Lap Me In Soft Lydian Airs

Catechumice

2012-02-10T11:22:00.007+01:00

For the last ten days it has been bitterly cold with icy winds keeping temperatures down well below zero (-9 is our record and it's much colder elsewhere) despite bright day-long sunshine. Typical winter anticyclone weather, no suggestion at all of the straw hats, shorts and T-shirts generally associated with the south of France. Our friend A. came round last night, complaining about the draughts in his house. Chief culprit was the cat-flap. The wind had been so strong, with gale force gusts, that it just blew the cat-flap open and the Arctic blast swooshed through the house freezing everything in its path, especially A.'s and Mrs A.'s ankles. A recent gust was the last straw, A. told us: intolerant of such things sent to try us, he aimed a kick at the cat-flap. It shattered, leaving a hole through which the polar winds blew in their icy fury.

I believe a new cat-flap is on the A. household shopping list, but meantime the hole has been securely patched, probably with the sort of cast-iron plates they used to make Dreadnoughts out of. The result seems to be that A.'s cats are now put out last thing at night, and spend all night scritching and scratching at the windows and mewing to get in. So no one's a winner.

We have no choice. Our cat Tonip is too thick to understand how cat-flaps work, so ours is permanently propped open with a couple of clothes pegs.

I wondered recently what the arrangement was at Wells cathedral. Cat-flaps aren't a thing one readily associates with cathedrals. The question arose because on our UK travels last autumn we spent an hour or two in Wells, mostly in the cathedral. There were many remarkable sights to be seen, none more notable than the main altar in the nave, where, oblivious of the bustling ecclesiastical activity about it, a cat was fast asleep on the richly-worked altar cloth.

At the cathedral reception desk we asked about the cat. We learnt that his name was Louis, he was the cathedral cat, and that the minor canon (or some such title) on duty had to put him out at night. No cat-flap, then: does Louis also spend cold nights scratching at the stained-glass windows, mewing to be allowed in?

In view of the expression 'poor as a church mouse' I wanted to ask if a diet of cathedral mice was any richer. Louis certainly looked sleek and well-fed. But a queue was gathering behind us and we had a plane to catch at Bristol, so the question remains unanswered.

Bagpipes in the boot

2012-02-07T19:13:00.007+01:00

My friend R. asked me today if I'd ever played the bagpipes. I think he was quite surprised when I said yes, I had.

Three months after starting teaching in Southampton, now many years ago, I had an unexpected tax refund. There seemed at the time nothing more prudent nor praiseworthy than to spend this windfall, about £40, on a set of bagpipes. So I did, and spent several months thereafter, mostly in the school hall after the kids had gone home, wrestling with the beastly things. Eventually I beat them into submission, and even the long-suffering school cleaners remarked on how I had improved.

Using mostly recorder fingering I mastered various pipe tunes, Bonnie Dundee, The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill, The Brown Bear and curiously named dances like Mrs Farquharson's Farewell to Towcester. In my vanity I used to keep these pipes in the boot of my car, at that time an MG Magnette, so that it would be work of a moment to take them out and give them a blow to jolly up any party I might be invited to.

Pride went before the inevitable fall. One sub-zero January night, at a party in Totton, an area of Southampton not known for its devotion to the Great Highland Bagpipe, at about 2am, just as things were livening up, my hosts invited me to blow up a reel or two and give the party - and the neighbours - no end of a treat. Out I went into the wintry night to fetch my £40-worth from the boot. (If you're reading this in the USA, and I hope you are, 'boot' means 'trunk'.) They were strangely, inexplicably, rigid. With horror I realised what had happened: naturally prey to interior condensation with all that blowing, they were frozen. Yes, frozen stiff. Lifting them out was like manipulating a dead miniature giraffe as rigor mortis sets in.

I took them inside to warm them. Attempting to ease the chanter out of the stock (see diagram above) before it had properly thawed, I split it open along the grain of the wood.

I never played them again. Later I took the chanter to a craftsman in wood for repair. He made an excellent job of the outside. You wouldn't have known there had been any damage. But it isn't the outside that matters: it's the perfect conical bore of the inside that guarantees the accuracy of the bagpipe scale. Inside the chanter my craftsman friend had, all unknowing, left little dowels and splints, globs of glue and lumps of plastic wood. The people of Totton were spared.

* * *

One reason why I left the blogosphere temporarily last autumn, absenting myself a good bit longer than I expected, was to deny myself the pleasure of posting two or three times a week when I should instead have been devoting my time to the composition of a piano trio. This Trio, a 25-minute work for piano, violin and cello, is now finished and the parts have been sent off to the musicians who are due to give it its first performance here in France on August 18th. (You can find details here: click on 'Concerts 2012'.)

It would be a delight to see any blog-friends, or indeed anyone at all, at this concert, if you happen to be planning summer holidays just now, maybe with the south of France in mind. No bagpipes, I promise.

Struck by lightning

2012-02-05T10:35:00.003+01:00

Reading Graham Robb's The Discovery of France (a must-read for people who think they've already done so by living here) I come across the origin of that extraordinary expression The Postilion Has Been Struck By Lightning.

I discover that a certain Madame de Genlis in 1799 wrote a French-German phrase-book called Traveller's Manual for French Persons in Germany and German Persons in France. Clearly horse-drawn travel was not without risk. Here are a few excerpts:

Postilion, this horse is worthless. It is restive. It is skittish. I am decidedly loath to take it.

Postilion, can one place a harp in its carrying-case on the luggage rack?

What kind of road is it? It is strewn with rocks.

Postilion, I believe that the wheels are on fire. Please look and see.

Postilion, a man has just climbed on to the back of the coach. Make him get down.

Postilion, allow this poor man to climb on to the seat. He is so tired! Leave him alone. He is an old man!

Postilion, the king-pin has fallen out. The suspension has snapped.

The coach has overturned. The horses have just collapsed.

Is anyone hurt? No, thank God. The horse is badly wounded. It is dead.

The postilion has fainted. Gently remove the postilion from beneath the horse.

There is a large lump on his head. Should we not apply a coin to the lump in order to flatten it?

Poor man! Be assured I sympathize with your suffering.

* * *

And while I'm on the subject, I remember hearing many years ago about a certain none-too-literate policeman in the little town of Forres, in Morayshire, which wasn't far from where we used to live. A horse had collapsed and died in Urquhart (pronounced something like 'erkut') Street. The policeman arrived, took out his notebook and pencil and began his report. The spelling of 'Urquhart' was quite beyond him. Not without resource, he directed the crowd of bystanders to drag the dead horse round the corner into the High Street.

Head over heels

2012-02-01T11:40:00.002+01:00

Reading the harrowing account of the death of Shelley (drowned at the age of 29 off the coast of Italy in 1822: body recovered 8 days later, burnt on a funeral pyre on the beach), what struck me as the most horrific detail in the whole gruesome saga was the attitude of Byron. Byron, who was present at the cremation, asked Shelley's friend Trelawney to save the top half of the skull for him. Trelawney, suspecting that Byron wanted to use it as a drinking cup, to his credit refused.

