatever it is, but can’t think what to do about it. The important thing is that it was only clinically described a couple of years ago, and nobody is anywhere near a cure since it's not clear what is causing it (it seems to be viral but that helps only up to a point). Basically we all live with it till it gets worse, and she keeps falling over or stops being able to swallow – there’s nothing wrong with her ability to eat at the moment, but it’s a feature of the late stages. The common ground between the various victims is that they have all been cats free to roam outside and hunt, so best guess is that this is something they have caught from rodents – though of course that simply shifts the mystery from NE Scottish cats, who are being well observed by concerned owners, to NE Scottish wild rodents, who aren’t.

Travels with Art Historians

Home at last, after a whole lot of adventures. Apart from the Professor, two Art Historians were implicated, our curator friend from Lancashire, and our  Belgrade correspondent, who has acquired a flat in Trieste. The first port of call was Würzburg, which I came to think of as Land of Cross Lions – the place seemed to be full of heraldic beasties with a lot on their minds and a sense of grievance. The best of all was on a tombstone by the great late-medieval carver Tilleman Riemenschneider, a lion apparently reduced by sheer boredom and frustration to gnawing the top of the shield it was carrying between its paws.  The main attraction which took us to Würzburg was the miraculous Tiepolo ceiling in the bishop’s palace. You can look at it all day and still not understand how it works. The rest of the palace is pretty amazing too, enfilades of rococo splendour heated by porcelain stoves. One of them, a plain black cylindrical affair, was standing on four paws, as if yet another disaffected lion was hiding inside it. We were staying in a rather cheerful hotel, in a fifteenth-century building  with low beamed ceilings and lots and lots of wrought ironwork – the bar and restaurant serving also the purposes of reception desk, office, and family sitting room for some friendly, low-fuss Franconians. The rooms were plain and decent, and breakfast was lavish, ham, Black Forest ham, salami, slicing sausage, cured fish, cold chicken, eight different kinds of cheese, nice bread, and one morning, pastries which must have been left over from the restaurant on the previous night. Mysteriously, no eggs, since just about everything else was on offer. Also, you were left in peace to enjoy it. Würzburg is in a cup in the hills, entirely surrounded by vineyards like fields of green corduroy. It was baking hot, but under the limes in the bishop’s palace garden, it was relatively cool, with the linden blossom giving off a sweet, heady incense-like perfume. We took a bus up to the fort on a height commanding the river which must have been there, in one form or another, since Roman times. A winding journey through prosperous, leafy suburbs with steep-pitched roofs visible through the trees, past hospitals, breweries, and any amount of public statuary, some sweetly rococo and some blockily modernistic. The museum in the old arsenal has a lot of medieval and baroque art, some of it wonderful and some of it quite weird. One of the strangest objects is a sort of mermaid, in the fashionable dress of the fifteenth century, with a prim little smile, afloat in a nest of red deer antlers. There are also life sized garden statues of Arcadian figures dancing and playing musical instruments shaped like animals – a sort of saxophone with a snake’s head, a sheep headed harp, that sort of thing. There is also a no expense spared Jesuit church which has a set of deeply theatrical sweeping white and gold plaster curtains about sixty feet long. Both of the nights we spent there we went to one of those German restaurants which were set up in the middle ages to support a charitable enterprise and have somehow kept going, and ate rather plain but perfectly nice food, with delicious dry, light wines.

After Würzburg, we loaded ourselves into trains and went to Innsbrück, via Munich, right up in the Alps, with dusty-turquoise mountains towering halfway up the sky. It wasn’t quite as lovely as we remembered – our last visit was in September, when it was full of rather elegant middle aged Italians in cashmere and pearls, whereas in July it was full of the more wholesome varieties of International Youth doing healthy stuff – but being youth, barging about like herds of bullocks, and the beer and pizza end of the town was pretty crowded. Fortunately, the things were were wanting to see ourselves didn’t interest them in the slightest. We visited the folk museum – which on the whole provoked the reflection that the combination of Catholicism, a tradition of finely detailed woodcarving, and long winter evenings can produce some pretty exotic results – the art gallery, stuffed with bad modern art and good baroque, where I found a perfectly stunning ivory and ebony group of St Michael and Lucifer, another, life size, St Michael smiling in a way that suggests an angelic sense of humour might not quite be yours, a large painting of the Spanish Armada (day 6), viewed from the Spanish point of view, and a very beautiful still life of a book on a cushion under a curtain, with that trome l’oeil quality of implying that someone has just that moment got up and walked out of sight. Then we went to several more churches, and Schloss Ambras. This contains an extraordinary Hapsburg wunderkammer. Where to start. There is the Hairy Family, i.e. a whole dynasty of wolf-persons in brocade, an authentic portrait of Vlad Dracul, an astonishing boxwood sculpture of Death taking a triumphalist pose which makes him look like a seventies guitar hero, sculptures in coral, mother of pearl, ivory, tortoiseshell, a pair of thigh length riding boots with toes which look as if they were designed by Magritte, an inexplicable natural curiosity which is a magnificently antlered deer skull completely grown around by an oak tree so that the antlers protrude on either side (given the length of time this would take I suspect this of being a pagan religious object caught out of its time), and any amount of objects whose pointlessness is matched only by the difficulty of producing them. We staggered out into the hard white sunshine, and when we saw a peacock apparently attempting to buy picture postcards, we  felt past being surprised by anything. From Ambras, we went on an even more exotic mission via the Postbus, which took us on a three quarter hour journey on hairpin roads up through little mountain village cascading with red and pink geraniums, and spat us out at Halle, where we were in search of something even stranger, which we had heard of: the Stiftskirche with the stiffs. This turned out to be even weirder than we thought it was going to be, and reduced even hardened baroque-users to speechlessness. There were two catacomb (i.e., early Christian) saints conventionally bestowed as a pile of bones behind glass with an elaborate black and silver frame, a third, however, was in a ‘sleeping beauty’ glass casket, wearing full Hapsburg ceremonial dress. Then there was a sort of glass bookcase full of skulls, each of which was veiled, wearing a golden wreath with or without silver lace, and resting on an embroidered silk cushion. Where they fitted into any known pattern of Catholic cult was utterly obscure. Goodness knows what’s going on there. We had a drink to recover our nervous tone, and got a bus back down to Innsbruck. Food was nice here too. Breakfast was even more magnificent than in Würzburg, with a terrific display of fruit (rambutan, grenadillas and passion fruit were among the offerings) and superb air-dried ham. We had dinner at the Stiftskeller, in a room thirty feet high with seventeenth-century statues on the walls. At this point, we bid goodbye to one art historian, and entrained for Trieste, via Venice/Mestre, to meet the other.

