Christmas 2006

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My Dear Friends,

For once I was delayed and I start writing this only in the New Year.  Christmas 2005 and New Year’s Eve were spent in Verbier with Virginia, my children and their partners. All was very jolly, good snow and skiing every single day and V. and I went on to St Moritz for a few days afterwards. We liked St Moritz better. I used to be snobby because the skiing was not challenging enough. But the facilities are superb and in truth I can tolerate smooth and polished pistes very well nowadays. The occasional bit of a black run, which would not be black in Val d’Isère or Zürs, is just fine by me. Anno Domini.

St Sylvestre itself was astounding. We had eaten relatively modestly and scrambled back to our room just in time for midnight. The balcony on our rooms looked out on to the main square in which a few thousand drunken revellers were singing and shouting, letting off fireworks into the sky and into the crowd, the local discos (including under our hotel) had turned their speakers outwards to create a cacophony that beggars description and certainly would have burst any attempt to measure the decibels. I think Concorde was quiet compared to the sound of this seething mass of humanity. Midnight came and we toasted each other with Champagne, kissed everyone and eventually the young decided it was time to go on to more exciting noise in various clubs.  And we oldies vainly shut the windows and curtains and so reduced the noise by about 50% - roughly to that of a commercial jet engine driving though a chicken slaughter house. And I put my head on the vibrating pillow and went to sleep on the instant.

I awoke at about 4.30 to silence and looked out of the window – a few last tired revellers were straggling home, the mess was tidied, snow sweepers and brush vans were cleaning up and the place was preparing for the morn of a new year.  By ten Guy and I were on empty slopes (he rather more tired than I) and skied until about two. Kitty joined us at that point and while they skied on I came down and home to lunch with a risen Virginia. We watched the masses rising up through the ski lifts in crowds.  Very satisfying.

In fact I was in Verbier some thirty years ago with my then new wife (Patricia) before the children were born.  I remember not having a good holiday but I also remembered a particular steep difficult slope. I had skied it a couple of times before taking the girls up and, showing off, nothing to it.  I slipped and fell down the whole mountain side, maybe four hundred feet or more. I was in fact only shaken, unhurt, though my hip flask had burst through the trousers and the jacket was in shreds.  Very dramatic and unforgettable. 

It took me a week to find the slope (just over and beyond Lac des Veaux) and it was marked as a black run, and closed. Several people skied it nevertheless including Guy but Kitty and I took the bubbles down.  I regretted this, so the next day I resolved to try. Carefully skiing all the way round the perimeter of the steep ridge of the bowl (there is a similar slope in Zürs up over Zürsersee but perhaps shorter) I was able to get perhaps a quarter of the way down, though the edge was narrow, icy and rather unpleasant.  But then I had to let go and over the almost vertical edge.  A couple of turns of course and it flattened out a bit and bingo I was down. Hooray, I looked up and was amazed at the distance I had descended in a few seconds. Then as I sped over the bottom of the valley, hooray again to have exorcised that ghost, I mused. It occurred to me then, and it gives me a most particular pleasure, at my age, to be doing things I know I shall never have to do again.  Been there, done that.  Maybe after all that is how C. feels about his heroic solo transatlantic crossing last year.

The President of the USA bombed a country he called EYE-RACK, but I swear in Verbier I was asked by an itinerant American ski instructor whether I had ever skied in GEE-STAD.  It took me a moment to figure that one out.

We have divided our duties automatically and absolutely. Virginia cooks all vegetable matter and I cook animal protein.  I suppose cheese and egg might be indeterminate for the moment but may yet settle in one direction or the other. Yogurt is definitely her domain (V.’s invariable breakfast), bacon and eggs are mine.

An unusually frank Prime Minister (of Luxembourg) said: “Actually we all know what we ought to do for the good of our countries and for Europe and maybe even for the world. And we also know how to do it. What we don’t know is how to get elected again when we have done it.”

Foods have migrated, as I commented a few years ago. Can you imagine Ireland without a potato or Italy without a tomato? – yet they are New World plants as are maize, chilli pepper  and cocoa (and tobacco).  So also with certain dishes – barbecued spare ribs (Chinese) are now universal, spaghetti Bolognaise and pizza (from Italy), and I think fast food sushi (Japan). Chicken Tikka (Indian) is now regarded as the commonest dish in England and archetypically British.  Ginger is available in every shop (nearly) and neither blueberries nor pineapples are exotic.  There are no seasons any more (we have weather reports instead): yet there are also gaps and lacunae. I know that Muslim peoples (like Jews) don’t eat pork and our local corner shops are exclusively manned by Pakistanis and Turks – and none of them sell Brussels sprouts – come to think of it not many brassicas at all – one Caribbean shop had a Savoy cabbage and I remember a Turk selling wonderful kohlrabi to eat as salad, but no sprouts anywhere. By the fourth shop (on a Sunday morning in haste) I protested and the owner was almost shocked, as if I had asked for something indecent. NOOOOOO.  I had to go to the supermarket and brave a long queue to get them, which I had been trying to avoid doing.  Come to think of it I don’t remember cabbage or sprouts in any Indian restaurant - don’t they know about sprouts?  The Chinese certainly eat huge quantities of cabbage, pickled like sauerkraut and so do Koreans.  Major food source in winter.

I like sprouts but I once read that they are particularly good at taking up heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic and lead, which poison old coal workings all over Europe. So to detoxify the top soil of the coal tips they plant sprouts, which apparently suck up the poisons and then allow other plants, grasses and trees to take over later. But though they must be harvested for disposal, you mustn’t ever eat those sprouts, which have to be disposed of most carefully, since they contain the extracted poisons. I suppose you could distil the mercury out as a form of green mining.