I can't say I've ever drunk out of a skull and I've no regrets about it. But I wouldn't mind being able to say with truth that I had, at some time or other in an uneventful life speckled by occasional excesses, drunk champagne out of a lady's shoe. Maybe that's something to come. I understand from those who know that the important thing in these matters is that the shoe in question need not be high-heeled but should not be open-toed.

Happy February!

Circus maximus*

2012-01-30T19:19:00.004+01:00

Conversation with my mother Joan, now 101 and bedridden, has been difficult for several years. She is almost totally deaf. Sometimes visitors communicate with her by writing things down in her conversation book. She reads what has been written and answers orally. A glance through her conversation books turns up some extraordinarily bizarre one-sided conversations. I had thought at one time of writing a novel, probably a fairly short one, in which the narrative advances by means of one-sided conversations, leaving the reader to imagine the missing lines and thus engage more fully with the leading character. Towards the end of his life the equally deaf Beethoven communicated in the same way, and his Konversationshefte, many of which have been preserved, are sometimes revealing of the mighty struggles going on inside his head and the stream of often very complex music which sought to resolve them.

But sometimes my mother's hearing picks up inexplicably. A recent conversation went as follows:

Joan: I've been in Rome, you know.

Chris: Have you?

J.: They sent me there. On a mission.

C.: Who better than you?

J.: I had to get the formula.

C: And did you manage to get it?

J.: No, I didn't.

C.: A question of money?

J.: Exactly. It was very disappointing.

C.: I'm sorry. You can't do much without capital.

J.: Indeed you cannot. The story of my life.

A deep sigh and a long pause.

J.: Have you been to Rome?

C.: No.

J.: Neither have I.

Shortly after this two carers come in to plump up her pillows and re-arrange her in bed ready for lunch. She feels she has to introduce me, although I know the care home staff reasonably well. 'Have you met my brother?' she asks them. At least she doesn't say 'Have you met my father?'

She's not raving. Please don't think that. I'm very happy that she seems perfectly content and logical in the little world of her imaginings. Who knows, she may start writing music soon.

*I know, it's the Coliseum. I just wanted to suggest things going round and round.

Going, going, gone

2011-09-25T16:58:00.005+02:00

A week or two ago J. and I were invited to the inauguration of a private observatory. Our German friend M. had built one in her garden, with her own hands, down to the last nail, rivet and dollop of cement, and finally it was ready to be put into operation. Local legend has it that M. has a supernova named after her, so clearly she is an astronomer to be reckoned with. A bit of a star, in fact.

So off we drove on the designated afternoon to find her house and observatory. After a warm welcome with lemon meringue pie served with a cocktail of rosé and concentrated pineapple juice M. led us to her creation. She has built her observatory on the traditional plan, a sort of giant rotating lemon-squeezer on a circular base. If she wants to view a particular section of the heavens, she rotates the dome, opens a panel and aims the telescope at whatever she wants to observe.

She has also built her telescope herself, everything apart from the reflecting mirror and some of the lenses. Counterweights, gauges, focussing gear, bearings, all these and more she has made herself, often using a lathe she was given for a thirteenth birthday present. A very remarkable lady.

It turned out, very much to our surprise, that we were the only guests, apart from a retired journalist who lived down the lane, whose private water supply had given out and who'd come to beg a shower. So M. produced a half-bottle of champagne and J. and I and the newly-clean journalist toasted her and her new observatory.

Unfortunately the day was overcast, so we saw nothing, not even the sunspots for which M. had rigged up a special viewing screen. The erratic behaviour of sunspots just now is one of the few things that seem to worry M. : auguries for the future aren't good. But we nailed the supernova legend: it wasn't true, M. said. No one had supernovae named after them. She had once belonged to a group of astronomers assigned to search a certain section of the heavens for supernovae, and she had indeed discovered several. They weren't all that rare, but they came and went, and any she had discovered were now very indistinct or had disappeared altogether.

We left at about 10, full of pride in our friend's achievement and also of a Rhineland speciality she offered us, a sort of potato rissole called Kartoffelklösse.

(Apropos of nothing, I see from our local paper Midi Libre that a Ukrainian died after eating Kartoffelklösse in a competition. He consumed 88. I expect Rog would call that deadication.)

Then a few days ago we had lunch with other friends, one of whom is an amateur astronomer, equally full of foreboding about those sunspots, as worried about their continuing effect as people were about Y2K 11 years or so ago, and I hope as needlessly. We told him about our visit to M.'s observatory. In turn he directed us to the supernova M101, saying it was growing fainter by the hour, but we might just catch it if we got the binoculars out that night.

Well, we forgot. The next night we looked again, cricking our necks endlessly scanning the area above Alkaid and Mizar/Alcor at the end of the handle of the Plough or Big Dipper. No luck. It had gone. Will we ever get another chance to see a supernova?

(Blogs come and go, too, and are clearly as unstable as supernovae. Lydian Airs is fading out for a bit. Maybe, like certain comets, it'll come round again. Who knows? Meanwhile, warmest thanks to all you celestial beings who've shone so brightly in the comments columns. You're all first-magnitude stars.)

Cocoa vs. Alveolar prognathism

2011-09-19T13:14:00.003+02:00

Glancing through that horrific book Struwwelpeter the other day I was as much struck by the dreadful implications of the story of Little Suck-a-Thumb . . .

. . . as by the extraordinary irony of the advert on the back page of the rather tattered copy in our bookshelves:

Through a local lens No. 10

2011-09-17T18:19:00.012+02:00

Esteemed Organ

Every year about this time my friend Jean-Claude and I give a public explanation and demonstration of the organ in the village church. Jean-Claude's part in the demonstration is to read from the altar steps the explanatory text that I wrote some years ago, while I, hidden up there in the organ loft, chip in timeously with odds and ends of tunes showing the difference between an 8' flute and a 4' flute, the American-type wobble that the Vox Humana gives, the ear-shattering Bass Trumpet reeds, and so on. Finally I play a piece (a fugue in F minor by Charles Burney, a one-time acquaintance of Mozart) which gradually introduces all the stops and ends in a blaze of noisy glory after which everyone can go and have lunch.

It's rather a remarkable organ, because there are only six others like it in all France. It's not all that old, dating from 1845. At that time harmoniums (harmonia?) were coming in, to the chagrin of many a curé. A certain Abbé Clergeau designed a modest, wardrobe-sized organ to compete favourably with the dreaded harmonium in cost, size, specification and - a clear winner, this - purity of sound. One of the few that were ever manufactured eventually found its way to our village. It's so special that it has been listed as an Historical Monument.

We do this as part of an annual Europe-wide promotion of Historical Monuments, generally on the third weekend in September. Great houses, public buildings, whatever forms part of the national heritage, are open for the public. Even organs. Free. I think this is quite a good idea. I don't know what the National Trust would think about it.

