Christmas 2005

 “The reader whom these things do not interest, has only himself to blame if he reads farther, and I do not desire any other indulgence from him than that of bearing in mind, that for him these pages were not written.”  John Stuart Mill, written in the foreword to his celebrated Autobiography:

This book is for those who agree that the only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it. Others are advised to close the book now and tiptoe away. Daniell Dennett,  ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’  1995 (a very good book)

You can at any time press the Back button or return to Home Page? or Alphabetical List to look at art  See also the new annual report 2006

My Dear Friends,   Quite so. 

Just before Christmas last year, someone challenged me: How many books are you reading? How many books are there, started, or half abandoned, being read at the same time, by your bedside?  I counted them.

At the time of counting I had sixteen books with markers, on the chairs and night tables of  my bedroom, not counting the subscriptions, which obviously vary in status from day to day: I subscribe to The Economist, New York Review of Books, Burlington Magazine and The Art Newspaper & Antiques Trade Gazette.  In addition I have three short shelves (say 2 metres) in the bedroom, holding perhaps some thirty books which I intend to read – some have been there for a long time, some started and abandoned before I came to this house. There were another twelve volumes in the drawing room.  These are mostly exhibition catalogues I intend to study more carefully but also a few novels I intend to finish but perhaps never shall: they have mostly been there for many months, even a few years. I have forgotten the plot and why I lost interest in what was going to happen.  I bought myself ten books for Christmas, but left them unopened in the bag to be a surprise when I got to them.  Some kind people give me books, alas including fiction, to be left unread for months or years.  I promise to read fiction one day and sometimes it is good. But my heart is not in it.  One day perhaps.

And you?  What books lie about your house? Not on the shelf, behind glass fronted bookcases. I have thousands of books in the cases gathering dust on top.  Nor do I ask what you are reading (though I should be interested in that too). Just how much you are reading at the same time, or abandoning with good intentions. Is there anyone out there who regularly picks up a single book, fiction or non-fiction, reads it to the very end, and then, discarding or keeping it, starts another in orderly sequence? I believe some people do that on planes or trains, maybe jettisoning the volume at the end of the journey.  But I use a long flight to read, usually not even the whole of, a serious book.  So I profit by several hours concentration at once.

I read that under 30% of the goods and services consumed at the end of the 20^th century were variants of the goods and services produced 100 years earlier.  “We travel in vehicles that were not yet invented that are powered by fuels not yet produced, communicate through devices not yet manufactured, enjoy cool air on the hottest days, are entertained  by electronic wizardry that was not dreamed of and receive medical treatments that were unheard of.” writes William Nordhaus (Yale). And there’s the humble yellow post-it pad with which I marked the passage in the article. 

The article continues that the USA finds employment for 139,000 psychologists, 104,000 floral designers and 51,000 manicurists and pedicurists.  This was all apropos the dangers of ‘exporting jobs’ – but there are new jobs and new applications and the warnings against ‘outsourcing’ and calls for protectionism sound the same as the 19^th century calls to stop mechanisations which were said to be putting people out of work. Marx on the contrary promised that mechanisation would lead to endless leisure for the workers. When will that be?  In fact England despite the loss of manufacturing jobs has more people in work than in 1950 and even troubled Germany, despite 10% unemployment produces and exports MORE goods than ten years ago. Efficiency and high productivity.

I like to cook. But living alone is not much fun in this respect, although I do cook proper meals for myself as my waist attests. But it’s much more fun to invite people. I like to invite people because I like to see them and I like to cook for them and they usually seem to enjoy the company and the food.  Good. At my small kitchen table however I can only seat six which imposes limits, but that at least ought to be easy to arrange. The Queen no doubt has a protocol department and the Ambassador can be asked to name a date first. But the rest, ordinary people (everyone I know) are getting more and more difficult.  Single people of course can come or not come, but the trouble with couples, whether married or not, is that both partners are working and travelling and entertaining their clients.  Until recently most couples had one in charge of social events, usually the woman “I must ask the boss” a husband would say deprecatingly, and this also allowed them time to discuss whether they really wanted to come, make a good excuse perhaps. These days they do not really seem to keep a joint diary. Therefore a. must ask b. who is in Thailand till Wednesday;  meanwhile c. has evening classes on alternate Fridays and her husband is …  and so on.  Five I need, two couples and a single girl, ideally.  Often surprisingly difficult.

Because I am over 60 I will get a ‘winter fuel allowance’ from the Government and a letter tells me it is free of income tax and does not affect pensions or other benefits. Thanks – and I also understand that it is easier and cheaper to pay everyone in the category than work out who might really need it most. It is also an electoral bribe no doubt, what in America is called pork.  But it is accompanied by a surprising warning: “If your circumstances change it may affect your payment …” let us know. Phone.  Hey, since the only criterion is that I be over 60, it  is hard to think of any change of circumstance other than death. In which case I am not going to let anyone know anything. I am quite certain that I shall not be going to go below 60 again either, help line notwithstanding. Oh well, nice of them to offer help.

RB suggested I wrap presents in a triangular shape.  But I am glad if I get each one covered with the same side of  the paper ie no white showing.  I BUY presents with care, attention and forethought and I GIVE them with love and pleasure.  But I wrap presents badly in silly paper with ill will and ill grace. I am a deep believer in professionalism - if the girl in the shop, who is paid and trained and  does not give a fig for me or the present or the recipient, can wrap it, they look better. Last year I bought too many things that I needed to wrap myself and basically they each looked like a scrumpled mess of gilded paper.  I DID buy the paper earlier in the year because I found out long ago that by the end of the year you can only get Father Xmas Santasentimentality, bondieuserie with reindeers and Disneyhorror jinglebells.

In Japan I am told there is a great cult of expensive wrapping and very little inside. I deprecate this.  I had rather give and receive a decent present, thought out and (oh yes, even precious, expensive, valuable) with no wrapping. Or indeed on the contrary, just as welcome, a small present, not necessarily of any monetary value, but heartfelt, thought out, just what I think you might want, what you think I might like because you like it yourself. It represents an instant of fellow feeling and togetherness, without wasting huge amounts of time, without cutting down the rain forest, clearing the tundra,  to make paper, and string and glitter to dress up mutton as lamb, the crow as the peacock.

Scandal. Disgrace. Heresy.  Blasphemy.  Madame Tussauds (the London waxworks) set up a crib, representing the nativity scene with David Beckham as Joseph and his wife as Mary (Posh and Becks) and Blair, Bush and the Duke of Edinburgh (sic) as the three magi and some others as shepherds and angels.  The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster deplored, the BBC tried to remain neutral, the tabloid papers registered shock horror, while the rest of us smile mildly or shrug our shoulders, which is surely the correct response to a rather simple publicity stunt to get people in over the Christmas holiday.  In fact I am sure it came about simply because they had spare wax heads.  I know they often keep spares in case of vandalism, and maybe thought they might as well use them rather than invent a new Mary. Since no one has ever claimed to know what the original protagonists might have looked like, one realistic or idealised face is surely as good as another. 