The Brenner Pass is stupendous, with mighty works of civil engineering spanning the gorges on spidery legs, and views down Alpine valleys with lonely little villages and charging, opaque, meltwater rivers. The train was late, but we managed to catch our connection, which bumbled along the Adriatic coast and tipped us out at Trieste to meet our friend from Belgrade. It was even hotter in Trieste than it had been in Innsbrück. After a long time in Aberdeenshire, I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to have nights as hot as day, the buildings made secretive by shutters closed against the sun. Our friend, fortunately, rejoices in air conditioning. Trieste’s a neoclassical town, on the whole. Like Edinburgh, there is an Old Town on a hill with a medieval street layout winding up to the (Roman) citadel – unlike Edinburgh, though the street plan is ancient, the buildings are nineteenth-century and later, apartment blocks, handsome for the most part – and a New Town on flat ground, laid out on a grid pattern by, in Trieste’s case, the Hapsburgs. The mix is Italian, Austrian, Slovene, and Jewish, an interesting place. Food is mixed; there is a splendid Neapolitan pizzeria, but local gnocchi are Austrian potato dumplings at heart, and the sweets tend to pine nuts, chocolate and rum, and don’t taste Italian at all. There are Greek, Jesuit, Serbian and Anglican churches, and a great big synagogue. The catholic cathedral is palaeo-Christian in origin, with two apse mosaics (Mary Theotokos and Christ Pantokrator) which are apparently twelfth-century Venetian, but utterly Byzantine in style and looking much older, and other interventions, medieval, baroque and modern, making a surprisingly harmonious whole. On either side of the entrance door are solemn busts of fifth-century worthies, presumably the local wealthy Christians who paid for the church: similarly, the façade of the Serbian Orthodox cathedral is proudly ornamented with the names of the local merchant princes who paid for it. Some things don’t change. One of the nice things we did was to go on a brisk little bus-like boat to an outlying town – a fresh and cool excursion after the heat of the city, which revealed a whole other Trieste of massive container ships, gantries, and mysterious industrial operations. A group of three giant vessels had Turkish names and Istanbul as home port, and a terrible old rust bucket like a floating knifebox had apparently come from Ghent. Names which evoked the whole commercial networks of the late middle ages. After dinner, one can walk in the square and along the mole, watching light glittering like sequins on the sapphire water. Youngsters sit about in the dusk, in pairs or groups, looking at the sea, and the warm air is full of quiet talk and laughter, over the gentle shushing and slapping of the waves. One night a boy was sitting leaning against a bollard playing his guitar, all alone, serenading the Adriatic.

Green Shoots

We seem to be getting somewhere with the lawn. We were in Aberdeen all day and though we didn’t see anything when we left, somehow returned to see a fine, adolescents’-whiskers green fuzz over the bare brown veldt, which is very good news. Our Tromsø friends are taking charge, and are, as is their wont, making things better with concentrated intelligence: we have planted up the big pots outside my study with begonias (evicting them from various blue pots about the place), and very fine and grand they look too. Planting up these pots has been a headache because the tulips were hugely late, and by the time they had died down, the South, because it has been on a more normal schedule, had gone over its season so we couldn’t buy bedding plants (the pots were full of white begonias last year, which was nice, but the begonias may be really quite fruity) Our absolutely-un-Doubtful-Guests also undertook to cook for us, so we came home from a day in the Vinegar Works to the welcome sight of someone else bustling about with potatoes and things. Meanwhile, we have a bit of welcome progress on matters personal – by recommendation, we went to a jolly physiotherapist in the course of our Aberdeen day, who has diagnosed my mysterious ankle problem (which has had me limping for two months) and told me what to do, and has a firm theory about the Professor’s iffy knee joint, which includes acquiring a bicycle: because he’s been compensating all over the place, he needs to be re-balanced, and since the only way you can ride a bike is by being in balance, this is a succinct way of taking relevant exercise. It makes perfectly good sense. He has had a pang of regret for the nice oldfashioned Dutch bike left outside a shop in Leiden when we were in the process of moving back, due to the absolute state of distraction induced by the move, but perhaps there are still bikes with handlebars in the right place, fewer than 10 gears, and no fibreglass or carbon components whatsoever …. though in the world of today it may be quite a bit to ask for.