(I wrote something else yesterday along these lines. Reading it again this morning I found it so patronising and, worse, so boring that I've rewritten it. Anonymous' capitalised comment said it all.)

Putting one across

2011-09-14T10:56:00.004+02:00

Montpellier. The photo above is of the Place de la Comédie, the great square in the centre of the city. It's called Comédie because the imposing building in the centre is the Opéra-Comédie, meaning that when it was built in the 1860s it was designed for both opera and stage plays. And you could hardly call this majestic square Place de la Tragédie.

I'm possibly in the photo, tucked away under one of those café awnings on the extreme right. It's 31º. These awnings have built-in brumatiseurs, which in very hot weather emit a fine spray, a mist, of cold water over the customers every now and then. Very refreshing. I have my coffee - alone: J. has gone to see her acupuncturist - and a glass of water. And today's Times, printed in Marseilles. I'm about to attack the crossword (1 ac. 'European residing in very attractive city' (6) - could be me, except that we don't actually live here) when my ear is savaged by some dreadful Eastern European accordion music.

It turns out to be coming from a lad of about 11. Faint traces of my former profession swirl up from the depths to ask Why isn't he in school? He is playing an endless sort of waltz, always in a minor key. After about ten minutes' worth of this revolving dirge he locks his accordion, takes a cup out of his pocket and wanders between the café tables soliciting coins from the clientèle. Many just shake their heads. Some put a few coins in. I lighten my net worth to the extent of 20 centimes. I could just have easily have taken something out as put something in. He goes away.

I thought (indeed, hoped) that might be the last we saw of him, but no. Presently he started up a new tune. The same minor key. It was like meeting unexpectedly someone you haven't seen for 30 years, you're unprepared for the change, you're not quite certain...

He was playing a tortured, barely recognisable, ultra-simplified version of Für Elise, a little piano piece by Beethoven, who would for once in his life have rejoiced to be stone deaf. Presently the lad wandered off to work one of the other cafés and I returned to my crossword.

Why wasn't the lad at school? I was reminded of an occasion years before when a parent, an American pastor whom I knew quite well, asked if he might take his two boys out of school for a fortnight. Would this hold back their progress? I trotted out two answers. Taking the narrow view, there would probably have to be some catching up when the boys got back, which tended to slow down the progress of the rest of the class, which was, to say the least, frustrating. Taking the broader view, in the context of the space-time continuum of the whole cosmos, it could not possibly matter two hoots if they took two weeks off school.

'That's the wisest thing I've ever heard a teacher say,' he said.

1ac. has to be 'Venice', surely?

Now we are 10

2011-09-09T12:36:00.006+02:00

No, I can't remember what I was doing. Nothing special. In the early afternoon, J.'s mother phoned from England, urging us to turn on the television: unbelievable events were taking place in New York. Within a couple of minutes of switching on, the second aircraft went in. Like the rest of the world, we were gripped by the horror, the outrageous enormity pulled into sharp, human-sized focus by those pathetic, desperate souls throwing themselves from windows. Then the collapse, the Pentagon and all it stood for violated, the mystery of the fourth plane.

Then the phone never stopped ringing. J.'s niece was in New York, a couple of miles away. Bizarrely, she had heard nothing about it. My friend A., also with a daughter in New York, phoned; outraged, but expressing a certain stupefied admiration for an organisation capable of dealing such a monstrous blow. The rest of the family phoned, more out of solidarity than seeking news. Each call took us away unwillingly away from the television: might we miss other explosions?

Then the fist-shaking anger, the natural thirst for revenge of so many Americans saying they were going to enlist to fight this evil. (I wonder how many did?) Then the mistrust of the entire Islamic world, and the need for the United States to strike a mighty blow in return. It would have taken a far stronger man than Bush to say no, be patient, wars against enemies like this aren't won by vast armed mobilisations: on the contrary, we must use invisible, low-profile, subtle and secret counter-insurgency weapons. As indeed they were to take out bin Laden.

Then the idiot invasion of Iraq, which seemed to me to be no more than a dismal strategy to satisfy US public opinion that something, anything, was being done to efface the shame of 9/11. Then the treacherous Blair fabricating feeble excuses for trotting alongside, making a bad situation much worse and wasting so many lives, essentially lives to be lined up with those who perished at Ground Zero. And countless millions of ill-afforded national wealth squandered on a pointless exercise.

Then Afghanistan, a ludicrous and shameful escapade, an unwinnable campaign with flawed objectives and no prizes. A futile hearts and minds campaign undertaken by ordinary soldiers speaking no Farsi or Pushtu: how could they hope to communicate with Afghans? Then the honours rightly accorded to the fallen, victims of a more vicious enemy than the Taliban, political ineptitude and military blunder. Then everyone knowing perfectly well that the reasons officially touted for military involvement in Afghanistan are false, and that the mourner leading those sad cortèges at Wootton Bassett is lifting his top hat, and those flag-bearers are lowering their colours, in salute to a sacrifice for a sham.

Please excuse me for writing something less frivolous than usual. The photo above I took in Spain earlier this week. It's of dawn, not sunset. Maybe better things lie ahead.

Crickets and croquettes

2011-09-05T20:52:00.002+02:00

We went out the other night to a restaurant in the next village, an eatery called La Gariguette. Since opening a year and more ago it has become a firm favourite, not merely because it's named after a variety of strawberry that I particularly enjoy but because of the excellence of its cuisine.

For €19 (about £17) you can enjoy a three course meal, entrée (starter), plat (main course) and dessert (pud) chosen from a menu with at least two dishes per course. To start with I chose Croquettes d'émincé de poulet, which are slightly crunchy rissoles of minced chicken breast and hazelnuts, seasoned and lightly fried in olive oil, served with a mixed salad, and I hope I'm not disappointing American friends by not having taken a photo of them.

Croquettes comes from croquer, to crunch. Because of their crunchy quality, cat and dog biscuits are called croquettes. Our cat Tonip eats nothing else, bar the odd part-mouse (always avoiding the gall-bladder) and the occasional salad of blades of grass.

Clearly another member of this household, something of a recluse and stowaway, in fact only appearing in the house at the end of summer, felt miffed about not being invited to join us at La Gariguette. There he is up there at the top as I found him the next morning, tucking into Tonip's croquettes. You could hear his jaws (or palps or mandibles, I'm not strong on insect eating irons) crunching away. He's a vine cricket. When he had finished his meal, leaving a few crumbs, I put him into a nearby rosemary bush. You see what preoccupations we have here in rural France.

No foe, beer

2011-09-02T12:52:00.002+02:00

Sorry, I haven't been around for a day or two.

Seeking to compare a temporary relapse from keeping Lydian Airs up to date with the agonies of letting the ironing pile up (Interjection from J.: 'What would you know about it?'), I looked for a suitable illustration in Google Images of a life-threatening heap of ironing. To be fair, there were several photos of smug, ill-favoured piles of ironing, but there was also this gem, the one at the top. Maybe one your recent sailing holiday pics somehow got in by mistake.