But celebrity and scandal in this very respect is not quite new. Between 1452 and 1464 Fra Filippo Lippi (a Carmine monk in Florence) painted a series of ravishing Madonnas, nativities etc using a particularly beautiful nun as a model.  In due course she became pregnant for real and he ran off with her, Lucrezia,  and they produced a son Filippino Lippi, in turn rather a good painter, a pupil, like Botticelli, of Filippo.  Eventually Filippo & Lucrezia got a dispensation to marry.  Hooray, and that scandal is now some 550 years ago.  Monks and nuns did produce children (probably quite commonly), but because they were illegitimate, they could not inherit and often went into the church in turn.  But the sacred iconic altarpieces must always have been painted using a nun, or else a studio model, mistress, or wife etc as model.  Who else should they have used?  What faces should Mme Tussauds have put on the sacred couple? Old Mother Teresa or just a bland neutral vapid conventional image?  Even the standard convention of what Jesus is to look like, the short beard etc. is not that old.  At least the Beckhams are married, appear fond of each other, and have a male child (?two) who is legitimate. They are such a boring happy bourgeois couple that I came to believe that the girl who claimed to have had an affair with him, was probably paid to do so – makes a story, scandal, tears, reconciliation. More publicity. If they won’t misbehave it has to be invented, and everyone has a vested interest in going along with it. If they can’t be sufficiently Satanic they might as well be Joseph and Mary. I approve.

By the time you get this letter Turkey can begin to ‘negotiate’ to join the EU; if you look at the map and include Ukraine you get an amazing coherent eastern border for Europe with the Black Sea within it. Maybe Georgia can one day join too to complete the ring.  No wonder the Russians don’t like it. But that may be beyond my lifetime and one should never prophesy – especially about the future.

Our Victorian ancestors allowed themselves to make mock of the parvenu, the nouveau riche,  people with new money (of which at that time there were many), those who were trying to ‘ape’ their ‘betters’ trying to pretend to be close to the aristocracy.  Sometimes they were richer than the aristos and the concept of noble poverty arose, poor finesse etc. to rectify this.  Smart and scruffy indeed, shabby chic was born.  There was also much talk of the awfulness of servants, but the trouble here was that while the new bourgeoisie did not know how they ought to behave, they also did not know how to instruct their servants. 

Better nouveau than never!  The new rich nowadays, super wealthy footballers and pop-stars, best-sellers and ‘celebrities’, hedge-funders and who knows who and what else, don’t care.  They show no thought of aping anyone else but just spend their cash as they please. They already have the status, all the status they can ever get through TV and Hello Magazine.  Maybe what they buy shows ghastly taste by some standards, ostentation, conspicuous consumption, but they don’t care what people poorer than themselves think.  They have no concept of ‘their betters’ because, or maybe as a consequence, the social hierarchy has collapsed.  There are no betters, in a modern democracy we are all of equal worth – only some are a lot richer.  The religions tried the same gambit, equal “before god”, but it never caught on.

When I left for prep school in 1947 my father gave me one of the few pieces of direct advice I ever got from him.  Aged eight plus, it was disastrously bad for a British prep school still believing in Empire: “Don’t forget that your elders are not necessarily your betters.  They are only older than you”  Rotten advice to give a schoolboy in his first term at an authoritarian institute, it got me into a lot of trouble.  But it was not wrong.

I went through a crowded Selfridges (big store on Oxford Street) just before Christmas, where, as I passed, I overhead, one startlingly pretty young girl wail wearily to another,  "... .... and I still have to buy my Christmas presents before I go to Mauritius.....  " I heard no more but as a plea for sympathy I found it remarkably thin.  Poor little darling. What a hard life. Think of Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage’ or, theologically, the seven sorrows of the virgin, the women of Darfur, and this twenty something year old girl has yet to buy presents before going off to lie in the sun.  Brave new world, rugged existence.  Je vais te plaindre = I weep for you.

Worse: On a hot day toward the end of July, as I begin to think about my summer holiday, work winds down, I might go and buy say a new bathing costume, or a T shirt.  It has long infuriated me that by then the shops have cleared the sales and only have autumn/winter clothes available.  Similarly on a bitter day, with a howling easterly in January, no pullover is available, spring clothes and even summer lightweights.  But I thought this was just a lunacy of the rag trade.  Not so.  On the 24^th December, Christmas Eve, ding dong merrily on high, holly and ivy, God rest you merry gentlemen, etc. I was beginning to get into the Christmas idea, play some Carols maybe. I had had a jolly lunch and felt Christmassy (whatever that might be). So after lunch I went into Virgin Records on Piccadilly Circus to buy a disc or two of Carols, perhaps Kiri te Kanawa, she of the fluting plumy voice. No, no, they have been cleared away, not available anymore. No carols before Christmas, Spring sales, too late.  The day is called Christmas Eve but for the seller, and for the irritated counter girls, Christmas is over.  Usually once I get in there I buy ten or twelve records, but I stormed out without a purchase.  I was too late for the Marketing of Christmas on the 24^th

Boxing Day. Everyone agrees that the 26^th December is the Feast of St Stephen, but though the protestant English don’t celebrate saints much, it is a public holiday. This day after Christmas is usually called Boxing Day and many unconvincing explanations have been given for this.  In 2004 there was much confusion because 25^th was Saturday, so the public might have lost TWO days free of work had the Government not declared Monday AND Tuesday to be holidays. Many shops stay open anyway these days, but was Sunday Boxing day? The Oxford English Dictionary is quite clear:  Boxing Day is the first weekday after Christmas, so it ought to have been Monday.  But the BBC (among many others) resolutely declared Sunday to be Boxing day and the two extra days were just holiday.  Aged 66 years I have finally got a proper explanation:  Around Christmas it is the custom, here as no doubt in many places, for the postman, milkman, delivery boys, laundryman etc. to receive a tip, present, pourboire, trinkgeld, bonus for Christmas.  This is usually called a ‘Christmas Box’ and may stand as such in the shop or be carried round from door to door soliciting donations.  Clearly this could only be done on a working day – nowadays usually in October, but traditionally on the day after Christmas. In a few years it will probably be in August, but the dictionary is right, and the BBC wrong. Boxing day is the first working day after Christmas. It’s a holiday anyway these days.

My scepticism of the need for mineral and vitamin supplements was again fortified by noticing that the large (1000mg) Vitamin C tablets now contain 10mg of zinc.  Probably it is a by-product or impurity and they are making a virtue of it, but it does say “helps to fortify the immune system”, goodie, so I looked up zinc and found that oysters contain 5.92 mg per oyster.  TWO oysters daily would be more than the daily requirement apart from all the other things that contain zinc.  I am sure that I eat 6 oysters per week in season, but maybe I should raise this to a dozen for health reasons.

Exhibition of Italian “Futurist Skies” at the Estorick Foundation: “Contemplation of [mural paintings on the] the walls and ceiling of Ostia Airport convinced public and critics that the traditional eagles of painting, far from glorifying aviation, appear today as miserable chickens beside the torrid mechanical splendour of a flying motor that surely scorns to roast them”  The exhibition was accused, in the press, of being Fascist, which is correct in time, but not visually.  How could a fascist scorn an imperial eagle and what will the Americans make of that?  Or are we to call the Bush administration and the people that voted for him  para-fascist – and is this just name-calling instead of analysis.  I think it is no more helpful to call these paintings fascist either.

I went to France for the New Year and for a number of what seemed sufficient reasons, I went by car.  French road signs are on the whole clear and the roads are well enough marked not to need a great deal of map reading. Map reading can be hard when one is alone and driving.  And the French have discovered roundabouts with a vengeance. They are building them on every crossing, but they haven’t fully mastered how to use them yet.  They still try to use the idiotic (and now rightly abolished) priorité a droit, which was always hellishly dangerous – but now for roundabouts it is counterproductive.  Cars dash wildly ON TO the crossing and jam up, when the whole point is to give priority to the cars on it to get OFF and leave it clear.  Maybe Etoile will always be blocked. But for English people, apart from the fact that they go round the wrong way, the funniest thing are the constant signs to ‘Toutes Directions’  when clearly one or more roads go in other ways.  But this time, I swear, 5km south of Angoulême I saw a sign that says ‘Toutes Directions’ in one direction and ‘Autres Directions’ in the other.  Which solves all problems. I shall try to photograph it.