Not letting the grass grow under our feet

This spring, Barry the Great sadly but decisively pronounced the lawn to be beyond recovery. He weedkilled it, as a first step to reseeding; the idea was then, once the grass was dead, to rotovate it. This, unfortunately, didn’t work, and after we got back from the Deep South, a nice and smiley bloke called Bill turned up with a digger the other day, and scraped it, producing a pile of moss which looked like the Great Wall of China. It is still more unfortunate that what with one thing and another, this mighty effort, followed by the deployment of 80 kilos of grass seed (I think) has coincided with the first patch of really nice weather this year. We have therefore had to get a sprinkler, because unless the ground is damp the seed will dry up and die. We’re not on the mains: though our water supply is, thank goodness, now working, since it’s a gravity-fed system, it enters the house under no great amount of pressure, and the sprinkler refuses to lob the water any great distance. I spent yesterday beetling in and out every twenty minutes to move the damn thing. The lawn has now been fairly thoroughly sprinkled, which is just as well, since the weather gods show no sign of wanting to help. The whole exercise was a cause of great rejoicing to little birds, who seemed to think that the whole exercise constituted providing a shower bath for their entertainment. Various people are drifting in and out: we’ve given up apologising for the lawn, and are concentrating on damage limitation, viz., re trying not to to track too much mud into the house. The ex-ambassador has just left, another friend came to lunch, someone else, whom we know only as a correspondent, is turning up this evening, and tomorrow, the friends from Tromsø arrive, to great and general rejoicing – they will mind the beasties while we go on our travels next week – we’ll be visiting Würzburg, Innsbrück, and Trieste – but we will have the pleasure of their company for a few days first. We were sorting out our journeys last night: the plan is to fly to Köln and take trains on from there, which is mysteriously a lot cheaper, and as on previous occasions, Deutsche Bahn was no trouble at all, nay, lucid and informative. Then there was the little question of Innsbruck to Trieste. Now, there is a good way of doing this, but Deutsche Bahn doesn’t admit to it – the Munich-to-Venice Intercity 86 which seems in some bizarre fashion to do its business by stealth. The Professor got there in the end, via the Trenitalia website, but compared to the Deutsche Bahn, it had a certain Alice in Wonderland quality. Not least because, though the train starts in Munich and traverses Austria before ending up in Venice, you can only pick up your ticket from a designated ticket machine, in Italy. Fortunately the railway station at Innsbrück are all that is helpful, so we will get them to sort this snafu out for us, but really, it makes you wonder.

Cast of Thousands

Today has been replete with incident, not to say, interventions from Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan'l Whiddon, Harry Hawke, and Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all. At quarter to eight, someone rang up –  à propos of a singularly bad mannered driver who swooshed past on loose chippings at 50 miles an hour yesterday, and threw up a pebble which made a hole in the windscreen – a bloke retained by our insurance company looking for directions, who was proposing to turn up and fix it with some kind of magic polymer. We were subsiding dozily once more, when fifteen minutes, later someone else turned up from the insurance to check if the first guy had been in touch. Ten minutes after that,  a general suspicion of heavy machinery suggested that clearing off the lawn had been resumed, and that we might as well get up.  Half way through the morning, our plumber’s A team appeared, much to our relief (the middle aged, competent ones, not the laddies with the heavy tattoos) and began looking into the water situation. Shortly after, so did the windscreen man who had meanwhile driven from Dundee. Then someone else entirely turned up to clean the windows – which, fortunately, is achieved using water he brings with him using a sort of pressure hose system. The digger driver, meanwhile, was roaring to and fro methodically destroying the lawn. The dog was in seventh heaven, since all of them in turn said, 1) ‘I see you’, 2) ‘what are you saying?’, and 3), ‘are you smelling my doggie?’, all of which adds up to labradoric bliss even without the surreptitious handouts which so frequently follow upon these ritual utterances. Then Tony turned up to clean the house, which the continued absence of a water supply made just a bit complicated; however, there are such things as hoovers and irons in the world so he was persuaded to get on with stuff even if he could not pursue the regular sequence by which he sets store. Meanwhile, the plumbers reappeared from distant explorations, with a complex narrative about silt, and investigated our UV water filter. This is the inmost layer of defence after the settling tanks, and it turned out to bear a distressing resemblance to an elephant sized used teabag (though I do assure sensitive readers that the UV treatment, which is actually the important bit, is not thereby rendered ineffective). However, clearly it had been copping a good deal more fine silt that it was designed for, and so we rushed off into town to get a replacement. I don’t like to be too definite but they have all gone away, we do seem to have water, and both the hot and cold tanks are full. Jolly, jolly, jolly, good.