Roger Scruton “Nowadays no one sits for a photograph without smiling into the camera – no one, that is, except fashion models, who adopt a frozen and narcissistic scowl. Even politicians, clergymen and artists have adopted this habit of smiling into the void, attempting to have with everyone a relationship that can be had only with someone.”

Still Scruton “.. the fundamental truth about travel: that it is a mistake. Don’t leave, but stay …” .  Scruton is formidably intelligent and annoyingly right about some things and irritatingly wrong (I believe) in ways that I cannot always quite put my finger on.  But here he is surely right. I have a good friend E. who declares she will travel to see people but not things. No landscapes or buildings, only friends.  I think I can largely agree if I include business travel (seeing people) and exhibitions (can I say art counts as people?), as well as the occasional holiday to do something that I really can’t do at home (in my case, skiing).  But if that can be combined with a visit to a distant relative or friends, so much the better. Of course I must go to Canada to visit Virginia and she comes here to be with me. Person to person.

Most people travel to escape their usual life – and what determines their ‘usual life’ is themselves. And it is precisely themselves (and maybe an irritating partner or child) that they take with them on their travels.  Together with the ills of air travel, terrorism, traffic jams on all roads, the advantages of home seem clear. I suppose going on foot or on a horse had its problems too. Maybe journeying was never easy or comfortable except for the very rich. Staying at home is better if home is comfortable.

Praise were impertinence, and criticism – blasphemy. In fact this was prettily said to describe a performance by Wanda Landowska of a harpsichord sonata.  After the Danish cartoons, blasphemy is much in the news these days, but it is something I am not sure about. I don’t think I understand blasphemy.  A man (Irving) has been prosecuted, found guilty and jailed for denying the holocaust (which is illegal in Austria, though not in England); Austria, of all places, where they have not prosecuted a single Nazi war criminal. But such denial, while silly and insulting and maybe inflammatory, is not blasphemy.  I understand that freedom of speech has limits in incitement and libel but I no more believe in blood libel (Protocols of Zion) than insulting a non-existent god.  It is certainly unkind, and may well be unwise, to insult people’s cherished beliefs and it may be necessary to take the consequences of their disapproval – but it should not be illegal in a liberal democracy.  Whether the prophet is truly recognised in his own country, he is certainly not sacred here. 

Parts of the Muslim world are long accustomed to calling the USA “The Great Satan”  and I do not doubt that they have regarded the epithet as a finely judged insult – even a sort of blasphemy. I suspect they have also tended to equate Europe as a little adjunct, a minor fallen angel.  Judging from several recent articles by Islamic scholars, it is perhaps only slowly dawning on them that while religious insults may hit home to some people in America (including the President, with his direct line to the deity via his hairdryer), this line of attack largely passes Europe by. The degree of secularism, of lack of belief in god or satan, and hence of an understanding of religious insult and blasphemy, is very slowly beginning to become clear. 

In fact there is a blasphemy law in England (only against Christianity) but no one has been prosecuted for more than 150 years. As I write there is a Bill going through Parliament against “Incitement to Religious Hatred”, but that is aimed at protecting the general public from retaliation by Muslims to deliberate provocation by right wing groups.  No one thinks those neo-nazis are bastions of observant Christianity and wild-eyed Imams have been more often regarded with amused condescension, slightly unhinged, rather than taken seriously.  Now that they have managed to influence shoe bombers and others, they are being rather more closely watched and prosecuted by an uncomprehending state and amazed jurors.  The Irish used to refer to ‘godless England’ but now the epithet “Godless Europe” is more often taken as compliment rather than insult.

Paid for advertisement: Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith):  “The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency.  I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive.”

Come to think of it, perhaps the Americans have also failed to comprehend the godlessness of Europe. Maybe they do understand Islam better than we do. Who are these people, we ask, who care enough about a badly drawn and not very funny cartoon to give their lives to avenge the imagined insult?  Yet Europeans too fought duels ‘for Honour’ as little as 150 years ago, Onegin killed his best friend Lenski –  although that is also why I can’t read novels; I feel I could solve most of their problems so much more easily by twenty minutes of frank talk. 

Charles Rosen in NYRB:  “Liberal”, which used to be a term of approval, is oddly pejorative in politics today for different sides of the political spectrum on the two sides of the Atlantic – for the right wing in the United States but for the left in Europe, while “Elite”  is a term of opprobrium on both sides of the Atlantic for both left and right for entirely different reasons – for the right, an “elitist” is an unpatriotic, degenerate left-wing fan of the avant-garde; for the left, he is an undemocratic enemy of the people.

Saturday night: Do you want peace and quiet or a metropolitan excitement?  Virginia is in Toronto where her flat, in the very centre of town, is distinctly noisy despite being on the 18^th floor.  For peace and quiet come to Clapham. In the countryside there are always noises, an owl, a fox maybe, the wind resonating through the empty, leafless trees (last weekend in North Yorkshire), some sheep startled on a hillside.  In summer the country noises are more and louder, running water, leaves against a wall or each other and human noises, the sound of a car travels much further.   Here, there is silence, total silence to the point of sensory deprivation. My neighbours the F.’s (No. 24) who have children and a generally quiet dog, are in Scotland – the L’s (No.28) are in Spain, both houses, attached on either side of me, swathed in quiet mute darkness.  For a moment I hear a police siren in the distance, presumably on the high road, every so often a train can be heard rumbling by, maybe a Eurostar to Paris or Brussels, but in each case there are houses shielding the sound and it is faint and ephemeral.  Two nights ago I heard a fox (mating?). Nothing else but total absolute Trappist silence. I can put on a CD but often, as tonight, I relish the quiet. I can just read into the night, ‘burning the midnight oil’ for no reason but the pleasure of being alone.