Google also came up with the photo below, presumably of something happening under the ironing board. If you suffer from AELUROPHOBIA, please don't feel obliged to look at it.

This brings me to what I was going to write about, which is phobias. I can't find any phobia which directly expresses a temporary aversion to blogging, but there are plenty of others, so here is Lydian Airs' Helpful Guide to Everyday Phobias:

BAROPHOBIA: Fear of gravity
KENOPHOBIA: Fear of voids
STYGIOPHOBIA: Fear of hell
ACAROPHOBIA: Fear of itching
COULROPHOBIA: Fear of clowns
PTERONOPHOBIA: Fear of being tickled with feathers
RHYTIDOPHOBIA: Fear of developing wrinkles
POGONOPHOBIA: Fear of beards
MERINTHOPHOBIA: Fear of being tied up
KERAUNOTHNETOPHOBIA: Fear of falling satellites
KAINOLOPHOBIA: Fear of anything new
CYMOBPHOBIA: Fear of tides, waves
MEDOMALCUPHOBIA: Fear of detumescence
NOCOMMENTOPHOBIA: Fear of cyber-isolation

If you suffer from all or any of these, it's best to bring them into the open. Unless of course you suffer from

AGORAPHOBIA: Fear of open spaces (Gr. agora = market place, phobia = fear)

Now in accordance with the title I'm going to pour myself a beer. I'd be delighted if you'd like to join me.

Augustus in the Hole

2011-08-24T18:09:00.003+02:00

This little chap lives in the connection box for our vegetable garden hose. He's only about the size of a €2 or £2 coin. He comes and goes. Somehow he manages to clamber up the hose connection and squeeze through the gap between the hose and the box lid. I open the box every evening to open the valve and start watering: sometimes he's there, sometimes he's gone off a-mollocking or whatever it is that toads do.

He shares his home with some rather nasty little beetles.

We have to find a suitable name for him, one that he will respond to when called. 'Augustus' has already been suggested elsewhere recently, and I'm happy with that for now. In the longer term, however, I'm relying on your inventiveness. Please be sensible and practical. The naming of toads is no frivolous matter.

Gaze on them (or peel them) and weep

2011-08-23T10:16:00.004+02:00

The label on the onion sets, when I bought them last February, claimed the variety was 'Stuttgarter Riesen', Stuttgart giants. This is the total of yesterday's harvest.

If I had a euro-centime for every stone in the vegetable garden, I would be fabulously rich and would spend all my days dishing out the dosh to the worthy, i.e. Lydian Airs regulars. The 'soil' consists of trillions of small stones bound together with a sort of natural cement, a clay composed of minute particles of Lybian desert blown across the Mediterranean over the millenia. This serves me well for wall-building (even if nobody else has got a good word for you, while there's still just time I'd like to say thank you, Col. Ghaddafi), but for growing things I might as well plant them in coal. In summer it dries to a hardness recognisable on the Moh scale. Some ash trees shade the vegetable garden from the pitiless sun, but in doing so they take all the water I lavish on it every evening. Full of hope each autumn I dig in compost and peat and other nutrients, but the goodness is quickly leached down far beyond the reach of any onion roots.

(In fairness to Mother Earth, strawbs and rasps do quite well in spring and early summer. The beetroot harvest in June marks the beginning of the season of despair.)

So their size isn't their fault. But I can't help feeling 'Stuttgarter Zwerge' - Stuttgart dwarfs - would be more appropriate.

Haven't a cluedo

2011-08-21T12:08:00.005+02:00

As a pre-teen I adored board games. No one else in a somewhat dysfunctional family having the slightest interest in them at home, I played them at boarding school and dreaded - for this and many other reasons - the end of term and nobody to play with.

Monopoly, of course, even though it took so long to complete that most games ended up being abandoned, the winner being the person with the most money.

Contraband, a card game a bit like cheat or hearts, where by keeping poker-faced and lying through your teeth you might manage to smuggle the crown jewels and other goodies from the pick-up pile clockwise round the table to the discard pile.

Totopoly, which had a mechanism with a handle that enabled little horses to stagger fitfully to the finishing line, hopefully carrying your shirt on it.

And of course we played chess.

But my favourite was Dover Patrol, perhaps not surprising in a school with strong naval ties. This came out in 1919, and had firm echoes of Jutland and other great World War 1 battles the Royal Navy might have fought if the Kaiser's Hochseeflotte had put out to sea a bit more. It was a sort of naval chess, with the difference that you couldn't see the value of your opponent's pieces. Each player started off with a complete navy of about 30 ships, represented by dramatic drawings of ships of varying firepower on little rectangular cards stuck into tin stands. The back of the card was either blank red or blue, so that your opponent across the board couldn't see how your fleet was disposed.

The object was to manoeuvre yourself, one ship, one square at a time, across the board into your opponent's harbour, capture his flag, and sail back with it in triumph to your own harbour. Each ship had a numerical value, from your Flagship (10) to the lowly Patrol Vessel (1). Naturally your flagship blew everything else of lower value out of the water, but - who doesn't have his or her Achilles' heel? - was vulnerable to mines and submarines. The 3 submarines in your fleet, perhaps reflecting contemporary preoccupations at the Admiralty, had no numerical value but sank everything sinkable except Motor Torpedo Boats (2). Among the named ships were HMS Manchester (6) and HMS Gnat and Hornet (3), presumably Insect-class frigates. The submarines were designated E1, E2 and E3: an echo of then recent history, because low-numbered, un-named submarines (E10, E11, E15) had performed feats of daring in the 1915 Dardanelles campaign.

I never owned my own Dover Patrol set until many years later, when I was about 25. I saw a set in a Southampton toyshop window, nostalgia took over and I bought it. It had been upgraded, taking into account World War 2. The ships were mere silhouettes, no longer greyhounds of the ocean shipping it green among 10-inch shell and depth-charge. There were now flying boats too, like the Sunderland flying boats I used to see as a child taking off from Calshot on the Solent. I kept it jealously and eventually - I think - gave it to my son.

Then when I was about 12 Cluedo came out and caught on at once. Cluedo has survived well, while Dover Patrol and its fellows (L'Attaque, Tri-tactics) haven't been able to withstand the onset of computer-based games and have sunk beneath the wave, as far as I know.

Since mentioning this I've fallen to wondering who among the regulars or indeed irregulars here fit the Cluedo bill? We already have our highly-esteemed Miss Scarlet, of course, but whom would you nominate for the other suspects? And while you're pondering this, here are two other Cluedo observations:

The French version of three of the characters. Pervenche is 'periwinkle', i.e. blue.

Just in case you were wondering, this desperate fatality didn't occur at our house. For one thing, our piano is an upright, and I don't remember a steam-roller being among the Cluedo murder weapons.

Which naturally leads me to this:

'There's been a terrible accident! Your husband's been run over by a steam-roller! They've taken him to hospital...'

