MANSFIELD PARK

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Cynical, facetious and glib, the charming Crawford siblings are a very modern pair.  Witty, light, intelligent, and in her case markedly physically attractive – not only does she have dark sparkling eyes, but she can master a hunting horse – they are metropolitan elite, , that layer above celebrity, smarter, more set.  They are, in other words, formidable.  Set against them are two modest, trusting and serious minded country folk.  In order for Fanny to resist she has to be the rather dull saint that so many readers are infuriated by.  Edmund, equally colourlessly virtuous, has Mary’s beauty to contend with (she, it is clear, finds in Edmund’s physical attractiveness the primary source of her ardour), not to mention those Crawford wiles.  Blame and credit are shared out between the sexes.  Fanny alone emerges spotless.  She, indeed, is a kind of saviour. 

It is a book that constantly asks the reader to examine his or her own motives and character, and sometimes this is an uncomfortable business.  I'm fairly sure I'd have fallen head over heels for Mary Crawford.  It is some 40 years since I last read Mansfield Park and now it makes me appraise my abilities as a parent, and question my own 'dispositions' and principles.  It is an intensely moral exercise, though Jane Austen is too much the genius to be merely moralising.  It is funny, wise, sharp, and realistic.  The vices and weaknesses of her characters are throughly recognisable.  Jane Austen remains emphatically contemporary.

ROB on Dead Fridays

Jacob - nice pic

The Louisiana, Bristol, September 2019

SAD BOYS CLUB - Dead Fridays

Lyrics: Weaver - Wheldon - Norton
Producer:  PC Leite
Artwork: Molly Line

Mansfield Park

I am reading Mansfield Park, not for the first time, but as research. Ha! At least that is why I started it, but, again, not for the first time, I find that Jane Austen is incomparable, the absolute master of the game. I know Fanny Price is insufferably virtuous, but she is only there as a witness to the vices of vanity, snobbery, selfishness, and so on, that we all share in some degree. I have already fallen for the well-formed, witty, intelligent, independent-minded, flirtatious and shallow Miss Crawford; already seen myself in the virtuous, down-to-earth, kindly Edmund Bertram. See? LURED.

PROROGATION BLUES

Good grief, what a lot of fulminating. I'm a Remainer, but one who believes the tactics of his 'side' have been wrong from the start. There has never been much of an attempt to explain or persuade. Matters now appear to have descended on both sides to mere name-calling, sloganeering, claims to be the Voice of The People, etc, and writing IN VERY BIG LETTERS. It is as if both sides really want trouble, a fight. The government is an elected government - Prime Ministers are not elected, MPs are - the Queen, as a constitutional monarch, has no choice but to do as that elected government asks, so unless you want an executive monarch, there is no point in criticising her. The proroguing of parliament is not a 'coup' - governments don't launch coups, they are (forgive me) couped against - it happens every year. Which is not to say that Johnson is not playing a filthy trick by extending the prorogation by a few vital days. He is, but I wish those who oppose him would stop shouting. It doesn't help - it just stiffens the resolve of the PM and his supporters. The voice of reason should be measured, not frantic. Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot / That it do singe yourself.

A BUNCH OF SUMMER PICS

Christ, can't bloody remember.  It's in Sheffield, usually.

Gertrude Jekyll's gardening boots

Mother'n'daughter

The Fist

Cricket at Lord's

Zoned out

Goldhawk Road

Photographer failing to remian discreet

No caption required

JNA framed

JNA in a tree

Women and children last

By the lily house

Beauty

Bridget Riley

Cut and Paste

Duncan Grant by Duncan Grant

Big ruddy castle on big ruddy rock

Personal space.

Docesses

Messi and JNA

Father and son weighing up the price of nippels (Luxembourgian for root vegetables),

Four generations at Kew

Ladies and Gentlemen

Pre-venison

Laurence Corns nuptials

SAD BOYS CLUB The Mirror and Me

Not sure what is going on here.  It is a sort of meta-self-parody type thing I think, with in-jokes.  Very post-modern.  Or not.  Jolly street theatrical, that I will say.