Sometimes I fall asleep in the arm chair.  The morning is quite another thing, even Sunday morning.  At 4 o’clock two or three planes come over, I think from Dubai or the far East, and at five, a few more. Then after 6.00 am a steady stream of flights from over the Atlantic pour low into London airport, some 25 miles due west of here.  The flight path is directly over the house and it seems louder even than the altitude would justify. I also suspect there is some effect of acoustic echo – the sound seems indeed to come from the wrong direction.  One gets used to it, but it often wakes me nevertheless.  Maybe country folk sleep through the owl and don’t hear the nightingale either.

There is a silence where hath been no sound,

  There is a silence where no sound may be,

  In the cold grave - under the deep deep sea,

Or in wide desert where no life is found,

Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;

  No voice is hush'd - no life treads silently

  But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free

That never spoke, over the idle ground:

But in green ruins, in the desolate walls

  Of antique palaces, where man hath been,

Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,

  And owls, that flit continually between,

Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,

There the true silence is, self-conscious and alone.

                                                                                                                                   Thomas Hood

I sent a simple US$ cheque to USA (on my dollar account) for $17.  They sent it back because it would cost over $20 to clear it and take seven weeks. Because banks take forever and charge so much for clearing cheques, we have long been used to getting funds sent by telex and email and electronic means of one kind or another. I think this is what they really want us to do because it gives them total control to embezzle the money with no hope of tracing it for as long as they like, despite the fact that the transfer must in theory be instantaneous.  Nothing is cleared on a Friday (it falls into a Friday hole and appears on the account Monday) and around Christmas or a bank holiday they hold it as much as ten days (the Christmas hole).  But on the whole it works as long as I send bank account number, sort code, and swift code.   If I have any queries all I have to do is dial the bank, press 2, press 5, give my mother's maiden name, take away the number I first thought and the amount being sent, divide by 77 and they will respond in no more (nor less) than three hours.  By then I shall be out to a meeting and then it is the weekend and .... I shall try again. Now a German client can’t pay me because they need an IBAN Code (new to me but I guess, rightly as it turns out, International Bank Number) so I ring the bank, go through a number of the hoops relatively quickly and actually get a live banker. Hey presto and yes he does know and when he gets to his desk he will ‘generate’ one for my account. Generate?

Genitum non factum like Jesus and the Virgin Birth in the Apostle’s Creed. The phrase is usually translated into English as “begotten not made”, but from earliest catechism classes I did not understand the distinction, which was, I was urgently assured, so important theologically. Now if the bank manager can ‘generate’ an IBAN number for me out of his computer, I suppose that helps explain how a god ‘begets’ (but does not ‘make’) a redeemer out of a virgin womb. Scary stuff indeed. But the bank rings back with a simple 2 digit prefix and the old sort code and account number all in a straight line of numbers.  That seems rather simple low tech, low security.

Walking round Dijon V. and I were astonished to come across the original shop of M. Maille, still open to sell mustard since 1747.  We bought some and also little painted faience pots at quite exorbitant prices, and filled with mustard on tap, like beer from the keg. But I failed to ask in what form the original mustard was sold.  What is certain is that in England mustard was sold as seed to be ground in a mortar or as powder to be mixed at table with a little water.  Very fresh and pungent and you can still get mustard powder in England (and Canada) but I have never seen mustard powder on the continent – certainly not in France where I tried once to buy it. Four hundred different mustards but none as powder. 

I remember the story that sometime in the nineteenth century, Mr Colman (I was at school with one of his descendants), decided to sell mustard as paste. For all I know he was copying M. Maille.  He was derided as an idiot since it was so easy to mix, no one would pay extra for it. Even if they did, it was said, the amount of mustard used would be so minute he could never make it pay. “Ah no” he is said to have replied “I shall profit not on the mustard consumed, but the far greater quantity left on each plate.” 

Just so, it occurred to me, with glue.  Old cabinet makers boiled their glue in delightfully smelly double pots, which they reheated and augmented as necessary. There was even a glue boilers guild.  We buy a tube, which is not really very expensive but pretty much one tube per little job.  However carefully the top is replaced and however quickly, by the time the tube is next needed for gluing it has set, or half set, in the tube; it won’t come out properly and won’t adhere.  Buy another tube. Their profit is the glue left in the tube.

Wildlife: The little bird feeder stuck to the outside of the kitchen window has become the major cafeteria for the neighbourhood.  A pair of blue tits and a pair of great tits come regularly and they mess around, dash in and out and drop things which the big fat wood pigeons pick up from the ground beneath. The pigeons are not the ugly grey town birds, but proper wood pigeons - they are hugely fat and waddle around, pretty as anything, with pink delicate breasts and necks and a white collar, and pearly grey wings. I can see one of them from my bathroom window sitting on a roof with a twig in his/her beak before he flies towards the building above me. I think they are nesting in the ivy and jasmine creeper that covers the back of the house. 

All in pairs at this time of year, two ducks (mallard) from the Thames or a park pond, landed in the garden.  They ate nothing and stood around looking important and slightly startled, as though they wondered how they had gotten into this company (parents at a teenagers rave up) before they flew off again.  We have a pair of jays, the prettiest, in their mushroom pink habit, decked with bright blue tips. I think they too are nesting in a high tree across the garden wall.  A single magpie raids from time to time - black and white and startlingly large, he chases the jays out, grabs a bit of bread and flies off with it, leaving the startled pigeons gaping. I fear he will eventually raid the nests of all the other birds, thus making their efforts at reproduction all vain.

Starlings used to be common in huge flocks, iridescent in their opalescent sequined plumes, but I am told they have suffered a decline. We have been visited by a single one only, and even then only occasionally.  Worse, I think all this activity has chased away the blackbirds too. I still hear his rather tuneless singing at 5.00 am from the rooftops declaring his territory, loud and clear, piping like a demented child with a new whistle. But only a single (spinster) brown lacklustre female sits near the feeder grabbing scraps the other birds drop.  She looks healthy enough, but is clearly a wallflower. Maybe she suffers from some immense disability of blackbird attractiveness, or maybe she’s gay. Does that exist? A single robin (I have never seen two together) raids the feeder and looks plump and Christmassy – I thought they were meant to eat worms and woodlice, but maybe the drought has buried the crawlies too deep. He is a juvenile, no tail yet, and a bit ataxic. A little wren flits through the garden without apparently stopping to feed.