'Oh, how dreadful! I must go and see him at once! What room is he in?'

'A5, A6, A7 and A8.'

Please excuse me. Happy Sunday.

Langue d'Octet

2011-08-18T18:08:00.010+02:00

For several nights we've had musicians billeted on us and elsewhere in the village. Just now we're in the middle of an annual festival called Autour du Quatuor, Around the Quartet. Embiggenise (© Dave) the poster if it comes out too small. So we've had Sarah (viola), Juliette (cello) and Lola (bassoon) staying with us.

Goodness, they work hard, these people. Several hours' individual and group practice a day, plus performance at night. The major work they performed was Schubert's Octet, a rich and enjoyable work for string quartet plus clarinet, bassoon, French horn and double bass. The basic framework was provided by the Zaïde Quartet, with the woodwind and double bass drawn from the general pool of French musicians who take time off from their regular orchestras in summer to tour the provinces, turning an honest centime at the multitude of music festivals with which France is peppered in July and August.

Some impressions:

* The extraordinary cacophony heard while walking down the guest bedroom corridor, with something different being practised in each one

* So much modern music appearing to employ this particular effect

* Some woodwind players preferring to manufacture their own reeds - here's Lola making bassoon reeds out of a special variety of cane. I believe she uses the garden fork to stab them into submission

* The Zaïde Quartet practising, all very serious-minded on a hot and sticky afternoon. In the kitchen next door J. is making her spiced figs (it's the fig season just now), a speciality for which she is justly famed. We agree that it's a privilege, having a string quartet of this quality playing in our sitting room. Even now the Zaïde girls may be discussing the privilege of occasional heady wafts of spiced figs accompanying them while they tease out tangled skeins of Brahms.

* An unusual story someone told me. There's usually an encore at the end of each concert. At one concert the Zaïde girls played a fast Haydn movement as an encore, with great verve and spirit. As the audience filed out an Englishman, unknown to me, said 'Are you the O'Reilly that owns this hotel?' Mystification. He explained: Haydn wrote this music during one of his trips to London. A popular song at the time (1793?) was 'Are you the O'Reilly' etc. Apparently Haydn heard this, maybe sung in the street, and incorporated the tune in the movement les Zaïdes played. I wonder if anyone can confirm this?

They've all gone now, and the house is quiet, apart from a certain delirium in the washing machine, heavy with towels and bedlinen. I drove Sarah, Juliette and Lola to the station at Béziers early this morning, sending them on their way to their next engagement. This is how they live.

Next up we have a quartet of French horns, all blokes. One of them is called Hocquet. This means 'hiccup' in French. Like name, like nature? I hope not. I'll keep you posted.

As you were, I'm afraid

2011-08-17T17:11:00.007+02:00

Owing to an embarrassing misunderstanding between myself and society photographer Scarlet B. the image I posted yesterday (see below), supposedly of the future appearance of three of my blog friends, was not of them at all but of the Fates (seen above in a somewhat stylised depiction). I can only apologise.

These ladies, well known to Greek mythology as the three Moiras (more correctly, Moirai) control all our futures.

Clotho, the spinner, spins out the thread of our ~~comments~~ lives.

Lachesis, she who allots, measures out the thread for each of us.

Atropos, a lady not for turning, cuts the thread irrevocably at the moment of our demise.

Some of you have identified yourselves with one or other of these ladies. You've thus clearly given yourselves away. I've always been kind to you, haven't I?

I thought you ought to know that I know that you know that I know.

Clotho East .... Great-Aunt Lachesis .... Atropos Z

Seek to know no more

2011-08-16T17:39:00.005+02:00

Last night I was vouchsafed a vision of the future appearance of three of my blog-friends.

It wasn't established who was which, though. Nor if anyone had taken to wearing drag.

Oh deer.

2011-08-14T11:34:00.005+02:00

This photo from Le Figaro reminds me - can't quite explain the logical progression, I'm afraid, maybe Scarlet could oblige - of the story of the flock of ostriches. Suddenly aware of some danger, they all buried their heads in the sand. One, bolder than the others, lifted his head out first, looked round him and said 'But where are the others?'*

Happy Sunday. Or whatever day you read it on. If you read it at all.

*Courtesy my Aunt Evelyn, ca. 1956. Other little gems may follow at discreet (and indeed discrete) intervals. Be prepared.

It's the bees' knees

2011-08-11T19:26:00.006+02:00

Before I came to live in France I can't say that kissing played a huge part in my everyday life. It wasn't a thing we did much in our family. The odd goodnight peck. A special greeting or leave-taking with someone known for a long time. Or kids' games. Truth or dare. Spin the bottle. It wasn't that we never felt affectionate or loving: it just expressed itself in other ways than kissing. I'm speaking about day-to-day co-existence, of course. We just weren't particularly demonstrative, that's all. Les grands amours were clearly different, from that first tentative brushing of lips to those vertiginous occasions when you just had to come up for air or you'd have passed out.

Coming to live in France brought many surprises. One was la bise, the habit of kissing on both cheeks, left-right in quick succession. Or right-left, there's no etiquette: you just have to guess which cheek to proffer first and adapt if necessary. All you do is touch cheeks together and go mwah, change cheeks and go mwah again. Nothing more. It's a curious thing, but while many expats, particularly men, hang grimly on to the apron strings of the Mother Country and sell their Britishness dear, indeed over their dead bodies, they're prepared to abandon themselves to la bise without any problem, indeed with enthusiasm.

Now it's a commonplace, a daily courtesy. The magic lady that comes to clean, Kathy the window-cleaner, our doctor, local lady councillors, waitresses, neighbours, the girl in the tourist office, visiting musicians, lady members of my choir, friends generally. Children, girls and boys, automatically put their faces up to be kissed. When attractive 17-year-old girls do this as a matter of course, I still find it more exciting than perhaps I should. And Brit friends that I would never have dreamed of kissing back in Blighty, who have also become devotees of this very agreeable habit.

And we find the number of bises varies. Mostly in France it's twice. Locally it's three times, L-R-L or R-L-R. Occasionally we meet people from the north, and Belgians, who expect four bises.

Men mostly shake hands with each other, on first meeting each day and often on parting. La bise between men isn't uncommon. It took me a long time to get used to it. A few summers ago J. and I were taking part in pre-lunch drinks (known as the apéro, short for apéritif) at which the village mayor, a squat, gravel-voiced local politico, and other notables were present. In the course of conversation I remarked that la bise wasn't very common in the UK (although now it seems to me to be becoming more and more usual and I'm all for it) and it was practically unknown among men.

As it happens I have been kissed by this same mayor for various of my activities, mostly musical, which he seems to think have brought credit to his bailiwick. On hearing me say, at this apéro, how rare kissing between Brit men was, in the general run of things, he said that la bise I'd experienced between men in France wasn't kissing: it was l'accolade républicaine, the Republican Accolade.