And then some other stuff

We were just quietly rejoicing in being home, nothing much going on, etcetera, when the water supply went pear shaped. There is some fluctuation in the supply coming into the house, a topic on which I am not inclined to venture an opinion, which in the course of yesterday night actually dwindled to zero. Just at the moment, we have water where it comes into the house, the kitchen sink, and there is currently no water in either the cold or hot water tanks, and because we had to go into the university today, it’s not been that easy to get people to the house and doing the right thing – we did think we had got someone in place in case the plumber arrived before us, but as is more or less inevitable, this went wrong, there was a gap in coverage, and the plumber duly arrived in it, as they do. Meanwhile, out in the garden, we have had a cheery chap with a digger removing the lawn: he’s two thirds of the way there and there is a ten foot high pile of moss with occasional fragments of grass, which will all become compost, or something. It looks like death, and all in all, this is not country life at its most glorious. We are promised a plumber tomorrow morning. On the other hand, though, my utterly beautiful blue iris has come out – it’s a fine deep blue iris sibirica with a silver edge to the petals, which I’ve forgotten the name of. Not in itself the answer to our problems, but definitely something in the other pan of the scales, as it were.

Whistler Stop Tour

 

I have been back in the Deep South for a couple of weeks, which has not been compatible with maintaining the blog. As usual, much of this time has been spent speed reading in the British Library, but we also did a certain amount of gadding about, chiefly in search of Rex Whistler. Thus we went to Mottisfont, to see the elegantly lifeless grisailles in the drawing room, to Salisbury, where there is an exhibition of his paintings and drawings, and (the Professor having meanwhile gone off to darkest Lancashire) to Port Lympne, which must surely be a contender for Queerest House in England. It’s, inevitably, in the belt of Kent/Sussex where interwar homosexualists had their county retreats, and it was built as a party house, no expense spared, halfway down a cliff, overlooking Romney Marsh and the Channel. There is a bizarrely sumptuous Italianate garden full of giant masonry, some of which looks as if it was nicked off the Gésu, and the interior (complete with an elaborately patterened floor of black and white marble, a many-pillared hall in the Moorish taste, marble baths, and a library copied from the Radcliffe Camera) breaks out in murals: there was once a room decorated with charging elephants and other symbolic fauna by José Maria Sert, and a dining room which originally had lapis walls, opalescent pink ceiling, gilt-winged chairs with jade-green cushions, and a black, white and burnt-sienna frieze in the Egyptian taste of nude Africans processing with bullocks, amphoras etcetera, by Glyn Philpot. The Africans now wear little drawers, due to a hasty day’s repainting after Queen Mary announced her intention of visiting, but the effect is still camp beyond belief. The house is now owned by John Aspinall’s foundation, and used as a wedding venue, which is something of a come down, though probably the  best a place like that could hope for these days. The Sert room has been replaced with a rather worrying, very brightly coloured mural of assorted Asiatic fauna, and though the Philpot frieze survives, it has been moved out of the dining room, which is now blandly corporate (and currently in the middle of a refit, which self-evidently will substitute another variety of Neutral Hotel Taste for the slightly shabby NHT now on offer), and into what was Philip Sassoon’s bedroom which is presently being transformed into a bar. And there is also Rex Whistler’s Tent Room, which is what I had gone to see. It’s very fine, and very sad, whereas Philpot’s black boys, even in their present somewhat reduced circumstances, are rather jolly. It gives the strongest impression that all the figures are revenants, something which derives, I think, partly from the colour scheme – the prevailing tone is dusty turquoise – and partly from the fact that the figures are wearing clothes of different periods. I’m very glad to have seen it, and the Aspinall people could hardly have been nicer or more helpful.  Another excursion, which was not Whistler related, was to Campion Hall to see the notorious ‘objets d’Arcy’ – this too well merited the detour. We are assured by the Society of Jesus that Father’s Christian Dior sequinned op-art cope is still worn on occasion (though it has to be admitted that orange is not, conventionally, a liturgical colour, especially not in combination with mauve and bright green…) Ahem. Campion Hall itself is terrific – Lutyens letting his hair down. The ceiling lights in the chapel are in the shape of cardinal’s hats, and there’s a lifesize, baroque Spanish high-relief sculpture of Ignatius Loyola and companions in the middle of the hall, which in Oxford, comes as a bit of a surprise. It was all very interesting, but it was also nice to get home. Tony & co had looked after the house and the beasties beautifully (Miss Dog, by the way, made a swift and uproblematic recovery from her operation and has forgotten all about it), and everything was looking in splendid fettle. The only remotely unpleasant surprise was something which turned up in the post yesterday – an Amazon package which proved to contain a surreal  looking CD of a heavy metal concept album on the life of Charlemagne by Christopher (‘Dracula’) Lee. I could of course think of several wags who might have sent me such a thing as a joke or a wind-up, but what was rather worrying was the invoice indicated that it has been ordered by me. A hasty examination of conscience suggested that I had not been plastered enough to order Amazonia at random and forget about it within memory, and I followed up with an examination of my back-orders file which confirmed as much. Even Aunty Amazon can make mistakes, but it was momentarily rather disconcerting, like something dropping out of a parallel universe, especially since I have been brooding extensively about the intrinsic spookiness of Rex Whistler’s murals. Fortunately, there was no time to give it any further thought: we were going to New Deer, since yesterday was the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, which we celebrate annually with our composer friends (Peter and Paul respectively), so along with shopping at the rather nice New Deer deli, we nipped up to the post office to return it to from whence it came. The party was lovely. Like all dos involving musicians, it ended round the piano and broke up at one in the morning.