Nor have I ever seen the owl though I hear him at night, woo, woo wooing his love; and once a black woodpecker came to the birdfeeder and sped off again into the shades of the big chestnut tree.  On the other hand that same tree harbours three grey squirrels, who chase each other round and round and grab a peanut from time to time.  A new fox, bushy tailed and elegant was sunning himself the other day.  When he perceived he was being watched, he got up languidly, looked about and, pretending that it was really time to go anyway, glanced as it were at his watch, each way, made a decision and ambled off through the bushes into the next garden. The sparrows and greenfinches eat the most seeds. They come twice a day in a joint troupe of some ten to twelve birds, tumble about, inexpertly, get in each other’s way, approach and retreat nervously but if they do get a perch-hold they will eat three, four, five seeds all at once before a blue tit can rush in and out for a snack.

The blue tits remain the masters, even faster than the great tits, perch, peck, nibble on an adjoining branch, back for more. But we have no goldfinches, which is a shame, because  they are so pretty. I am told if we were to offer ‘niger seed’ they would find it and come.  What is niger seed and where do I get it? I have searched, but no one stocks it, where oh where? I shall report if I find it.

Except for a very few places where I am very well known, I invariably book restaurant tables as Alex. or Alexander, or Mr Alexander even. Lately they have taken to trying to elicit a first name but I mostly resist this.  And it annoys me when many now try to ring me to confirm (why would I book if I did not want to come?);  but worst if they fail to get me on the mobile, they leave a message. But I may not carry their phone number so I can’t always ring back.  This creates an insecurity as to whether I have a table or not.  Pseudonyms of course have a long history, pen names existed long before Stendhal, Anatole France, George Eliot, Saki etc. and the phrase nom de plume is equally at home in English.  But now in the age of blogs and Microsoft I see that people are using more and more fanciful pseudonyms – and they are known as ‘mouse names’. 

I like to sign cheques (I still use cheques) with an ink pen, but apart from that, when did I, or you reading this, last write with a pen? On a daily basis I carry pen, ball point and pencil. They make a nice set and it has something talismanic about it.  But I seldom write cheques en route; the glossy paper that auction catalogues are printed on takes proper ink badly and pencil hardly legibly. So I have to use the ball point, which I like least.  But a case can be made that the old wood/graphite (called lead) pencil is the best writing instrument. You can use it on almost any substrate, wood or brick, or paper  - you can use it upside down, to write on the ceiling, under water, it never crashes or runs out (with a little sharpening a pencil will last for years); you can shade, fill in or smudge and you can rub out (erase).  The lack of permanence is the only snag if that is an issue, though the pressure of writing will usually leave a mark.  And it is still cheaper than the least ball point, which blots and runs out and globs.  Alas, since my hand writing is illegible even to me, and has been all of my life, I have typewritten, and more lately word-processed everything I wish to preserve.  Recently, with growing confidence, less and less of it is ever committed to paper.

Fresh out of school, I went to the first English production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, then of Krapp’s last tape,  and End Game.  I was probably too young to fully appreciate Godot (for which he got the Nobel Prize, but the other two, coming later, made a great impression on me.  How much of an impression I only really learned this year when centenary celebrations of his birth give new performances – and I was astonished how much I remembered from some fifty years ago.  Colin Tóibín in the NYRB writes:

 “Beckett was interested in consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime, its perpetrators to be punished by offering them infinite numbers of absurd logical conclusions.  He loved the tension in cogito ergo sum and took a dim view of the connecting word, the ergo in the equation. Cogitating was the nightmare from which his characters were trying to awake. Being was a sour trick played on them by some force with which they are trying desperately not to reckon. Beckett produced infinite amounts of comedy about the business of thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary.  His characters did not need to think in order to be, or to be in order to think. They knew they existed because of the odd habits and deep discomforts of their bodies. I itch therefore I am.”

It was half an hour after midnight and I was unwisely reading Swinburne:

Then star nor sun shall waken,

  Nor any change of light:

Nor sound of waters shaken,

  Nor any sound or sight:

Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,

Nor days nor things diurnal;

Only the sleep eternal 

  In an eternal night

Off. Power outage (as the Americans call it). All the neighbouring streets and as far as I could see in any direction.  I was glad I was in bed, where I have a torch, as I would not like to have to get up from my arm chair, and go to bed in such total stygian darkness.  Not usual in town.  As I lay there in the dark I was quietly annoyed by the word ‘outage’ (which only I had used).  Outing is what gays do – when the lights are on is it an onnage/ innage?  No, maybe it is an ‘innings’  but that is a word reserved for a team batting at cricket (and maybe some other games). We call it a power cut.  I went to the window and as I watched, the lights flickered on again. Perhaps twenty minutes in all. No hassle. Sleep – it was nearly 1.00 am by then.  Swinburne is amazing (note the number of single syllabic words), but perhaps not in the wee small hours of darkness.

Further philological note: I hate the increasing use of the word de-planing (getting off the plane), doubly misderived from disembarked (Barque is still a boat, embark is to get on it, disembark getting off) – so do I emplane when I get on? No, “Boarding will commence…”. I suppose they got into a stew between disboard, or deboard or unboard, which might have been logical and ‘get off’ seems too colloquial. Leave? Marketing people can’t bear to have us leave.