Cartoon: 1^st panel:  “Our new strategy is to sell fewer units at higher margins”  2^nd : “How is that different from saying that our sales are down, so we must cut costs?”

George Carlin: The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at  the end of it? A death. What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home.  You get kicked out  when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work.  You work forty years till you’re young enough  to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating … you finish off as an orgasm.

I have now largely abandoned my hand bag (during the week it was called a brief case), because I can just about accommodate everything in pockets. Just.  Credit cards, keys, loose change, handkerchief, money (cash), phone, pens, glasses, business cards, driving licence.  Abroad I have to carry a passport too.  That is minimal.  But if I am going to an opening or a theatre (say) I need the tickets too.  I used to carry a cigar case and matches, which just tipped the balance, since my glasses now get carried (dangerously) in a top pocket.  But I should like also to take the new (over a year) small thin digital camera.  That would mean returning to a handbag – so I NEVER have it with me when I want it.  In the briefcase I would also put a catalogue (viewing), magnifying glass, torch (tools of the trade).

It occurs to me that the list can well be compared to the list of the possessions at the beginning of Mark Twain’s immortal Tom Sawyer :”[Apple had been eaten] … a kite in good repair, a dead rat on a string to swing it, twelve marbles, a jew’s harp, a piece of blue bottle glass to look through, a spool cannon,  a key that wouldn’t unlock anything,  a fragment of chalk,  a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six firecrackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a dog collar – but no dog;  the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.

I have long realised that if I put milk in coffee there is still the same amount of caffeine in the cup as before. If I put water in the whisky I have not reduced the alcohol in my glass.  But the other day I had taken on a little too much wine the night before and felt the need for immediate rehydration in the morning.  Hence I got revelation in a cup of tea.  If you drink tea 'black' (which I often do) it leaves quite a marked brown ring in the cup.  This is the tannin and various things the tea contains, perhaps combining with the hardness in London water (as soap does). This was my first cup.  If however you put milk in, and especially if you put milk in first, it doesn't do it, or nothing like as much.  Ergo the tannins are attaching preferentially to the MILK and you are drinking it and them.  So tea with milk is STRONGER than black.   I never thought of that before.

A kind friend sent me a volume of essays and poems by Kurt Tucholsky (of whose existence I had been unaware) – obviously a mixed bag and some of it strangely distant from my experience, like the office cartoons, Dilbert,  in the IHT of which I can make nothing.   But one little essay, dated 1927, rang a bell (almost literally), a long diatribe against the intrusiveness of the telephone, the inability not to answer it, its precedence over those present.  What I wonder would he have made of the mobile (handy, portable, cell)?  Yet the fact that in England it is now nearly universal, as many phones as populace, must tell one something.  People want this, desire it, need it.  They talk, chatter, gossip, check up, and communicate as they go along all day – obviously in an alienated society of individuals the mobile phone provides the link that the herd used to gain by proximity.  On the ski slope, at work, on the commuter train, at the bus stop, shopping, stopping, walking, sitting, knitting, resting, testing, in bed, in the car, illegal when driving, skiving, every moment contact; and further text messages (SMS) and voice mail arrive even when sleeping. 

Concerts and theatres now are obliged to demand and announce that phones (and alarmed watches) be switched off, but usually one or other does go off during the performance.  The interval has not started, the performance is not over yet, an encore perhaps about to be played, the clapping is still loud but some people are already phoning – what do they need to say so soon? Can they even hear anything in the noise? In the Paris Metro the phone has a good signal, in the London Underground there is silence, blessed lack of contact.  What does that say?   Perhaps only that the London tunnels are deeper than the French. But my mobile phone is nearly always on too, except in concerts and nowadays I switch it off (mostly) at dinner, if I am with friends, off as I ring the door bell. Sometimes I get home before I remember to switch it on again or even forget till the following morning.

In the channel tunnel the train stops.  I don’t like this much. An announcer tells us:  “We have been brought to a controlled stop.  We expect to depart as soon as possible.”   If you bother to analyze the sentence it means exactly nothing, except that it hasn’t broken down. It meant to stop.  None of the assistants knows why. Soon it starts again and we emerge. On Saturday 12^th March I skied in Switzerland, cold crisp snow, heavenly sunlight, pure winter pleasure. A blizzard was forecast for the afternoon or the next day but never materialized.  I drove on a dry road to Paris the next day.  Paris was cold and grey but by Wednesday in London I was out without a coat.  Thursday morning, in sunshine, I awoke to birdsong and saw the little sticky buds on the chestnut tree opposite my bathroom window.  Spring had arrived and the lawn needed mowing.  I did it in what I call my lunch break.

You will remember the Schiavo case, and that after 15 years unconscious she was finally allowed to die.  I am outraged by that case almost more than about Iraq.  Iraq can be called an error of judgement and there are or were genuine arguments on both sides, though the aftermath was bodged. At the time I think I might have gone the other way (it is so easy to be so sure afterwards) but on the whole I acquiesced and shrugged and thought the legal case rather poor but maybe, if that's what they want to do, what is to me?  There are people who think it was justified.  I am pretty sure I was wrong in taking it as lightly as I did, but I am absolutely certain the "Hard cases make bad Law". 

It is a tribute to the American Legal System (who on the whole do not always get a good press), that they have stuck to the letter of the law (which is their job) and everyone else, even including, I suspect, the husband Schiavo, behaved disgracefully. I am no constitutional expert and don't care much about 'States' Rights’ but I am certain that if ever a President should NOT have signed a hasty and ill thought out law, this was it. The contrast between his record on accepting the death penalty at leisure for healthy adults and his opportunistic acquiescence here (and DeLay allowed no delay in making even worse comments – he now wants to impeach the judges) is unspeakable.  Later in the year there was considerable delay in helping New Orleans and Delay delayed and is being impeached.

By contrast, and under a similar blaze of publicity, the Pope himself was allowed to die in quiet dignity.  Whether the Pope was a ‘good man’ must be between him and his god, but for me he remains a deeply flawed and reactionary figure.  The church, all the churches, all religious establishments remain deeply antagonistic to scientific and moral progress.  Every new thing is opposed. Why?

Why indeed?  I think it is because the religious instinct depends on certainty, sells certainty (as do some ‘religious’ political creeds, even so-called ‘scientific’  creeds – call them scientistic) whereas science is not about certainty – it is about hypothesis, doubt and investigation, questioning and progression.  This is a radically different mindset.  The scientist (in principle if not always in practice – for some people science is also a religion) asks and questions, quests and finds and CHANGES HIS MIND in the light of new evidence. Science is fundamentally sceptical, whereas religion claims an absolute truth which it cannot deliver. It feels threatened by any challenge to it, any evidence to the contrary.  To me it seems obvious that the faiths (the very word is bothersome) have been wrong about every observable fact of the physical universe – this much is often conceded by many who nevertheless profess faith. 