 

All Well

Miss Dog has come back from the vet's deprived of the opportunity of motherhood. She has always been singularly partial to her cosy bed so we were not wholly surprised to turn up to the vet's, to be told 'she should be fine to go now, but we can't get her to get up'. She was eventually coaxed into the car, where she went to sleep, and  returned to her loving home, where she got out of the car, tottered ten feet, and went to sleep on the lawn.  She is now in her bed. It will take 24 hours for the narcolepsy to wear off, at which point she will probably be a lot crosser than she is now. They put a local anaesthetic on the wound site as well as giving her a general anaesthetic to operate, so at the moment, she isn't conscious of it. That, too, will wear off, alas. Otherwise, they had a look round since they'd got her there, and apart from a bit of grass seed irritation in her floppy ears, which is inevitable at this time of year, she is a fine healthy Labrador. Currently asleep. We have been told to put her into a tee-shirt for the night, so she doesn't attack her wound (nicer for her, if it works, than the ignominious plastic bucket on the head which dogs so loathe). It's going to be fun trying to dress her, though, not least, keeping her awake long enough.

Steeling ourselves

We are bracing ourselves: tomorrow morning, Miss Dog goes to the vet to be spayed, which will be a great weight off our minds. Apart from feeling that we would rather that the complications of life did not include puppies, finding homes for them, etcetera, there is a serious additional problem, which is that if Miss Dog’s hormones are prompting her to Look for Lerve, she runs away, and roams to distances not normally within her cosy little sphere. One potential result, of course, is that she could easily  be squashed on the fastmoving A road of which she wots nothing, but another is that we can’t leave her with other people to mind her, because Sod’s Law dictates that 24 hours after we took our eyes off her she would go into heat, and AWOL, causing maximum anxiety and stress. Once spayed, we’re pretty certain that she will lie on the lawn chewing old fizzy water bottles, without a care in the world. In the short term this will be horrible, in the long term, it is obviously sensible. The lawn, by the way, is also in a state of transition. Because it was 80% moss and apparently beyond recovery, Barry the Great killed it, and on the odd sunny day, as it has withered and died, Miss Kit has looked more like a lion than ever stalking across its dry, tawny surface, which she blends into to an almost disconcerting extent. Barry is planning to rotovate it and reseed. Calum from the garden centre came up this evening and after intricate calculations, decided we needed more than 80 kilos of grass seed, which led me to reflect that you never really think how big things are till something goes a bit wrong.  Like taking pictures off the wall, or books off the shelves.

Sweet Williams

The hall is currently enlivened by a vase overflowing with Sweet Williams, a flower I’m very fond of. The bunches were two-for-a-fiver at the Co Op, which suggests that they are unproblematically in season. I am always pleased to see Sweet Williams, but even more so in a year when the concept of ‘season’ seems to be  dubiously relevant. Down by the lake, the winter cherries, usually flowering in January, are still in bloom. The spring cherries on the lawn, the vulgar pink ruffled affairs we inherited, are yet to flower, and it’s less than a fortnight off the longest day, for Pete’s sake. Roses, forget it, though some do seem to be budding, a bit. The peonies are equally slow to get started, though you’d really expect them to be in full flush by now. On the other hand, there are still plenty of tulips. Some plants, clearly, are soldiering on on a schedule dictated by length of day, or something like that (hostas, brunneras, ferns and so forth are on schedule), but most of the ones with dramatic blooms would seem, on available evidence, to go by amount of light, and so are six to eight weeks behind. People can argue to their little hearts’ content about  global warming, but nobody in possession of a garden can be in any doubt about climate chaos.