More amusingly, my favourite Chinese Restaurants in London, with a generally well printed and well organised menu (and the most delicious crab with noodles) has as its first item on the Starters Menu “Hot Mixed O’Deurve”.  The Irish Chinaman strikes and I suppose it is a fair attempt to transcribe phonetically what they are offering – Hot Mich O’Deurve is clearly part of the IRA mafia. I was chatting to the son of the owner who was born in England and spoke excellent English.  So I spelled out hors d’oeuvre for him and got a free glass of wine! 

The young man, who was of course totally English looked totally Chinese, and would have been called, in Canada, part of the ‘visible minority’.  A clever phrase to exclude Poles and Jews and (most) Albanians from ‘minority’ status. ‘White’ is tainted by South Africa but there are about two million Moslems in UK now (and only 267,000 Jews I hear).  Multi-ethnic Canada has got political correctness to a fine art.  A comedy show on the radio here made fun of the far right fascist parties who would now have a problem in England since most of the recent immigrants were Poles and Lithuanians and Estonians, blond, slim, blue eyed and well educated. So much easier to identify the newcomers, to learn whom to hate, if they are a bit darker of skin.

I have been a member of The London Library for several years. It is wonderful, because it has most books I ever want and when it has not, I have requested purchase and it has always done so!  Most wonderful of all, it allows members to take the books home.  I joined because I was drowning in books and swore to buy no more.  I am still drowning, I use the library less than I should (or might) because in fact I find I don’t like reading a book I do not own – chiefly because I do like to annotate it as I go along (mostly pencil in the margins) and it bothers me if I can’t.  And when I moved into this house what I measured first was whether the books would go in.  They did, just, and I have 76 running metres, but now I am bursting at the seams again and in thinking of moving (with Virginia) my main criterion is room for the books and pictures. I need walls.  I read that Thomas Carlyle (the founder of The London Library) is quoted as saying “The true university of these days is a collection of books”.   The library was founded in 1841 but the statement was probably true long before Carlyle, even when books were hand written, valuable and rare.  How could I live without my books?

Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happine: says that people design their architecture, their homes and their surroundings (& gardens) to compensate for what is missing in their lives. On this premise, a messy house is not the sign that its owner is messy inside. On the contrary it takes a calm and rational mind to live comfortably in disorder. People fill in what they fear and the person who is attracted to rigid order fears being engulfed by chaos.  The perfectly controlled interior design accompanies a hectic, perhaps muddled, mind which is worried, and needs constantly to be reminded, reassured, that life may after all be manageable.  I remember a bumper sticker: A clean car is the sign of a dirty mind. Even so my chaotic desk may be a sign of my calm and equable nature and ordered thoughts.

The girls insisted they had not studied history at school, chiefly because what they had learned was all taken up with painful and unpleasant subjects like the holocaust.  So the chief effect of holocaust studies is to make people avoid studying history.  Great result!

Of course I am aware this is a sample of one, and not to be taken as representative of a whole generation.  But I have since  asked an equally unrepresentative number of youngish people whether they knew who Lenin had been, and most do not. The cold war ended about fifteen years ago, so any one aged 21 was six and will have no first hand memories.  I am just an old man talking of long past times. 

Federico Zeri once said to me (and I never got the chance to ask whether it was an original remark or he was quoting) that "All the great dictatorships of the 20th century arose as secular manifestation of the unreformed religions" I wonder are we seeing the same phenomenon arising in the Islamic countries. But I have been reading Hughes's biography of Goya. An intemperate and in some ways wrong minded book, he is fearfully anti-catholic, vituperatively republican and angry with a lot of things.  Without needing to agree with him on detail, some of his remarks will also make one not want to look at Goya for horror, but it is salutary to note that inhumanity and massacre, torture and rape are not confined to the 20th century dictatorships.  1808-1814 in Spain was just as bad and Napoleon had made the same mistake that Bush made in Iraq. He thought he would be welcomed by the backward Spanish population, who certainly could have used his progressive constitution. But not from a foreigner: they preferred they own dreadful monarch and superstitious priests.  

Barry Gewen in IHT from NYT:   [Hannah Arendt’s] thought tended to move from individuality to universality without passing through the communal, lived world that provides most people with their sense of identity. Such radicalism is what gives her writing its power, but also what makes it so troubling.  In her response to [Gershom] Scholem she wrote “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons”  This is a statement that manages to be warm and chilling at the same time.  

My mother used to quote Günther Grass as having said almost exactly the same thing (maybe he had read Arendt), and she warned me always to beware ‘abstract nouns with capital letters’ as fraudulent. I have taken her advice and distrust Government, Washington, the Church, the People etc in addition to the national and professional abstractions, Doctors, Therapists, Frenchmen etc.  Though I sometimes find Arendt’s intellect daunting, I don’t find her at all troubling or chilling but good and strong and right, because I agree totally. 

Unfortunately I am afraid that I also agree with Bertrand Russell who was  “....scrupulously impervious to the sentimental fallacy of imputing special virtue to the victims of invasion or oppression."    

I can love people, individual people, kind, good people, happy people and sometimes (mostly) flawed and (often) sad people.  And the great crimes are all ‘only’ crimes against humanity.  The European Holocaust, Rwanda, maybe  Iraq, certainly Srebenica are crimes not because the victims were Jews, Tutsis or Moslems but because they were all, all people, living, ordinary people, good and bad and indifferent and hungry and silly and greedy and a few even sainted people.  That is our humanity.  I love my children, Virginia, my many (I am glad to say) friends, and some ‘good acquaintances’ (the categories merge). I can love you, who read this.  It is the only kind of love I know and I hope I can make the difficult leap from your love to a principle of the love of humanity. I do not see any need to stop at a half-way house in between.