But if they have been wrong about the thunderbolt and the plague, the age of the world and the descent of evolution, and the nature of the quantum, why should I believe the churches have any moral authority either?  Science is the triumph of evidence over authority. John Paul II was always for authority, perhaps because he grew up under authoritarian regimes, first the Nazis and then under the Soviets.  He was not the only person to substitute one absolute authority for another, even if his was more much benign.

Now Rupert Murdoch, discussing the decline of printed newspapers worldwide says that today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings  “don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important.”  They use the internet, blogs, other sources of direct information including podcasts (whatever they are) to find out what happened and make up their own minds.  If this is true then it certainly helps to account for the problems Pope Benedict XVI will face. The church still believes in handing down wisdom and demanding obedience de haut en bas and, irrespective of the message itself, is thus profoundly out of tune with the philosophy of the times.  I think modern people are indeed disrespectful, have no thoughts of ‘elders and betters’, the parvenus discussed above.  We are all intellectual parvenus in each generation. And we do make up a rabble, but a democratic rabble, of disparate opinions, with many perceived needs and desires which modern consumer capitalism is well placed to cater to.  And I think the more decentralised modern churches are better placed to cater to these people, where they want catering to, than the more authoritarian, centralising, paternalistic Roman Church.  Supermarket religion, people picking up only the little bits off the shelf that appeal for that day or that need – this is what Papa Ratzi has most objected to. That is the modern world, and he may have to get used to it.

Mathematics and science in general are a way of talking about the physical universe. They are not necessarily a direct representation of what is going on, of what ‘really’ ‘exists’ (both words could do with careful definition), but science produces results, mostly technological, medical, agricultural etc. which have been largely beneficial, and on which our civilisation is based.  Religion, which has also contributed to our way of life, though I think decreasingly,  is another way for some people to talk about the universe.  No longer convincingly descriptive (to most of us) it nevertheless produces results, mostly moral and what those who respond to it call spiritual. Those who can respond find it comforting and useful.  In neither case, scientific or religious, need truth strictly speaking be involved, nor absolute certainty.  But there is a most unamiable desire of the human being to impose his own particular outlook on others,  which perhaps has to do with insecurity.  I think the scientists handle their doubts better and with more tolerance.

Richard Feynman “The character of physical Law”  talking inter alia about flying saucers (and astrology): ” …from my knowledge of the world  that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.”

“I know it like the back of my hand” so says the proverb.  Really?  If I look at my hands at all  I think I usually look at the palms (which I would describe as the front) though I do not read the lines for meaning or prophesy.  If I look at anything, if I ‘know’ any part of my body really well it must be my finger nails – I do not go in for much manicure, but I have to look pretty carefully to cut them, and they constantly fray and split and chip as I put my hands in hazardous places in kitchen or car: I think I know the nails on my hands quite well.  Of course as I type the hands are exposed and I can see them clearly enough – but I am looking at the keys and the screen, not the back of my hands. As I get older they wrinkle and if I do not get too fat they will wrinkle more.  There is a complex system of veins clearly visible, more visible in some lights or at some times of day, but I could not draw even an approximation of their patterns from memory.  I think I know your face, your sparkling eyes, better than the back of my hands.

I was asked what I am up to and answered: Up to?  Well I still pretend to be in business as a dealer in old master paintings. Sometimes I buy  a picture and sometimes, mirabile dictu, someone buys a picture from me. By this means together with a few commissions and bits and pieces and a couple of valuations, I sort of make as much as I need to live. In principle I was trying to reduce my holding in paintings (increase monetary capital) but the temptation to buy is too great and so I think my stock goes UP - which I suppose is the missing profit on the deals. All in all ok.

Five days in Vienna:  The Viennese are very proud of themselves and their city but so are most peoples (“Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London so ….”   etc in New York and Paris and similar songs probably everywhere). It is in fact a nice city, very compact though this also gives it a slightly cramped feeling. Because you can walk everywhere in the centre you do, and get very sore feet on hard cobbles.  The Viennese are very proud of how much it has improved in the last few years, but I find this hard to judge. Yes, there is a tube line and an efficient train to the airport and credit cards are now taken in most places (though by no means all) but there is still the same kind of aggressive smugness (Aren’t we wonderful?) that seems to be a sign of some nervous insecurity. Students in ill fitting eighteenth century stageprop frock coats aggressively sell concert and opera tickets on the street, but music was always a big thing. The new Liechtenstein Museum is fine and Modern Art is catered for and … I sort of thought of the Vienna as she was some ten years ago, then and now, like a rather grand dowager duchess. 

She still wore her jewels, which were genuine and impressively grand, she had an impeccable lineage, a great past, her children (the old Empire) were adult and gone and causing some bother here and there, but they still came back home to pay their respects from time to time.  Nevertheless, she alone, still young enough to be attractive, had a grandiose, but slightly sour quality, the times of her greatness past and nothing much to look forward to.   That was then.   And now?  She is very attractive, she has perked up, not quite for another majestic marriage nor yet an impressive late life career of her own.  But I think she has a toy boy, a young lover who, not quite respectable perhaps, is discreet enough to be hidden, and is both flattering her ego, stroking her sensibilities and giving her enormous pleasure. She looks younger and there is a spring in her stride, a twinkle back in the eye. But objectively nothing much has changed and she wonderes how long he will stay.  I think of the glamorous Marschallin at the beginning of Der Rosenkavalier. 

In between I live alone, go out, date as you might say, socialise, eat, go to fairs, cook (I like to cook), view auctions, read, try to control my weight (fail mostly in this), write a little of this and that, and get older by one year every year. Same as everyone else but I have got to 67 so sometimes I feel a little slower. I still like to ski but not so much either. Sometimes my children allow me to buy them or cook them a meal.

I suppose those paragraphs could sum up the whole letter until the middle of the year. I went to an exhibition of so called ‘naïve art’.  Some enthusiastic onlooker proclaimed “It brings out the childish in one”. If it does then that is exactly what I don’t like about it.  Like Disney, who claims to “have a dream” (I must say that my own dreams are quite different), like the presumed virtues of innocence (which are mostly just ignorance), like the reading of trashy “airport” novels, this naiveté is a form of escapism into infantilism.  The modern psychological formulation of these manifestations, excrescences, sometimes kitsch and surrealism, can be summed up as being in denial.  When I look at Caravaggio, or Rubens or even the slickest Raphael, when I read Shakespeare (or Donne or Goethe), when I hear Bach or Schubert or Bartok, there is no escapism, no denial.  Dvorak, Tolstoy, Chardin honestly face the world in different ways.

Childish things should be for children, as St Paul said, to protect their psyches and slowly teach them about the realities of life. Horrific fairy tales toughen children for later real, but usually fortunately lesser horrors.  We, who fortunately have lived charmed lives in Western Europe (and America) these last 50 years should grow up and face the real world in life, as in art, which is already once removed, an allegorical sublimation of life. “How’s life?” they ask.   Pretty good on the whole, but there are shadows and skeletons and hardships round some corners – let art reflect these, clearly and honestly, not cover them in chintz curtains and lace doyleys.