H'm. Very curious. And how very different, as a late Victorian theatre-goer was heard to say after a performance of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, from the home life of our own dear Queen.

What's Your Problem? Lydian Airs' Useful Guide to Patron Saints

2011-08-07T15:34:00.006+02:00

AGUE St Pernel and St Petronella cure

BAD DREAMS St Christopher protects from

BLEAR EYES St Ottilic and St Clare cure

CHASTITY St Susan protects

CHILDREN St Germayne. But unless the mothers bring a white loaf and a pot of good ale, Sir Thomas More says, 'he wyll not loke at 'em' (p.194)

CHOLERA Oola Beebee is invoked by the Hindoos for this malady

DANCING MANIA St Vitus cures

DEFILEMENT St Susan preserves from

DISCOVERY OF LOST GOODS St Ethelbert and St Elian

DOUBTS St Catherine resolves

GOUT St Wolfgang, they say, is of more service than Blair's pills

GRIPES St Erasmus cures

IDIOCY St Gildas is the guardian angel of idiots

INFAMY St Susan protects from

MADNESS St Dymphna and St Fillan cure

MICE St Gertrude and St Huldrick ward them off. When phosphor paste fails, St Gertrude might be tried, at any rate with less danger than arsenic

MUMBLING St Modget will hear

NIGHT ALARMS St Christopher protects from

PUMPKINS St Rusticus limits undesir'd growth

QUENCHING FIRE St Florian and St Christopher should not be forgotten by fire insurance companies

SCABS St Rooke cures

SORE THROATS St Blaise, who (when he was put to death) prayed if any person suffering from a sore throat invoked him, he might be God's instrument to effect a perfect cure

SUDDEN DEATH St Martin saves from

TEMPERANCE Father Matthew is called 'The Apostle of Temperance' (1790-1856)

TOOTH-ACHE St Appolonia, because before she was burnt alive all her teeth were pulled out

WEALTH St Anne

(From The Reader's Handbook, of Famous Names in Fiction, Allusions, References, Proverbs, Plots, Stories, and Poems. By the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. (1898)

Learn modern Greek with Christos

2011-08-06T13:04:00.006+02:00

Yes, we're planning to go to Greece next spring, if it's still there and hasn't sunk beneath the Aegean wave under the weight of debt. I know many Greeks speak English, but that's such a shameful cop-out, one I won't be party to if I can help it. And maybe there's no need...

* * *

...I arrived at the taverna ahead of the other two, and so had the undivided attention of the waiter for a few moments.

"How do I greet people in modern Greek?" I asked him. "How do I say 'Good morning', or just 'Hi'?"

"You say 'Chairete'," he said. (Kye-ray-tay, hard CH, like in 'character'.)

"Chairete?"

"That's right," he went on. "And it's quite acceptable, indeed good manners, to add something else, to include the people you're speaking to. For instance, you can say 'Chairete, persones'."

"Chairete, persones?"

"That's it. 'Greetings, people.' Or you can just as well say 'Chairete, evzones'.

"Chairete, evzones?"

"You've got it. 'Greetings, soldiers'. It doesn't matter if they aren't soldiers, it's perfectly socially acceptable to address people as 'soldiers'. In fact it's an honour.'

The other two arrived. Lesson over. I thanked the waiter. 'My pleasure, soldier,' he replied. I smiled proudly.

* * *

Should you go to Greece and should you wish to avail yourself of these little everyday politenesses, courtesy of Lydian Airs, please feel free. But I'd rather you didn't acknowledge their source, if it's all the same to you: I'm afraid I dreamt all this last night and it may not be absolutely gospel. Far from it, in fact. It' s probably all Greek to the Greeks.

Brifknefs in the Lifts of Venus

2011-08-03T21:53:00.003+02:00

I've been reading The Shocking History of Advertising!, by E. S. Turner, a versatile writer and journalist who penned his last full stop in 2006 at the age of 97.

He quotes from The Spectator of about 1740:

Famous Drops for Hypochondriac Melancholy: Which effectually cure on the Spot, by rectifying the Stomach and Blood, cleanfing them from all Impurities, and giving a new Turn to their Ferment, attenuating all vifcous and tenacious Humours (which make the Head Heavy, clog the Spirits, confufe the Mind, and caufe the deepeft Melancholly, with direful Views and black Reflections), comforting the Brain and Nerves, compofing the hurried Thoughts, and introducing bright lively Ideas and pleafant Brifknefs, inftead of difmal Apprehenfion and dark Incumbrance of the Soul, fetting the Intellectuals at Liberty to act with Courage, Serenity and fteady Cheerfulnefs, exciting Agonifts in the Lifts of Venus to great Deeds, and caufing a vifible, diffufive Joy to Reign in the Room of uneafy Doubts, Fear, &c., for which they may be truly efteem'd infallible. Price 3s 6d a Bottle, with Inftructions. Sold only at Mr Bell's, book-feller at the Crofs Keys and Bible in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange.

Sounds exactly what's needed. I think I might order fome.

Mistaken identity

2011-07-31T19:00:00.010+02:00

In the course of the village street market this morning J. and I met our friends M. and Mme Hector. While we were chatting I thought I recognised Mme Martin, a secretary at the Mairie (a sort of village town hall) and her husband coming towards us. They're neighbours, they live just up the lane from us.

I detached myself, smiled, held out my hand to be shaken and greeted them warmly, fulsomely, even. I asked them how they were, remarked how good it was to see so many people at the market, asked how the family was. They shook not only my hand, but J.'s and the Hectors', as courtesy demands. We wished each other good day, and they strolled on.

'Who was that?' Hector asked.

'But you must know them! Why, that was Mme Martin, the secretary at the Mairie,' I said. 'And her husband. He's a chauffeur to senior members of the regional council.'

'That wasn't Mme Martin,' Hector said. 'Nor was it M. Martin either.'

'She might have looked something like Mme Martin, but that certainly wasn't her,' J. said with great firmness.

Abashed, I said: 'Who were they, then?'

'No idea,' J. said. 'I've think I've seen her before. She might be something to do with the village drama club.'

So I've spent the rest of the day in a squirm of embarrassment.

* * *

Apparently once on a drive in Windsor Great Park, in the early days of his madness, King George III ordered his carriage to be stopped. He stood up, got down and walked a few paces towards an oak tree, which he addressed as the Prussian Ambassador.

Am I going the same way?

J. Zoffany (1733-1810): H.E. Baron von Bomburst, Prussian Ambassador to the Court of St James (Royal collection)

Dew est mon droit

2011-07-29T10:38:00.008+02:00

If only it would rain. Good, day-long gardener's rain. I've had to water every evening, bar two hallowed, heaven-sent occasions, since May 22nd. Not just flowers, shrubs and vegetables, but three of our more delicate trees as well. I've abandoned watering what passes for a lawn.

This morning J., looking out of the window at the parched dwine, said 'I'm fed up with summer. I'm really looking forward to the autumn'. And we've got all August to go yet, with no rain forecast.