Günther Grass himself got into trouble by suddenly admitting what he had failed to mention for a lifetime, that he had been in the Waffen SS at the end of the war.  He had long admitted his committed belief in Nazism and voluntary joining of the Partei.  Does this make a difference?  Not to me.  His books stand and had whatever effect they had. If some people will now admire him a bit less, that hardly matters either. He was seventeen.  People who do not change their minds (even about what to conceal) are to be judged more harshly than those who can change in the light of new evidence – that evidence may only be experience or the passage of years. I am reminded of a politician, who charged with committing a U turn answered “And I used to believe in Father Christmas too”.  My view is that authors should be judged on the evidence of their books, and people should be judged (if at all) on the evidence of their lives, whole lives if possible.  But the author is not the same as the person.

Gottlieb, Theophil, Amadeus, Amadée, all translations of the same idea and not uncommon first names at least until recently perhaps.  Odd then, that with its Protestant animus against saints names, England (English) should have no equivalent.  You’d think at least the Southern Baptists or our own Puritans might have used some such.

I went to a several weddings this year but I also went to my first gay marriage (civil union) party.  Most marriages are civil unions these days because either the couple has been married before or else they are totally irreligious (usually both).  But what was remarkable about this party was that of course it was quite unremarkable – what had I expected?  Why should it be different? The party itself was superb, well done and brilliant. It was all of that and fun and, one of the couple being a teacher of dance,  it made me think of all those girls from the ballet that Degas and Offenbach and Strauss describe in painting and music.  Oh, oh the freshness and enthusiasm of the young dancers dancing for fun, for innocence and enjoyment.  It made me feel at once young again and very, very old. 

But the guests, apart from the pretty dancers, were like any other wedding – why should they not have been – brothers and sisters of the celebrants with their children and grand children, and aunts and old friends from school (like me), all having fun and drinking and eating.  It also made me think that most people get married and then have to try to make it work. This fortunate couple have been together for thirty years and have already made it work and can then marry. Splendid, though of course that will not apply to future generations of single sex couples.  They will have all the attempts and failures like the rest of us.  And that after all is the point. Just like the rest of us.  I came home rejoicing and jubilant as one should after a happy event and ate the sweet fudge they gave away as we left, sweetness to my mouth and thought how well they had done to create a life together.

But we more usually have separate words to differentiate bride and groom in heterogender marriages, words used only on the day of the marriage or referring to it. How can I describe the scene to a stranger? Are they both to be bride or groom?  They regard themselves as equal perhaps (so do heterosexual couples), one is a bit older, one taller and they have different names, but these attributes do not refer to their union.  Who’s which?

In spring the fields of England and much of Europe are a bright, bright yellow colour with what I used to think was mustard; I was not quite wrong - it is closely related. I now know it to be rape (from Latin rapum = turnip).  It is also called rapeseed, rapa or stubble turnip. Grown mostly for oil, in other places there are varieties which give colza or canola. The latter name derives from a variety common over there, called Canadian Oil Low Acid. The plant is not known in the wild but was certainly cultivated in Neolithic Europe, so it is ancient and native.  Until recently it was mostly used for lubrication, especially of steam engines, and for lamps but modern varieties are used for cooking and also for margarine. According to some Austrian research, it will be developed for bio-diesel. All very interesting and my interest arose through acquiring a bottle of Ambre Solaire, whose distinctive smell reminded me of youthful sun-drenched holidays in the South.  But I am allergic to walnuts and walnut oil,  so just to make sure I checked the ingredients.  Brassica oleifera in very small print after a whole lot about vegetable oil.  Brassica oleifera is rape.  It seems somehow mundane – should I use cheaper canola next year?

Food books, and recipe books. I have a goodly number, mostly gifts from kind friends. I don’t use them much though they are good to refer to from time to time.  I am struck that just when people, it is said,  have largely stopped cooking at home and only buy ready made meals and takeaways and pizzas to your door (not to mine), they also buy more and more books ABOUT cooking. They look at the pretty pictures, and maybe once in a while go to an amazing, outrageously expensive even to the point of perversity, gourmet restaurant.  I suspect there is an inverse correlation between the publication and sale of cookery books and home cooking.

We are also told that no one reads anymore. But Amazon sells millions and millions of books and more books are sold annually that at any time in history. So who is buying these books and why? I do not believe they are unread.  email is a literary medium, the internet provides millions of pages of written stuff – I don’t believe the absolute standards are down. The vulgar public never was literary and never will be. But education is the future of mankind and we are working at it.

We had a drought and a hosepipe ban and advertisements showing a hosepipe car washing with plastic bottle of mineral water by the thousand pouring out of the hose. Quite effective visualisation.  And a bath full of bottles of mineral water.  On holiday with friends I measured (roughly) the shower tray in which I stood.  It was about 1 metre x metre and about 10cm deep.  In fact the drain got partially blocked and I almost filled it,  but allowing for some slow drainage I reckoned it might well have overflowed if it had been totally sealed.  But only just.  1 litre is 1000 cc, a cubic metre therefore a million cc = 1000 litres.  I used about 1/10^th of this ie about 100 litres for my shower, maybe a bit more. Inaccurate (I do not know the actual rate  of outflow)  but not so bad and not as much as the water saving adverts seemed to be saying.  Good propaganda but alarmist.

Goldfinch.  At last.  A single bird at the feeder long after my bag of niger seed (said to attract them)  was eaten – indeed he ate not at the bird feeder which may contain a few niger seeds, but at another thinner one containing only sunflower seeds. No matter, bright red face with black and white head and yellow wings. They do exist here. Hooray.

I am fascinated by Kampusch – the girl in Vienna who was abducted aged eight and escaped some ten years later.  I have not seen her on TV, since I have no TV, but in any case she seems (as I write) to eschew publicity and is in hiding. From what I read she seems balanced and together. Given that her captor treated her reasonably kindly, which he seems to have done, I rather wonder whether the moral might be that what was in effect a  forced marriage at aged 8 years, does not seem to have done her much harm.  Historically of course that is unremarkable, despite it fits so ill in our society. The rejected outraged parents have my sympathy but they also amuse me. They still seem to feel that they ought to own her just as Priklopil did, who 'stole' her. Whereas she seems to feel that she can take ownership of herself, which I would guess is her right. It is all very odd and strange, puzzling  and instructive. I hope they don't brainwash her too much now she is out.