Grey

A week has gone by, singularly lacking excitement. I contrived to damage my ankle, which is now a good deal better, but has acted as an effective brake on doing anything but sit and think. I took the problem to Dr Wu; her ministrations, characteristically, were exceedingly painful but effective. Unfortunately, the Professor tootled off in the general direction of Dumfries last Wednesday, so Miss Dog has had a dull time of it. There has been a daily walk, but it has been limited by my inability to take her to the forest, which requires the car, and my determination to stay on the flat, which from her point of view, means stumping along a tractor path, not hiking about in the woods where the deer are. Boring, boring, boring, from her point of view, and there has been many a sigh and reproachful glance.  Otherwise, I have been cooking the sort of food I cook on my own, which seesaws between roll-and-a-boiled-egg and occasional erratic experiments arising from using up odds and ends.  I made a banana bread which was rather good, i.e. a yeast bread incorporating a baked banana, with sultanas and vanilla, which isn’t at all my usual sort of thing: I don’t cook with bananas in the ordinary way because the Professor doesn’t get on with them. Otherwise, it’s been days of blameless activity, trying to work out how, when and where a whole lot of Mary of Guise’s private correspondence can have gone astray, or – what most of today has gone on – the surreal and/or baroque aspects of fine jewellery of the twenties and thirties. I’ve discovered a very considerable artist called Suzanne Belperron I’d never heard of. Among other things, she made rings carved out of rock crystal set with fine diamonds: games with light, and then some. Never a dull moment, from my point of view, but alas, of no interest to dogs. I haven’t got out into the garden much. There has been a most infuriating weather pattern of days which start brilliantly sunny,  cloud over by eleven, stay grey and cold for the rest of the day and turn into a fine evening.  I don’t want to stand about because of the aforementioned ankle, and it’s been too cold to sit out. Even one of Mme Belperron’s rings would have looked dull.

Existentialism for Labradors

The Professor has become keenly interested in the general well being of the dog Slobber. For those to whom his name is unfamiliar, he is (probably) the hero of a strip called ‘Tottering by Gently’, in Country Life. The garage began stocking this periodical, and it has gradually morphed into a must-see, essentially because of the cartoon. Slobber’s life is not, in general, very problematic, but this week, he was to be found on his cosy beanbag in front of the Aga with his brow wrinkled in unaccustomed thought, pondering the question; ‘who is a good dog then?’ – as well one might, were one a dog. Our own Miss Dog, of course, is a stranger to speculation of this kind. Born and bred in Aberdeenshire, she is met not with ‘who’s a good dog, then?’ but with, ‘I see you’ (which, to all but the most advanced thinkers, offers few challenges), and ‘what are you saying?’, to which the answer is basically, ‘woof’. Neither we, nor our visitors, throw her existential Yorkers of this kind. And thus, when you pat her handsome head, it remains reassuringly hollow.  She is exceptionally pleased with things this week, in fact. For one thing, the sun has come out, so she can bask on the gravel outside my study. For another, her pet sea slug (a stripey holothurian,  surreal triumph of the dog-toy-maker’s art) has mysteriously become plump and regained its squeak – i.e., she has taken it to bits so often, it has been confiscated and replaced – and, since from time to time the holothurian has to be disappeared in order to be sewn up again, I have also bought her a second toy so there should always be one in play at a given moment. It is a vulture, and is called Gloria. I wonder about people who design dog toys, I really do.

One thing after another

The Baritone exited stage left, in his courtly fashion, on Thursday morning, ensconced himself in Gordon’s taxi and vanished out of our lives for the time being. We then found ourselves faced with a social problem of unknown dimensions. The previous evening a cheerful American voice on the phone had announced ‘Hi, it’s Jeff’. Jeff being the Professor’s father’s brother’s second wife’s estranged son, thus a man in a vestigial relationship with us, of a kind spawned by the modern world of today. The estrangement, as far as we knew, related to the lady in question having left her first husband when the aforesaid Jeff was three – whatever she was like then, viewed in her latter years she struck one the kind of person who made you realise that whatever its faults, the women’s movement had been a Good Thing.  At the time when her second husband died, the Professor had met the lady exactly three times, since his Mama wasn’t keen on her, so there wasn’t much of a relationship there either. However, she was much given to complaining and seemed to take a general view that if she was bored and unhappy it was the business of the most proximate male to sort things out for her (i.e., for want of anyone better, the Professor, who she didn’t even like), so when she died some months ago, we were sufficiently lacking in finer feelings to be rather relieved. But estranged or not, when someone dies, their offspring end up doing the mopping up, and so Jeff had come over to get his mother decently buried, then had come over again to sort out matters concerned with the estate. We couldn’t get to the funeral because the Professor was ill, so it seemed only decent to invite Jeff up when he came over for the second time, accompanied, as it turned out, by his family, wife and two children of unknown age and gender. What we hadn’t particularly expected was that this general invitation would be taken up immediately on the heels of a domestic Marathon. However, at least it meant there were flowers in all the rooms, so after a quick sort-out-and-turn-round, we stood by with more resolution than enthusiasm. Suffice it to say that the very distant relations turned out to be absolutely charming. The estrangement between Jeff and his mother might have been caused by just about anything, but as it turned out, she must have disapproved of him for many of the same reasons she disapproved of us: Mrs Jeff worked (they had in fact met as colleagues), none of them were racist or sexist, or prone to apocalyptic religiosity, and the boy had put in time with the Peace Corps, all of which must have enraged her. We enjoyed their company, they enjoyed ours, and even though the very last thing I wanted this week was yet more entertaining, it was fun, and I hope that for them, it was a pleasant change from grubbing about in a suffocatingly respectable suburban town on the fringes of Glasgow. But nice though they were, we are rejoicing in having the house to ourselves once more.