I have recounted before, that I have a bird feeder in the garden to which tits and sparrows, greenfinches and other little songbirds come.  Considering the mess they make it is gratifying that the two fat wood pigeons and the occasional starling also come and pick the seeds of the ground beneath.  But of course I have to keep it supplied and they eat a lot.  When I went away for ten days they took nearly a week to rediscover that I had refilled it.  Of the seeds available to me, I have found that ‘sunflower hearts’ are the best liked which is fine by me.  But today I noticed that they come in two sorts which look identical except for the colour of the bag.  They also cost the same: one is called Hi-energy birdseed and the other just Sunflower Hearts. Both are recommended by the Royal Soc. Protection of Birds and the first is also helpfully labelled 560 Cals/g the second 620 Cals/g.  Hold it. Yes, the Hi-energy has FEWER calories than the other.  Who are these marketing people? On the same shopping trip I bought a packet of fresh shelled peas – the label said ‘sweet and vibrant’ – yes, VIBRANT.  Sweet I understand – probably they add sugar, but what happens to a pea for it to become vibrant? Will it be petillant on the tongue, the champagne of vegetables? Or is it dancing. Snap, crackle, pop.

I went to Olympia Fair and at last managed to buy a beautiful long light rhino horn – always wanted one but it was always either too expensive or not nice.  Then I walked round the fair brandishing it – and to my surprise lots of people had no idea what it was.   Amy Page (US veteran art journalist), who did know, suggested I might be going to grind it up for aphrodisiac.  NO, no says I – and then I had a real original thought.  What will save the rhino from extinction?  If anything can save the great beast from the predations of the silly superstitious Chinese it is surely …Viagra.  Sell them Viagra, sell it as rhino juice or horn powder if necessary, mix it perhaps with horn powder (using keratin from hair or buffalo horn) and thus save the real rhino. Pfizer to the rescue of the greens, big Pharma using the might for eco-friendly superstition to overcome the vices of ignorance. etc.etc. Give them something that works and they might not feel the need to kill the poor big lumbering prehistoric pachyderm. Hooray.

Parable of the Fox and Magpies: I woke at six to a huge cacophony in the garden and went to look.  Bold as brass, sitting in the middle of the lawn was a fox, threatened and shouted at by four magpies (I could only see three but the fourth was clearly audible in the Pawlonia tree to the right). One bird was on the lawn itself, not a foot from him, jumping closer and further and eventually pecked at his tail. And again.  He jumped up, the bird flew onto the old swing to join the other two and they all screamed and yelled and eventually he ambled off, pretending he had to go to work now anyway.   The Moral of the story is: Magpies don’t like a mangy old fox either.  or   One fox is not equal to four magpies or (any suggestions?).

I seem to be on birds this year – we shall “…soar like eagles” someone said to me.   Maybe, but I have never actually seen an eagle in flight. I have seen kestrels, buzzard, falcon (I think) but associate them with hovering and then a killer plunge to death of prey.  I have seen a white owl swoop silently out of a wood at dusk, low over the meadow and off between the trees. Magnificent and eerie.  For all that, I think my favorites are rooks and crows. I have seen them tumbling and darting in a stiff stormy wind and cannot but think they are enjoying themselves.  Maybe they are showing off to each other but I suspect, if the idea is not to anthropomorphic, that they are having fun. Up and up, then close wings and fall spiraling out of the sky, catch just before the ground, off to left or right, up and over – wonderful. Maybe it is courtship display.

And I have sat with a ‘sundowner’ in Italy, a cool Campari at the end of the day, and have seen gulls coming in from the sea, or from further up the coast, to find the rising thermals near the warmed cliffs at eventide, then spiraling motionless up and up in the warmed air until they are high enough to glide in with least effort to their night roosts, while others join the stack beneath them.  Hundreds and hundreds for an hour or two at dusk, like morning airliners at Heathrow (but going up the stack, not down).

I saw a large buzzard sailing along side the motorway in Switzerland, and very pretty he looked.  But in truth he was probably scavenging for road kill, which is not quite so romantic. Crows do that too, sitting just on the edge of the carriageway and popping out to nibble at squashed wildlife.  But in Japan I hear, there are crows who intelligently sit on the top of traffic lights with a nut in their beaks. They cannot actually crack the nut, but they wait till the lights are red, fly down and carefully place it under the front wheel of a car. When the lights have changed and the nut is crushed they fly down again and pick up the pieces before the next lights. Clever birds, memes at work powering new evolutionary directions (would a creationist accept the traffic light as Bible-given?), but I pondered. Over a high span bridge across the motorway near Bern are three model vultures, silhouetted against the darkling sky.  Presumably they are to warn motorists to be careful, of the consequences of dangerous driving – unless they are real vultures!

And even the ugly old Marabou stork in Kenya years ago, so unattractive a scavenger when on the ground, in the air, with that huge wingspan, soars and flies with amazing grace. I have seen film of the Andean Condor doing the same.  And I love to watch the house martins collect insects (or are they drinking?) from the surface of a pool (like the aerobatic swift):  I also still like the mad butterfly, tumbling flopping sinking fluttering in the breeze like the daffodils of Wordsworth. 

The butterfly, a cabbage white,

(His honest idiocy of flight)

Will never now, it is too late,

Master the art of flying straight.

Yet has - who knows so well as I? -

A just sense of how not to fly:

He lurches here and here by guess

And God and hope and hopelessness.

Even the aerobatic swift

Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Robert Graves

Eagles may be the very image and allegory of nobility and strength, Fascist or Habsburg and USA and Tsarist Russia but raptors they remain, impressive when fishing, the white sea eagle picking salmon off the water,  less attractive when scavenging lambs placentas in a highland sand pit. I think I still like my butterfly supping nectar, because I never managed to fly straight.  But if it must be a bird then I’ll settle for the rooks in flight and my sparrows.  Sparrows and blue finches, greenfinches and that pair of beautiful, sleek well dressed if slightly overweight wood pigeons that flop from roof to roof between the mangy town pigeons around my garden. I feed them all at my kitchen door feeder with seeds from the supermarket.  That’s where seeds come from but a friend farms 3000 acres in Canada producing thousands of tons of grain. His wife buys seeds for the birds in their garden – they are, she explains, the ‘right’ seeds - it says so on the packet so it must be true.

It is not of course the case that Londoners did not care. Certainly they did not want a terrorist attack, though it was widely expected (not ‘if’ but ‘when’).  For that matter, I don’t think most Londoners cared too much about winning the Olympic Games Bid for 2012, despite the huge advertising campaigns, “Back the Bid”, and all the hoopla associated with winning.  It was bad luck that the party was cut short, but I do detect an overt pleasure in the public at large that the Games were won against France. The reverse is also true but England has a thousand year history of annoying the French and anything that upsets them so thoroughly must be fun.  I also detect a parallel quiet pleasure (and the G8 summit at Gleneagles helped) at showing the Americans how not to over-react to an attack, commandeer the red buses as ambulances to take the ‘walking wounded’ to hospitals, and go to work normally (more or less) the next day.  Oh yes, a few bombs, terrible, most annoying, condolences, every one is a bit cross, we shall bring to justice, re-open the tube trains, get on with it, go to work. Sotheby’s sale that very evening was seemingly unaffected.

Of course, due to the Blitz in1941 and the IRA in between we have a certain amount of practice and 9/11 was bigger, but not a few people have pointed out the contrasts of NYC and London a day or two after the outrage. On the morning it happened, I was barred from the tube.  Most people were telephoning and shrugging and deciding not to go to work. Day off, not so bad – I did the same.

But the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, on TV (and quoted in IHT) said  “This is not an attack against the rich and powerful. It is not an attack on the politicians, but on the common working people of London”  Ah so that’s it! If it were on the rich and powerful or on the pols. themselves, it would have been alright then.  And then unfortunately the police shot an innocent electrician just round the corner from where I live. I suppose it must count as ‘friendly fire’ or ‘collateral damage’ but they all lied and made excuses which did not help. No doubt they will cover up, and make a bad impression which is sad because they had appeared to be doing rather well until then.