At our Chelsham Road Christmas party they play games and sing songs and have stand-up comedians, amateur and semi-professional, some of it silly and all ‘good clean fun for the family’. They also have the “Chelsham Babes” some eight or ten little girls aged about 8 years old dressed in froufrou and having a great time impersonating chorus girls they no doubt see on TV. The children have a lovely time, the parents clap and I alone am left wondering and rather disapproving.  No paedophile I, nor, I hope, a prude either, and that is why I wonder who it is that likes the children dressed as slightly salacious adult girlies, flirting and waving their little bottoms.  JonBenet Ramsay was a little girl in USA who won prizes as a beauty queen aged six; she was murdered and an American in Thailand wrongly confessed to her murder – her parents were also under suspicion.  They are trying to ban internet pornography but surely infant beauty pageants and even our Chelsham Babes invite, encourage, tempt,  play to the paedophile. For myself, I don’t understand why anyone should begin to want to ‘molest’ an eight year old girl – but that is Priklopil’s problem and he is dead. I am more interested in Miss Kampusch, who seems to have grown up surprisingly well balanced despite her circumstances. Maybe we shall know more by the end of the year.

A friend, (PV) musing on medical examinations and tests and health scares, while denying being statistically limited to the Biblical ‘three score years and ten’, asks what we shall all do after 70.  What shall I  "do after 70" ? - who knows? But if I thought for one tiny second that I only had till 70 then I would not bother having check ups. With only 12 months to go I would have no time for that.  Of course I am aware that tests can only show a status quo and not foretell the future - but we can never do that. I can also be knocked over by a bus before this letter reaches you.  But what will I do? Live as long as I can and enjoy myself as much as I can and when I have to go I hope I shall go without regret or fear. When the party is over it is time to go home. I never thought I had to be the last person to leave.

He also wondered how an atheist might count his blessings. What, he demands, is the “atheist equivalent”.  He felt that the phrase “Introspection on beating the odds of public health demographics and overcoming age and gender adjusted epidemiological statistics” just does not have the same ring to it. Should he just gloat?

I don't see why an atheist can't count blessings.  We do not have to specify where the

blessings comes from, certainly not believe that a blessing has to be an individualised  personal gift from anyone, far less of a deity.  I am content to be 'blessed' by the genes I got from my parents (thanks) even though I know they got them from their parents. That does not invalidate anything and is called inheritance. I was blessed by the education they gave me (thanks).  I have been blessed by the friendship of a number of men, by the friendship of a number of women, and the love of a number of women. I have been blessed by the joy these people have given me, and in each case I hope that they have regarded that joy as a blessing to them,  reciprocal in turn. I have been blessed by Rubens and Raphael and a raft of other artists, blessed by the music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Bartok (and other composers), blessed by the violin of Heifetz and Stern, the voices of Berganza and Gobbi, blessed by the poetry of Shelley and Shakespeare and Millay and .... and so on. These are real blessings, as is foie gras and caviar and new potatoes with butter. And Batard Montrachet, and Lalande de Pomerol, a malt whisky from Islay and an early landed brandy from Cognac. And I am blessed with the smell of new mown grass and of roasting coffee and a newly opened box of Cuban Cigars.  None of these blessings require a deity or a belief in a creator spirit.

 The sunlight on the garden

Hardens and grows cold,

We cannot cage the minute

Within its nets of gold,

When all is told

We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances

Advances towards its end;

The earth compels, upon it,

Sonnets and birds descend;

And soon, my friend,

We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying

Defying the church bells

And every evil iron

Siren and what it tells:

The earth compels,

We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,

Hardened in heart anew,

But glad to have sat under

Thunder and rain with you,

And grateful too

For sunlight on the garden.

Louis MacNeice

Not everything in my life this far has been good (as these letters to some extent testify), I had a cancer removed from my colon, apparently successfully and completely, during this year. That was not fun, but, yes, I am also blessed by sunlight on the garden:

I remember as a child having to take some tablets which made everything go purple – perhaps it was gentian violet.  My mother was convinced I had worms because I ate so much but I think it was a just a small boy’s hunger, of which she had no experience.  I remember that we had to give the dog ‘worming tablets’ before he could go out in the big wide world and no doubt many animals, domesticated and wild, are indeed infected with tape or nematode worms of one type or another. I believe there are more nematodes than all other species and one species, about 1mm long, is widely used in animal experiments. They breed and produce many generations gratifyingly or alarmingly (according to attitude) fast.  I wonder the anti-vivisection league don’t use them in their adverts. Cruelty to round worms! But now I get three emails in a row with attachments saying Our firewall determined the e-mails containing worm copies are being sent from your computer. Nowadays it happens from many computers, because this is a new virus type (Network Worms). Using the new bug in the Windows, these viruses infect the computer unnoticeably. After the penetrating into the computer the virus harvests all the e-mail addresses and sends the copies of itself to these e-mail addresses. Please install updates for worm elimination and your computer restoring. Best regards, Customers support service.  My computer has worms. Ugh.  But something in the text made me uneasy – it did not seem very well written and the more I read the text the less it made sense. It did not seem to come from anyone either.  I decided not to open the attachments and, after talking to the Imperial Geek, I deleted the lot.  I think if there was a virus it was in the attachment – as you might say, ‘a can of worms’. 