AT LORD'S - FRANCIS THOMPSON

JUST BECAUSE ONE DAY EVEN BUTTLER AND STOKES WILL BE GHOSTS, IMMORTAL GHOSTS

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

As the run stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro:

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Barlow

Letters Home, 14 July 1944

Two letters home from the front, Normandy, 14 June 1944.  The first is to his mother, the second to his university friend, Desmond Leeper.

14.7.44

Cake is contraband: sending cake is criminal: eating contraband articles criminally despatched must be among the gravest of sins.  Sin, black velvety sin, was, as everyone knows, always a delicious thing – this sin was this indeed… Four of us wolfed it there and then, washed down with sweet tea, and everyone voted you Honorary President for Life.

14.7.44

I continue to learn about dirt and desolation – and, for that matter, au contraire, health and virtue.  The greatest joys, next to sleep, are the Mail, and (well, there it is - ) reading the new staggers and scoffing illicitly sent cake.  Writing this in the inevitable dull orchard with its geometry of trees, nothing ramshackle here, and surrounded by the equally inevitable and for ever blasted bloody mosquitoes.  Living too soiled a life to read the New Testament – or too irrelevant possibly – one can only thrive hopefully on the dignified paganism of the 91 st psalm and its like.  An odd comment on modern manners incidentally is that under heavy bombardment all the boys pray like bloody hell and incessantly.

OXBRIDGE DAY, 27 JULY

SAD BOYS CLUB

Lunch in Oxford

Supper in Cambridge

MAKE THE TRIP!

SAD BOYS CLUB visit Sheffield, 24th August

THE SPY AND THE TRAITOR

Startlingly brilliant book, so full of fact, yet so thoroughly dashing a read.  A kind of magic trick.  I laughed, I cried, I felt my jaw dropping.  And Gordievsky.  What a man.

Evening Standard 1965

Dad in the middle.  My only real claim to fame is that my love for the Daleks kept them going.  Donald Baverstock was the brilliant editor of 'Tonight'.  His wife Gillian was Enid Blyton's daughter.  My Mum was their son Glyn's godmother.  After Baverstock left the BBC he worked I think for Yorkshire TV.  The Baverstocks lived on Ilkley Moor, in a house I remember liking very much, where we stayed with them one long weekend.  My Mum never let any Enid Blyton into our childhood.

In Memoriam: A.M. Davis

Here's a poem I wrote a couple of years ago about someone who is remembered by a stone in the cemetery at Kensal Green.

In Memorian: A.M. Davis

Eventually, we found him, no-name Davis,

though we got no more than his initials,

a bald A.M. -  Andrew, Adam, Angus?

What’s in a name? Info for officials

certainly, but first a mother’s cooing,

a father’s first boasting, cigar in hand,

and now it is gone.  What we’re pursuing

is chimera, a ghost in the sand.

He served with the three forty-seventh

Mechanical Transport Company

in the land of milk and honey, heaven

but for a kind of killing gluttony.

His body is buried in Ramlah, and

remembered here in more temperate climes.

Nearby a skeletal gasometer stands

encircling nothing, describing dead time.

The still-white limestone has cracked at the base.

Not quite flat, it strains against oblivion.

Without difficulty we read its face:

there is nothing beyond death’s quotidian.

There are scallop shells, loose on the gravel.

They signify a loss across the seas,

for a soldier who did not die in battle

succumbing perhaps to Levantine disease.

How lately placed it is hard to reckon.

Lives, like memory, like gas, seep unseen
through gaps in time, and now this one beckons,
this early Spring day, crying I HAVE BEEN.

CONTRADICTION OF PROBABILITIES

I have now written two biographies.  The following is the truest remark on the genre I've yet to find:

"Too much intelligence is often as pernicious in biography as too little; the mind remains perplexed by contradiction of probabilities and finds difficulty in separating report from truth." Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (New Edition, 1826)

Slightly concerned that it might be thought I am claiming 'too much intelligence'. Of course y'all understand that 'intelligence' here means 'information'. (OED 6a. Knowledge concerning events communicated by or obtained from another).