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.