We rise to the occasion

Last night’s party went splendidly. Its splendour was greatly augmented by Tony, who not only polished silver, polished the piano (tuned within an inch of its life last week), took down the sitting-room curtains, rearranged the room into its summer guise, an annual ceremony delayed this year by the extreme disobligingness of the weather, cut the box by the front door and ironed the Professor’s shirts, but, bless the man, came back around seven to be a discreet presence in the kitchen washing up, putting away, and tidying, with the result that for once the Professor and I did not have to do it in great haste as quietly as possible after midnight while the musicians drank whisky and played the piano. The weather, which was supposed to be awful, wasn’t, except for a couple of tiny but vehement hailstorms, neither of which lasted more than a minute (and they had the consideration not to happen during the recital, what’s more). The Baritone was in famous form; he gave us a lot of Welsh, which was rather super: that melodious tongue’s richly sounded ‘r’s and ‘l’s got their full money’s worth, and then some. Most of the rugs had been removed so it was a bit like being inside a violin. Supper I had organized quite cunningly so that everything could be picked up; there were knives and forks laid out, but hardly anyone bothered. I’m happy to say that the box of spring flowers made it to Cambridge – and that, despite hail, gales, and the daffodils’ headlong desire to get it over with for the year, there were still enough pheasant’s eye narcissus in the garden to give me flowers for the house last night.

Assuming the brace position

As of tomorrow, life will be dominated by music for most of a week. And, inevitably, by the logistics which surround it The piano has been tuned, the fact that musicians need to be fed is in hand, if not entirely sorted. My own efforts are focused on Tuesday, when our friend the baritone will sing for us and a small but lovely audience – he’s staying for several days, but he, his accompanist who is also one of the Professor’s graduate students, and the composer will be there that night – which means on one level, that all kinds of useful business will be transacted in course of the traditional post-mortem (all three of the above will be staying over), on another, which is my sphere of operations, that as well as a buffet party on Tuesday, it’ll be Breakfast of Champions on quite a lavish scale the following morning. Preparations are quite well advanced. I have filled the freezer with rolls and suchlike, by way of advance organization, pastry and so forth are in the fridge. We’ve finished painting the garden fence, the lawn is temporarily respectable (Barry the Great has indicated that it’s 90% moss and in fact, we should kill what’s there and re-sow, but has done a decent cosmetic job on things as they are: in a fortnight from now it will look like death, and remain thus for most of the summer, alas). I’ve got so much of the domestic end of things under control off and on the last couple of days that panic is pretty much averted (unless the cooker suddenly dies, as memorably, a cooker died on my wedding morning; golly, that was a panic and a half). Anyway, fingers crossed. Things are looking very nice.  The tulips are coming out, though sadly, the daffodils and narcissi seem to be going over very quickly. We sent a box of our narcissi to a friend in Cambridge who is not the sort of person to buy flowers for himself, and who, barring miracles, will not see another spring. I hope they got to him and arrived in reasonable condition, and that they gave pleasure.

A host of mostly golden daffodils

Daffodils are not generally the merry harbingers of the first week of bloody May, but here they are at last, and we’re pleased to see them. The countryside is full of them. One thing which has struck us is that we do seem to have  an extraordinary variety – not just our favourite green and yellow archaic stripey mutants. If you go round the garden picking daffodils, once you  get over the general impression of a sea of yellow and start focusing on details, you observe there are at least  twenty varieties, and maybe quite a few more if you really went round with a notebook and ticked them off. I have personally planted some of the small size jonquils,  ex- pots in the house, ‘Cheerfulness’, also ex- pots in the house, the creamy-white scented narcissus ‘Thalia’, which remains my favourite of the whole lot, and Poet’s Narcissus. That’s all, four varieties. I’m inclined to think that most people, like me,  have fairly definite views on daffodils, if they care about them at all. The gay proliferation of doubles, singles, lemon-yellow,white, cream, orange, and everything in between therefore suggests that we have fallen heir to someone’s obsession, some considerable distance back in the day.

Creak

We have spent much of the day undercoating trellis fences. A perfectly hideous job. You look at treillage and say to yourself, ‘there’s hardly anything to it’, then forget that each bit of wood has four sides till you’re in there with a brush. This has been an absolutely obnoxious task, because, while Britain is theoretically ‘basking for the Bank Holiday’, in practice, hereabouts it has continued decidedly overcast. And, even if the sun shone once in a while, though if the wind ever died down, it was warm, since in actual fact, it blew almost without intermission, after a while it began to feel as if it was gradually removing the top layer of one’s skin. Still, the job had to be done, and for the most part, it has been done. We have used all available paint and covered, I think, just about all of the exposed wood. Surviving paint from the previous coat may have to do otherwise, unless we can scare up any more. It’s all given a degree of urgency by a strong sense of this being somewhere on the verge of the last minute; this alternating sun and rain is getting the plant life moving at last, and we need to slap paint on before it becomes impossible to get at the trellis. Then, once everyone’s great feet are out of the border, I will start trying to hack away at the weeds. What a joy that will be.