My good friend CL justifies his desire and need to cross the Atlantic single handed in a small boat with the quotation:

I may as well confess that I have personally never been aware of any such need at all, and it has therefore, for me, indeed remained quite unexpressed. Besides I know that ‘nature’ (whoever she is) is so much more powerful than I – plate tectonics causing earthquake, volcanos and tsunami, other factors leading to Hurricane and Bird flu, locusts and HIV.  I also feel I have to do quite a lot for myself and I therefore disagree totally with almost every word of the above paragraph. Especially I object to the phrase ‘as we were meant to’ – by whom, or by what?  In Shylock’s phrase – “.. on what compulsion must I?”  By what right does Mr Palley claim to speak for everyone?

Mistake not. I have no objection to my friend going on this trip: I give a slight shake of my head and some sympathy for his family.  If he gets back safely, as I most sincerely hope,  I shall joyously drink a glass of congratulatory wine with him and hope that will be the end of it.  But alas I doubt it will be the end – these people carry their demons with them, over the Atlantic and back and then some new challenge will arise in his unrequited soul. That is his, and his family’s problem, but why do people like this, nice, otherwise kind and sensible friends, presume to speak for all of mankind? For me?  As a matter of record most people do not feel the need to cross the Atlantic solo or climb Everest, or, in my case, even go for a walk in the country. Therefore I do not do it, though I do know another man of about the same age that crossed the Atlantic solo. But my genuinely Naval friend J. (Royal Navy) declared that he liked to cross the Atlantic in BIG boats, not small ones.  I am afraid I regard this ‘challenge’ as high Romanticism, neither sound Biology nor good Psychology.

from IHT “…families with small children board first.  … as the craft fills up, it becomes clear that they and their kids have been seated in a special sadist section, among Idi Amin, the Etiquette Committee of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a perfect 4-year old wonder child who will spend the whole flight quietly reading The Economist.  It is an iron rule of plane travel that the parents who are trying to hush their children are more annoying  to their fellow passengers  than the children who are being hushed. Accordingly, other fliers in the area begin to develop hostile feelings toward the desperately shushing parents.”

Coffee and Caffeine: I suppose I drink too much (too much for whom? by what standard?). My joke is that I would take it intravenously if I could.  On a day in town, especially if I have had only tea for breakfast I may take three or four or five double espressos as I go along. I feel fine on it and I fancy it may heighten my metabolic rate enough to keep me going and burn off some food I have excessively consumed – an aid to slimming.  At home I make either a small pot of Turkish or a large (1 litre) cafetière.  But now I notice that the little Turkish coffee pot is used with three large scoops of coffee and I put the same amount (of a different coffee) in the cafetière. So I can get the same caffeine rush from two little black cups of ‘proper’ coffee, as from a whole cafetière all to myself.  But not the same fluid intake of course. 

Marketing dishonesty again: They are trying to sell a new drink Tea Latte, with cinnamon etc. and frothy milk on top. It sounds disgusting to me but it also says 99% caffeine free! So it contains 1% caffeine? How much caffeine in ordinary tea or coffee.  I daresay my toughest  espresso is 97% caffeine free or some such. In fact I looked it up and 300mg caffeine is regarded as a modest to medium daily intake. A good espresso has about 100mg caffeine for 7oz cup (enormous), tea about a third of that (35mg) but one drinks more. On the whole it seems quite easy to get 300mg per day with tea and coffee and as usual all those %% are misleading and dishonest marketspeak.  Beware %.

I never learned to pack light – but each year I hope to take a smaller suitcase. I eagerly get it down, and I start to plan. I have my Euros and Swiss Francs. Or Canadian dollars. I have books to read, and magazines, guide books and maps. I have paper bags with presents in them and presents without bags, and bags on their own; and I have water bottles to drink from and an empty insulated picnic bag.  I have umbrellas and a walking stick, walking boots and trainers, sunglasses and three pairs of reading glasses and tinted reading glasses.  Camera and binoculars, (peep – interruption – text arrival); toilet bags and Victoria’s electric toothbrush (left behind – but I in turn will leave my own here, and brush manually). I have passport and horn handled Swiss army knife (the Swiss army have quite different knives), and a charger for the phone. Maybe I should take the charger for the camera too – it ran out the only time I wanted to take photos before. I shall take a hat which I probably will not wear, and as many pairs of shoes as I dare, dressing gown (I put it in first for fear of forgetting) and slippers. Only two ties, belts, short sleeved shirts and long sleeved shirts. And I have tried on my linen trousers to make sure I can close them (yes) so they are in. And all that before a put in a blazer and some shirts and pants – ordinary clothes.  I have taken down  the big suitcase after all.

Good book: The Mirror of the Gods. Malcolm Bull.  of an Wtewael (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick).   “Here there has been an explosion, shooting crowds of putti high into the air, making the clouds spasm like intestines, and throwing the elegant gods and goddesses into confusion. On the right, instead of a stately procession bringing food to the table under the direction of Minerva, come Bacchus, Silenus and a host of drunken revellers.  Hercules, who according to van Mander had been in charge of security at the earlier event, stands gesturing into the air.  Below Mars and Venus have left the table to party in private, and Saturn, who had been politely nibbling on the arm  of one of his children, forgets his manners and turns to gorge himself on a more succulent sibling. The muses, formerly playing under Apollo’s direction, now play on without him, looking anxiously at each other as they try to keep time. Only Pan, the god of panics, keeps his cool.

He goes on to discuss many other versions in the late sixteenth and early 17^th centuries, “and each in turn  seems to have more food, more wine, and a generally lower standard of behaviour.”  In some versions, the apple that Eris (Discord) throws in, is itself inscribed, “For the Fairest” with Mercury pointing to the inscription, but mostly Eris calls it out. “It makes you wonder” the author says, “how many of the goddesses could actually read” 

There’s a thought. In the Bible they read – in classical mythology, I think, no one ever does. Maybe the ability to read, the book, is a more important difference between Classical mythology and that of the Hebrews (and their Christian offspring) than is monotheism.  Islam also refers to the ‘the peoples of the book’.

Coming back from holiday by boat across a rather rough channel I saw a couple of very large, aerodynamic birds that were unfamiliar. Beautiful in flight, black wingtips, I later found they were gannets, whom I had always thought of as an epitome of greed. With a wing span of nearly two metres, they dive to fish and catch what they can presumably, fly and dive into deep water. Amazing beautiful creatures.

A man perceives a need. A pair of shoes, something for dinner, six cans of beer.  He knows roughly where these are to be had – he goes there, he examines what is on offer carefully, he buys.  If he does not find what he wants, or if he does not like what he sees, he will go to another shop, or a third. He may see something on the next shelf, or in the second shop, that he fancies too and he buys that as a surprise present to himself or to a loved one. He may not find anything he wants, so he abandons the task.  Either way he then goes home, and gives the matter no more thought until next time.

A woman does not specify quite so precisely. She perceives some sort of a need, she has not been to the shops recently, so she goes shopping. She scans several shops with which she may well be familiar, discovers a pair of shoes and remembers she does need a new pair. She also remembers that dinner needs to be bought and, ah yes, six cans of beer would be nice. In the end she comes home triumphantly bearing her purchases or empty handed – the same result as the man though it will have taken much longer. She also knows more of what is on offer, what else is on offer, where else to go. She has learned, she has discussed it with a friend, both before and maybe over coffee near the shops. The whole thing is an event, an occasion, a situation, and she carries out a sort of post mortem afterwards. Should she rather have bought the other, darker pair, a steak rather than a fish? She wouldn’t mind an opinion from the man, but that is not an option – he has long ago forgotten what he saw in the shops, has no feelings of triumph from his expedition, and is no longer interested. Fish or fowl, lets drink the beer we have, and maybe next week we’ll think again.