And orchids. They’ve done something to orchids.  Whether it is genetic modification  or natural selection, or they’ve just found the right varieties or who knows what, orchids used to be the most rare and exotic (and expensive) flower and orchid fanciers were the strangest miraculous people who had strange greenhouses that would grow them.  Some are still expensive, I think mainly for reasons of profit margin, because others are a great deal cheaper, and they grow easily and well.  I have been given orchids and they routinely last for eighteen months and then a new stem grows, that lasts for another year.  Then they die down and though still green and healthy looking, I have had no new flowering stem a third time. But give it time.  Maybe I just happen to have the perfect spot (at the far end of the kitchen among the succulents) in shaded sunlight, but if so it is pure chance.  Water once a week only and do not allow them to stand in water. They actually seem to come in plastic pots which though not beautiful do have a little upstand or foot (unlike usual flowerpots) so unless you are careless with a fancy cache-pot you should be able to keep the bottom dry. Basta, that is all. A little plant food in the water once in a while. They rather enliven my cactuses which I am beginning to think rather dull by comparison.

Advert in the underground:  Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess “reborn as a musical”. Super!

The life of my children appears unaltered in any material way since last year. They share their lives with the same partners and seem well contented, which is good. Luisa now has some ten months to go before qualification – alas that means that as soon as she is a solicitor she will also be unemployed.  So though it will mean job hunting,  it will also be job hunting with a title, which is surely better. I hope so, because she will have worked hard for it.  But she seems genuinely thrilled with some aspects of the law and legal practice.  Considering the effort involved that is just as well.

Guy is still with the same bank doing rather more advanced work of the same kind for rather enhanced pay, though never enhanced by as much as he would wish.  But by nature, working in the financial sector means an almost infinite aspiration to increase and accumulation and he seems pleased with his career choice and success is more or less directly related to compensation. Naturally he feels he ought to be at a higher level by now (he is coming up 28)  and wonders what the next step may be; the security of staying put and progressing (if he is progressing) or seeking a leap into the next stage. I know far too little about what he does or the mechanics of that business to offer more than a sympathetic and sometimes uncomprehending ear. He has finally managed to move into his new flat after spending nearly a year, and a court case, with the builder.

Dawn in Toronto: 6.30.  Behind the high rise office blocks a steely grey sky, corroded by flecks of chrome yellow mottled discoloration, begins to illuminate the lake.  On the other side is Niagara (about 150 km) and more distantly Buffalo (USA) and Detroit. The Canadian winter is settling in slowly, a snow flurry in upcountry Ontario is forecast (Buffalo to the south already had a large snow fall); here in Toronto the leaves have flamed up red and largely fallen though still providing some flecks of conflagration between the buildings where they are sheltered.  Surprisingly the wind is neither as bitter as an English North Easterly nor the ambient temperature in town so cold as I expected. 

Most of Europe makes fun of the British for talking about the weather but Canadians are obsessed with a full time weather channel and discuss the matter endlessly and minutely, being precisely informed about flows and barriers and fronts and heaven knows what else.  In fact snow is forecast for the city next week but I am off back to London after nearly two and a half weeks.   From all this you gather that I continue to share my life with Virginia as far as geography and her family commitments allow. 

A dear friend (CS), daughter and grand-daughter of close friends, is engaged to be married. Hooray.  And with the wedding invitation comes a small map to show where the (Anglican) Church is to be found and the site of the reception afterwards and general instructions. The map shows the roads, V&A, Science and Natural History Museums, the underground stations and Harrods Department store.- and there is a sort of space in front of the church on the map. Quite right, the modern landmarks are not temples nor palaces but the museums on the one hand, and department stores, cathedrals to Mamon and retail therapy on the other.  The blank site on the map is in fact occupied by a Jesuit Style Baroque nineteenth century Catholic Church known as the Brompton Oratory, the biggest, most showy, most fashionable, Roman Catholic church in the central London.  But that was blotted out of the map. Just a space, the marriage is to be celebrated at Holy Trinity round the back, so you wouldn’t want to draw attention to the catholics in front.

Big Bang. At the end of November, as I finish this letter, I have put the house on the market. I have been happy enough here for almost exactly six years but it will not do forever. It is not suitable, if I should live that long, for a very old man, if only because the stairs are too steep.  There is nowhere to put a lift. I do not know where I shall move to.  I have nowhere to go. But if I have to move sometime, it might as well be now while I am flexible enough to manage the trauma.  I want to take my worldly goods with me, my books, my records, the wunderkammer and above all (even literally) the paintings. I hope Virginia will come with me at least in large part. I shall call it a sabbatical year and by the time it is over I shall be very close to 70. At that point I want to be close to settling somewhere for good if that is possible.

Nothing is permanent, nothing is for ever.  I shall travel of course, maybe more, certainly to Canada and to visit relatives and friends, Luisa and Guy above all will bring me back to England if I fetch up abroad.  So far no one has made an offer on the house, though a trickle  of people have been through to look. It is rather unnerving to see my own living room in an estate agent’s window. If someone does bite, I shall have to move rather suddenly, but I am not pushed, I can wait and then move when I have sold. No one is waiting for me. I am planning to spend Christmas here and then skiing to St Moritz in January.

It therefore seems likely that the next one of these letters will be from a different address, which may or may not be more permanent.  At least I hope I shall have a tale to tell, a travelogue, a drama, maybe with a happy ending by the end of the year.  String quartet, champagne and foie gras beside ornamental water.  Please keep in touch.

I imagine my mobile phone +44 7 785 774 269 will stay the same at least for a while and my email alex@wengraf.com should remain for life. When I do move, I shall have snail mail redirected to my club in the first instance and they will hold it till I collect. That may not be very frequently, but it will be secure.

Reform Club

104 Pall Mall

London SW1Y  5EW

020 7930 9374 (sometimes they may know where I am) I shall try to keep the secretary informed of my movements.

But I doubt I shall actually stay at the club for very long at a time, and they discourage permanent residence.  Obviously I shall go to Canada for a bit, and skiing for longer if the season turns right.  I have bought a new laptop which will become my main computer and am trying to organise email on the move, which I have not been good at.

Much love to you all and greetings as appropriate.

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