Night at the Opera

We had a night out on Friday – the students put on Eugene Onegin. As with last year’s Magic Flute, you had to admire their enterprise. Our student productions really are student productions, with no bought in stars, and the number of good voices and competent musicians we can field in a given year is astonishing. It was not without is problems – there were as many musicians as could physically fit into the Cowdray Hall’s little orchestra pit, which translated into only one or two violins per part, and the typical Tchaikovsky massed strings came out a little vinegary as a result. The most serious problem was Onegin: he had a perfectly reasonable voice, but the plot only works if Onegin is a fatally attractive rake. The lad in question was more of a serviceable watering can, really – he sounded all right, but unless Lensky can reasonably believe that merely dancing with this fellow is sufficient to cause a woman to fall under his spell, then you can’t explain why he gets so cross. Tatyana’s inexplicable devotion is less of a problem since she’s supposed to be a fantasist anyway. Another thought which was prompted by the unfolding narrative (and thinking of other operas)  is that aristocratic life would be a damn sight easier if doting old duennas were routinely exiled to Novosibirsk, or painlessly destroyed. Apart from that, Tchaikovsky’s tendency to recycle his effects meant that there were odd moments when one expected a fleet of swans to cross the stage in profile or the guests to assemble for Aurora’s wedding. Which prompted reflections on what would have happened if they had.

Fifty shades of grey

We have finished redecorating the back spare room.  Barmy but slightly wonderful is the general consensus. The furniture, including the bed, has been painted a very light stone-colour with the exception of the mule chest which it would have been a shame to repaint since it has very spirited 19^th century faux graining. The walls have acquired a dado rail, beneath which is a medium grey with a much lighter, luminous grey above. Woodwork is white. The carpet remains pale grey, and the charcoal grey Lesbian toile-de-jouy curtains have been re-hung. The bed is surmounted with a gilded corona  faintly reminiscent of a wreath of oakleaves, hung with pale grey muslin; there are gilded brass tie-backs to either side of the headboard. We had to go into work, but Godmama spent the whole day sewing, since the muslin needed about ten metres of seaming. The bed itself is adorned with a nineteenth-century quilt made of blue and grey striped ticking. Even as I write, a committee of taste is deliberating over hanging the pictures, which are also grey, with gilt or silver frames, and there is a ghostly mirror with very foxed antique glass, which I also gilded. Most of the decorative items have been removed, but there was a good agonize over the spongebowl on the mule chest: blue transfer-ware with a spirited representation of Bacchus and his pards, plus Greek temple and palm trees, or grey Grecian spongeware? (Grey Grecian). Girandoles were tried, and taken away again. The effect is on the whole Swedish, and extremely elegant. Also, comfortable, and surprisingly jolly, and thanks to almost everything being pale grey, the corona etcetera is very much less reminiscent of Disney princesses than one might have feared.

Then ten years passed like a flash ...

I have been running this blog for a decade. Our first post, April 1 2003, was the following:

Reasons for Invading Switzerland

1. We don’t like them
2. Nobody at all nice likes them
3. Their neighbours can’t stand them
4. They are in fact the Axis of the Not at All Nice
5. The Pofessor has a personal interest in the overthrow of the current régime and therefore we ought to do it
6. The Food and Drug Authority considers chocolate a dangerous substance which needs to be kept in safe hands
7. We are convinced on evidence we consider adequate that they have stockpiled weapons of mass destruction at Lindt-Sprüngli Gbmh
8. Nobody needs to tell Tony until we’ve started shooting

We will assemble on the borders with placards in small neurotic letters

“nobody likes you, yah, yah, yah”
“call that a national literature?”
“put that in your fondue and smoke it”
“Jung was a loony”
“four hundred years of democracy and all you produce is the cuckoo clock”
“Müsli’s no Üsli”
“Calvinism is the Root of all Evil”

If there is NO FIRM COMMITMENT TO SURRENDER BY THE FORCES OF EVIL within 24 hours then we will invade with maximum prejudice.

After that, we settled after that to chronicles of small beer, but at the time I think we were fairly cross about contemporary politics, not without reason. Fast forwarding by a decade, Godmama is achieving wonders: I’ve gilded the corona for the bed, which looks terrific, albeit as camp as all get out, we have several shades of grey on, or about to go on, the walls, Tony has put up  a dado rail, which has been undercoated. I will have to wash the muslin for the bed curtain, which has become mysteriously grubby, but that is probably to the good since it seems to be a bit more starched than we actually want.  We are within sight of the room's being sorted out, and very fabulous it will be. Also fast forwarding by a decade,the Professor was talking to a friend of ours who is both richer and more techno, who was mentioning that his fridge talked back. What it says, I gather, is 'I need to be defrosted' or some such, but the field is open for more elaborate commentary. 'Isn't that your third gin? 'Put that chocolate bar down, and step away'; or a more general, 'think what you're doing to yourself'. The latter might be the most likely since it would require less effort from the manufacturers and, given natural wastage as people opened their fridges and went berserk upon being corrected, increase the number of fridges bought. However, the events of the last decade seem to have brought us significantly nearer to redefining Lindt as an Axis of Evil.