I am not talking of profligacy and ‘shopping disease’ or ostentatious consumption. Just daily commerce. There are even busy executive women who can compress the process into less time than the leisured man may take to make his purchases.  But though you cannot measure it with a stop watch, the actual processes are nevertheless quite different.

Just like sex. In the end both sexes come to the same result (they have to, and that’s why it works). And, like every other human activity,  it is not an absolute.  The early stages of courting may well be hugely protracted, and may even send a man to the shops to scout out what he can buy and bring to his beloved. Necessity, oestrogen, distraction, may well bring a young highly-sexed woman, or a preoccupied female executive, to bed with a surprisingly inappropriate partner.  She may sometimes allow the same thing to happen in shops, if she is unhappy or lonely;  that syndrome is now dignified as ‘retail therapy’.  We react to the vibrancy of peas (vide supra).

But I think my parable holds for shopping quite well – of course it is only that way round.  Human sexuality evolved over millions of years, shopping is a product of the last few hundred years at most. We are forced to use the behaviours we inherit.

Urban wildlife report: It has rained at last (mid September) and that has brought the snails out – where do they hide in the dry weather? I crunch on them by accident in the dark and they crawl even into the house,  But the snails bring back the blackbirds. They clear the crushed ones quickly and smash the whole ones on a stone – the garden is again alive with birds. The tits are back for the sunflower seeds in the feeder, a lone squirrel is chirping maybe for a mate. The fox I suspect is nesting again in the far left hand corner – I see him sometimes at dawn.  But where are my sparrows and greenfinches? I rather fancy there are fewer spiders this year too.

A week later I can happily report that my greenfinches and sparrows are back – I had missed them.  Though much smaller the tits are braver and will also peck at the peanut holder.  The greenfinches seem especially shy, but even the sparrows seem shyer than I had those cheeky town birds in memory.

Forgetfulness (Billy Collins)

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of.

It is as if, one by one,  the memories you used to harbour

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic pack its bag,

and even now as you memorise the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with L as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems  to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Oh, but it is true. My ability to recall names I do really know (used to know) is much diminished. And nearly every day when I leave the house, set the alarm, lock the door, I have to go back, unlock unset to fetch something I have forgotten – mobile phone, credit cards, shopping list, instruction on how to reach my destination, invitation... sometimes (often) I have driven round the block before I remember and have to turn back.   As I said at the beginning of this letter, when I routinely had a brief case (I wore a hand bag too which acted as the same thing) I could put all my junk in that and leave it there. Now I am thinking of making a list and pinning it to wall by the door – check list: keys, coins, money clip, handkerchief. Credit cards, freedom pass (= tube ticket), mobile phone, reading glasses, £1 coins for meters, car key.  And also a ‘to-do’ or shopping list, instructions (how to get there), invitations. That’s all without actually carrying anything – and I am sure I have forgotten something even on the list itself.  So far I have not ever forgotten my house keys – that is the nightmare that haunts my failing memory. Once I came back from holiday and set off the alarm because I couldn’t remember the alarm code. PIN numbers are another plague, code words, ‘memorable’ dates.

Lest again I be accused of not mentioning my own family, Guy works as a Hedge Fund analyst for Erste Bank (an East-expanding Austrian outfit) and Luisa now has a formal training contract towards clocking up enough years to become an independent and fully qualified solicitor (Lawyer) in September 2007.  They both seem quite contented and stable and progressing along life, so I suppose that is satisfactory too. I speak to each every week (sometimes oftener) and see them about every ten days or two weeks (they have to see their mother as well).

Thinking and reading about the international situation, (though we live quite comfortably in truth) I came across two quotations, though I unfortunately failed to note who wrote them. For what it is worth I read of the French that  “ .. their one and only desire has been not to resemble the Americans, a risk, I assure them, they do not run.” and then

Of England, of the complex and almost infinite England, of that torn and lateral island that rules continents and seas, I will not risk a definition; it is enough to recall that it is perhaps the only country that is not fascinated with itself, that does not believe itself to be Paradise or Utopia. I think of England as one thinks of a loved one, as something unique and irreplaceable. It is capable of reproachable indecision, or terrible slowness, but also capable of rectification and contrition, of returning to wage once more, when the shadow of a sword falls across the world, the cyclical battle of Waterloo.  Hooray and yes to that. For some reason I think this was Borges.  Maybe both quotes. Any offers?

I have consciously left unaltered the entries into this document written at the beginning of the year unless totally belied by later experience. Though business has been unremarkable (to put it mildly) I feel quite cheerful about life, so it is perhaps time to introduce Virginia.  Virginia looks fair to bringing my wanderjahre, like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, my years of wandering, to a close.  Though of largely German origin and Italian affinities (her most formative years were spent in Ascona, Ticino), and though in recent years she has spent much time in Italy, Virginia is Canadian and her children and grandchildren (and an apartment, which is her home) are in Toronto. We feel very comfortable together and by the time you get this we shall have spent several weeks at a time together in Europe, in London and in Toronto, with gaps in between, followed by Christmas and New Year in Verbier with my children and their partners. We have no detailed plans after that but Maastricht is fixed in my calendar and by then we shall have known each other nearly a year.

E-Mail from USA: The British are feeling the pinch in relation to recent bombings, and the alert level has been raised from 'miffed' to "peeved'. Soon though the levels may have to be raised again to "irritated' or even "a bit cross".  Londoners have not been a "bit cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out.

Terrorist activity may yet be re-categorised from "tiresome" to "a bloody nuisance";  the last time a "bloody nuisance" warning level was announced was during the great fire in 1666.

It never came to that, but I think it is surprisingly close to what I said and wrote – vide supra – in the first days after the bombs went off.

Items for sale in supermarkets and shops are often labelled “As seen on TV” – presumably to reinforce an advertising campaign and confirm to the poor, ignorant, blind and forgetful shopper that this very item is indeed the thing he so admired, was urged to admire and buy, the actual marque he was not supposed to forget, that has the status of having been shown on TV.  Since I do not own a TV this of course falls on deaf ears (blind eyes) but today I bought, without noticing, as I often buy, a packet of four ‘little gem’ lettuces. I like them because they are compact and tight and almost have flavour (a thing I usually miss in lettuce).  But when I got home I noticed they bore the triumphant round tag  “As seen on TV”.  What for heaven’s sake was shown? A lettuce? This very lettuce? This kind of lettuce? Is it so newsworthy, advertising worthy, exciting, CELEBRITY conscious? Shown on TV like Beckham and Bush, Madonna and New Orleans, and Lettuce.  I once saw a sticker on an apple that said ‘ready to eat’.  Is the public really so dumb – does all this tell us about the public or the marketing director?