The morning dew, such a friend to gardeners, packed up weeks ago. Which takes me naturally to Encyclopedia Britannica, fourth edition (1816):

Alleged Virtues of Dew

The dew of heaven has always been regarded as a fluid of the purest and most translucid nature.

[...]

...the people of remote antiquity fancied that external application of dew had some virtue in correcting any disposition to corpulence. The ladies of those days, anxious to preserve their fine forms, procured this celestial wash, by exposing clothes or fleeces of wool to the humifaction of the night. It was likewise imagined, that grasshoppers feed wholly on dew, and owe their lean features perhaps to such spare diet.

So, ladies, if you're concerned about your fine forms, here's your answer. Go and roll in the dew.

I can only finish by bidding you A dew, dear friends.

Ho ho, Monsieur

2011-07-27T15:03:00.009+02:00

SOCRATE

Last night J. and I watched A Prairie Home Companion on one of the French film channels. A bit sceptical to start with, I gradually became more and more engrossed, then helpless with laughter, and by the end I couldn't wait to order the DVD via the link here.

It was in prairie English, with French subtitles. Very often French subtitles are poor. Sometimes they don't even complete the sentence, e.g. 'Je t'ai demandé si' (I asked you if) or 'Avez-vous terminé votre?' (Have you finished your?)

And of course there's the clever stuff that just doesn't, or won't, translate. Carry on, Cleo had the immortal line 'Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me! which came out in French so unconvincingly (L'infame! L'infame! Ils m'en veulent tous!) that I suspect the low-grade translator hadn't twigged Kenneth Williams' line.

But full marks last night to the subtle subtitlers. In a song called Bad Jokes singing cowpoke Lefty (or Dusty, I can't remember which) sang about his horse which, although gifted in chemistry, physics and mathematics, had problems with philosophy: he found it hard to put Descartes before the horse.

I could imagine the translator thinking long and hard about this one. He/she came up with a stroke of genius: the horse 'ne savait pas la différence entre Socrate et sa crotte', didn't know the difference between Socrates and his dung.

SA CROTTE

Eden Tate Gallery

2011-07-23T19:26:00.002+02:00

Yes, I'm afraid I won't be biting anyone to death just at the moment. I don't have any teeth. Well, I've got a quite a lot, but not the sort of incisors and canines you need to take on a couple of sabre-toothed tigers before breakfast with. And win.

Recently M. Tanguy the village locum dentist put in a couple of pre-molar crowns, with the result that the plate I've worn since I lost some front teeth in a flawed exercise in inebriate pugilism when I was a student, didn't fit any more. So while I wait for a new one I'm obliged to revise and extend my intimacy with soups.

Here is a list of the soups the splendid J. has fashioned for me:

Gaspacho
Vichyssoise
Bortsch
Brown Windsor
Ale and Coracle
Gappo Root
Consommé Beauharnais
Carrot and Coriander
Leek and Bovril
Chicken
Goodly
Imperial Game
Iced Walter
Oxtail with Red Wine
Mushroom with Champagne
Drabbed Bawlor (Soup)

If you have a favourite soup that doesn't appear on this list and which you think I might find both toothsome (if you see what I mean) and nourishing, perhaps you could let me know?

Noise Fludde

2011-07-20T21:32:00.004+02:00

Gustav Mahler, maybe the world's most original orchestrator, a composer forever searching for new - some would say excessive - orchestral effects, once went to see the Niagara Falls. His comment was 'Endlich, fortissimo!' (Fortissimo, at last!)

I've never been to Niagara, but I have been to Eas Coul Aulin. Well, sort of. I believe this is the highest waterfall in the British Isles. It's a few miles inland from Eddrachillis Bay, in North-west Sutherland. We went to find it once, when we lived in Scotland. I'm ashamed to admit - I have to take the blame myself - I made an imbecile mistake, the unerring effort of a complete cretin: instead of clambering through the heather to view this slender skyscraper of a cascade in its entirety from the foot, I clambered through the heather at the head of the grumbling family + dog to view it from the top. All we saw was an insignificant burn* disappearing over the edge of the cliff. Had I been Mahler I suppose I could have said 'Endlich, pianissimo!' but even if I'd thought of it at the time it wouldn't have been much consolation.

I can't account for this photo. (The choir isn't my vocal group Les Jeudistes, in case you were wondering.) Maybe they're performing something very noisy from Mahler. There's a mighty chorus towards the end of his 8th Symphony which includes the words (from Goethe) Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, All that is transitory is but an illusion. Or possibly metaphor. Not a bad notion to draw from a waterfall.

Please could any comment you might feel moved to make not include any anagrams of 'Waiter! Scum!'? Thank you.

* burn = stream, brook, Jimmy.

Through a local lens No. 9

2011-07-18T18:30:00.009+02:00

Le Pont du Diable, the Devil's Bridge, Olargues

This bridge, according to a legend carefully fostered by the Office de Tourisme, took a very long time to finish because of an unusual phenomenon largely unknown to today's building trade.

As fast as the 12th century masons put this bridge up by day, the Devil came by night and threw the newly-laid masonry into the river below.

Tiring of constantly helping the builders to fish blocks of limestone out of the river, the villagers consulted the one amongst them who might have the readiest access to the Devil. So the village priest sought him out, and a pact was made whereby the Devil would allow completion of the bridge on condition that he could claim body and soul of the first living creature to cross the bridge when it was finished.

On the day the bridge was completed the villagers gathered at one end while the Devil, come to claim his due, stood at the other. The two parties advanced towards the middle, the Devil with arms outstretched to receive his sacrificial victim, while the villagers shuffled forward uneasily.

When they were but half-a-dozen ells apart, near enough for the villagers to be almost overcome by the stink of the antichristian mercaptan, the villagers' ranks suddenly opened, and a cat was hurled into the arms of the Devil.

The Devil, outwitted and snarling with disappointed rage, vanished in a miasma of putrid smoke. The bridge has been open to traffic ever since, but nowadays few feel the need carry a cat with them just in case. Given the number of strays about the village, you would have thought the Office de Tourisme could have hired them out to gullible or romantically minded tourists, or those in deep trouble, as laissez-pussers.

This photo, with the classic view of the village and the Devil's Bridge, was taken by my friend Jean-Claude Branville, a man of many talents and a distant cousin of St Theresa of Lisieux. The logo in the bottom right-hand corner is that of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, The Most Beautiful Villages of France, of which Olargues is one out of about 150, to some extent due to Jean-Claude's efforts.

This is the view of the bridge from the terrasse of one of our favourite restaurants, Fleurs d'Olargues. It's the Devil's own job to get comfortable in those chairs. Maybe....?

There's a line from one of Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales concealed in this post. If you spot it you're entitled to either a warm smile or a devilish grin. Please indicate your choice with your entry, as stocks are limited.

John Cage

2011-07-15T11:36:00.004+02:00

This is what it feels like when the musical ideas I'm trying to set down on manuscript paper just WILL NOT come.