I went of for the weekend to Antwerp.  The Cathedral is spectacular, the museums stuffed with good pictures, fine old buildings with ravishing internal gardens, an elegant hotel. Good restaurants sell mussels and sea food (and lots of other places sell instant rubbish too) and the whole place ought to be superb.  I suppose one could call it vibrant, like the peas mentioned earlier in this letter,  but here it vibrates with Flemish rap music, tattooed and pierced yobs and yobettes with squaling infants, multicultural with the lowest common denomination of each pan-European culture. Not really, they must be working or do something – they are well fed and in good mood. Holiday even.  Jeans, bare midriffs, leather and studs. I escaped into a haven of smoked eel and crab and ate too much. (There is even a sign pointing to a ‘Haven’ but it surely means harbour (like German - Hafen). I ate too much having promised myself, after the excessive breakfast in the hotel, that I would have no lunch at all.

The language is opaque: I do not understand what they call Dutch (and the Dutch call Flemish), though I can make out quite a lot by mispronouncing it as German if it is written. In fact they nearly all speak French but they won’t. The ticket lady at the museum is being helpful, torturing herself in appalling failing broken English.  But no prompt from me will induce her to say a word in French, which, middle aged, she surely speaks fluently.  If not Flemish, then pidgin English, if not English then better to be misunderstood, a total preference for incomprehension rather than a hint of francophony.

Excellent mussels and oysters – I spoke to the chef and told him I had not had such good mussels since Ireland. Ah yes, these come from the protected waters of Zeeland, only half brackish, half fresh water, less salty.  These mussels and oysters, the shellfish which filter 6 litres of water a day each actually DO come from Ireland.  They have to spend at least 14 days (only 14 days?) in Zeeland waters to acquire the name of Zeeland oysters and presumably get the slightly less salty distinctive flavour. Oh, that’s OK then, because the lobsters come from Canada and the Dutch flowers come from Kenya and are flown in each night by Martinair to Amsterdam to be relabelled and sold in London & NYC in Dutch boxes. But it takes rather longer for a Muslim immigrant to become Dutch.

I also had the intense pleasure of walking round an exhibition with the curator who had put much of it together and written a lot of the catalogue. An honour and a privilege, but mostly a pleasure to be forced once again to look at each painting and drawing intensely and to be forced to think, and articulate why one likes or indeed and especially dislikes what one sees, what one disagrees with on the label and why, to modify and change one's mind.  I envy those who have the discipline to do that each time on their own.

The late David Carritt said years ago that one tends to go round a museum ignoring the Raphaels and Rembrandts but fixing on a minor obscure artist with whom one is unfamiliar. But it's worse than that. After I left the exhibition I went upstairs to the permanent collection and indeed found myself glancing at the big Rubens paintings, the three magnificent Jordaens paintings (which I happen to have examined in Maastricht only last year). I stopped for a moment (see below) before the strange Fouquet with its mechanical milking machine, and the Frans Floris devils, and had to stop myself being accelerated out of the building (I was tired too). Look again and look and look and see. Thanks.

Later I caught a tram into town and went into the cathedral again to have another look at the three great Rubens altarpieces. But not wishing to eat more, I then wandered about and sat with just a beer in the sun amid the mussel sellers and the frites eaters. And wondered: I have read books on mediaeval banquets and I know that the poor lived close to subsistence everywhere until recently (still do in many parts of the world – bread or a rice bowl, with just a small garnish).  But what of the people in between, or even the Duke or King on a non-banquet day. What of Rubens, I thought, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. He would have largely recognised the city perhaps, he would have worked in his house, praised, encouraged or berated his assistants and now he is a bit tired and the sun is shining. He is human, intensely but also ordinarily human; he decides he needs a little fresh air and sunlight. Though he has a beautiful garden, he goes, in the company, it may be of a child or else alone, needs to get out for a moment, maybe on a small errand to look at some new material at the port side, some canvas or timber for a panel, a pigment (has that delivery of siena earth arrived yet?).  [I have since learned that he went riding every afternoon – he went on his horse as I might go to town by car]. I imagined him at ease and peckish. Like me that afternoon, he has enough money in his pocket, and he has a moment of partial relaxed leisure. I doubt he would have been offered potatoes though they existed. Street vendors maybe sold sweetmeats, honey cakes, surely moules were in the river. What if he fancied moules? Would he be able to eat them there, in the street, or if he took a bag home - how would they be cooked. I see piles of fish on a Snyders platter, but I am not interested (I am also interested) in what they did to the sturgeon or the skate.  But did they smoke the eels (if not, why not?), or grill a herring, or lightly steam the mussels with celery and white wine (why not?). The human eagerness to snack must have been as acute before macdonalds (there is indeed a macdonalds beside the cathedral now). Probably no coffee or tea – so what did Rubens (or, even earlier, Jan de Beer, or the Master of Amiens) eat or drink at four on a sunny afternoon in October?  What did they have for breakfast?

So we come to the end of another year. Once again I shall send this letter off early so that it is clear for the Christmas rush.  Obviously this material is not time sensitive, and no one is under any obligation to read it in a hurry (no one is obliged to read it at all). But I do welcome feedback – please do write back to me, agreeing or violently disagreeing too.

Virginia and I go to Verbier skiing for Christmas with my two children and their partners and maybe I shall offer some observations next year.  At my age birthdays are not worth recording or celebrating except decades or at best fivers – my next one of those is still a couple of years away. I imagine that many, if not most of the recipients of this letter feel the same way.  But I am glad to say that none have yet fallen away.

As I hope the whole of this letter indicates, I am not persuaded that the world is a wicked place and we are all doomed.  Certainly there are some bad people, bad places to be (better not to be, but not where we are), and bad times now and then.  But we have all lived well and prospered, some more than others. It was ever thus and is still so; things could easily be improved, improved faster, but things are improving, slowly. World wide, absolute poverty is less, absolute hunger is less, disease is reduced (which is why we are living longer and have pension worries).  We have problems of obesity not hunger, excess not deprivation. Many people nevertheless feel life was better before, but that was when we were younger – we all get older by the same amount each year. I feel strongly, and I believe objectively, despite Tsunami, hurricanes and Mr Bush, that life is getting slowly better for most people. But ALL people are getting older.

And so as the last dying leaves are blown away by the final November gales, my little lawn is too wet to cut, the grass is too long to leave all winter.  As the temperature drops to zero and below, cars are stranded in snow on Devonshire moors, the central heating stokes up as the price of gas increases, and I have to face the gastronomic rigours of another festive season by again making a monumental effort to control my weight gain.  Is this not a boring refrain? Would you not rather hear of foie gras and caviar, champagne and Pomerol, roast goose and chestnuts? I would certainly prefer to write of these things.

But no, first we must eat lettuce and celery, hard boiled eggs and raw fish. DG, blessed oysters at least are low in calories, high in zinc – but do I need zinc? Let us raise the spirit to higher things, Rubens in Antwerp and at the National Gallery, Bartok String Quartets, the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay to name but three. None of these are fattening - life’s ok.

At the Royal Museum of Art in Antwerp, three successive rooms each have a major extraordinary central painting of a Biblical lady exposing herself.  Cranach’s sensuous Eve, probably the most recent, was painted close to five hundred years ago.  Maybe a bit earlier, Judith (Metsys) is brutal and calculating, while the Madonna of Fouquet is perhaps just less than a hundred years earlier than Eve.  Inserted here in reverse chronological, but correct Biblical order, the extraordinary, hieratic, strangely beautiful, outrageously slim, quite bald mother with her implant breast and pneumatic child, surrounded by equally expanded, inflated latex red and blue angels, may as well serve to wish you the season’s greetings.

To all and sundry best wishes at this time, and in these times,

If you liked what I have written there is more on the literature page: Alternatively if you got bored from here or any page you can always press the Back button or Return to Home Page? or Alphabetical List to look at art.