If as you pass you'd like to push a slice of cake through the bars, I'm sure this would help no end.

And if you could avoid seed, walnut, Battenberg or cattle cake, I'd be very gratified.

The mouse that boared

2011-07-14T08:56:00.005+02:00

Once again (remember the nightingale last week?) our much-esteemed friend and neighbour Hector comes up with something a bit special. Having set up a movement-triggered infra-red camera in a swampy bit of bamboo thicket on his land, he was gratified one morning recently to find this encounter had taken place during a night of storm and tempest:

The eyes have it, don't they?

There are more close encounters here and here.

Thanks, Hector. Life in your bamboo thicket is never dull.

A wry glance

2011-07-12T14:50:00.007+02:00

This arrived a couple of weeks ago...

----- Original Message -----

From: D

To: C

Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 5:14 PM

Subject: What is Scotsman's image of "comin' through the rye?"

Hi C,

How are you? We hope you are enjoying your summer so far. You will probably chuckle when you read what I am concerned about. I thought of you recently when G. read Salinger’s “Catcher in The Rye.” I have heard enough about the novel since it first came out that I feel like I read it, but I know I didn’t. While we talked about the novel and its title, I realized that I did not really know what Burns’s line means, “When a body meets a body comin’ through the rye.” Because I grew up in a part of the country where there are many descendants of Scottish immigrants from both Ulster and Scotland itself, I heard the song already as a little child. As a child I imagined the rye stalks being taller than people. I imagined that a person would wade through the rye not being able to see where he was going and occasionally run into another person who also happened to be wading through. I have never seen a rye field, but G. has seen them in Germany. She says the rye is typically about 25 or 30 inches tall or so. Any now my question. When a Scotsman in Scotland reads Burns’s line, what image does he have of people coming through the rye? It seems that if people simply walked across a rye field, the farmer would do something to stop them from damaging his crop. Or are there big rye areas with numerous rye fields separated by paths? Or did Burns mean something metaphorical or allegorical?

Cheers, D

I got round to replying this morning. It took me fully from 9.15 to 1pm to put this together...

Hello D,

Thank you so much for this, and sorry to have taken so long to reply. The question you pose is quite complicated and I can't do more than offer a few observations. In the early 1780s Robert Burns wrote his own version of a south of Scotland folksong, of which there existed many variants, which was so well-known at the time that eventually it became, duly bowdlerised, a children's song. The original, as published in The Merry Muses of Caledonia in 1800 (although in existence for many years before that), was downright bawdy. Burns may have had a hand in editing and even adding to it:

O gin a body meet a body

Comin thro the rye:

Gin a body f*ck a body,

Need a body cry.

Chorus:

Comin thro the rye, my jo,

An comin thro the rye;

She fand a staun o' staunin graith,

Comin thro the rye

Gin a body meet a body

Comin thro the glen:

Gin a body f*ck a body

Need the warld ken.

(Chorus)

And so on for another three uninspiring verses...

Pause for glossary: Gin (hard G, as in 'begin') = if, should: a body = someone: jo = darling, love: fand = found: staun = something upright: staunin [play on words] = standing/astonishing: graith = growth: warld = world, everyone: ken = know:

Burns used the above as the basis for a much more subtly suggestive poem of his own:

O, Jenny's a' weet,poor body,
Jenny's seldom dry:
She draigl't a' her petticoatie,
Comin thro' the rye!

Chorus:
Comin thro' the rye, poor body,
Comin thro' the rye,
She draigl't a' her petticoatie,
Comin thro' the rye!

Gina body meet a body
Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?

(chorus)

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warld ken?

(chorus)

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the grain;
Gin a body kiss a body,
The thing's a body's ain.

(chorus)

Ev'ry Lassie has her laddie,
Nane, they say, have I,
Yet all the lads they smile on me,
When comin' thro' the rye.

Glossary: a' = all: weet = wet: draigl't = (be)draggled: ain = own; [the line means 'it's no one else's business']: nane = none. Warld is pronounced in two syllables, 'wah' and 'rlld'.

So there's a strong sense of an earthy sexuality in both the original folksong and Burn's version of it. Jenny is the village tart, or at least generous with her favours. The tune to the original, incidentally, is pentatonic, suggesting great antiquity.

Both versions also evoke secrecy and concealment with 'rye' and 'glen', both enclosed places away from prying eyes. In Burns' time and for long after rye and other cereals ('rye' is clearly more convenient for rhyme than 'oats' or 'barley') were grown with stems 5' to 6' high. Moreover, the contemporary method of ploughing (called 'rig and furrow') left much wider passages between the stands of cereal, sown haphazard by broadcasting rather than in neat rows, as via a modern seed drill. A field of cereal was thus a good place to hide in, and the likelihood of trampling much less than we would expect nowadays. Your childhood imagination was, maybe unwittingly, 100% accurate. The stalks were chopped and used as winter animal feed. (Waterloo was fought in mid-June: Wellington's troops used the concealment offered by long-stemmed cereals, almost ready to harvest, to great effect.) 'Glen', also good for rhyme, means 'valley', usually a narrow one. 'Strath' would be used for a wide valley. Where there's a valley, there's water, and consequently trees and bushes offering concealment, in addition to the enclosing hill- or mountainsides. There may be further sexual overtones here.

I'm not certain that J. D. Salinger was aware of any of this in 'The Catcher in the Rye', although I think he probably guessed at the implications and overtones of the poem(s), even if Holden Caulfield 'misheard' it, and saw how applicable the image was to his novel.

I hope this helps.

[...]

Christopher

Thank you for reading this far, if you have. Please don't feel the need to include the word 'draigl't' in any comments you might be kind enough to make.

End Of The World Found On Moon

2011-07-11T09:45:00.005+02:00

So the News of the World is no more. I can't say I ever saw a copy of it, except maybe when I was about 14 and preoccupied with behind-the-bike-shed ethics and practices. Sleaze was more gentlemanly (and no doubt more ladylike) in those days: the NOTW's genteel in-house euphemism for sex was 'intimacy'.

E.g.: 'Witness Miss F. , a hotel employee, having knocked at the bedroom door while carrying the breakfast tray, understood the sounds from inside to be an invitation to enter. As she did so she observed intimacy was taking place.'

I regret more the passing of the Daily and Sunday Sport, not for the unending diet of sleaze but for the occasional inspired, indeed poetic, zaniness of its headlines.

E.g.: 'Statue Of Elvis Found On Mars'
'Bus Found Buried At South Pole'
'Rose West Ate My Guinea Pig'
'WW2 Bomber Found On Moon'
'Mum Gives Birth To 8lb Haddock'
'Man Fights Shark With Wife's False Teeth' .

I nearly bought a copy once, one afternoon when I was wandering rather disconsolately round Lee on the Solent with my daughter Patroclus, killing time before the night ferry from nearby Portsmouth to Le Havre. The Daily - or it might have been Sunday - Sport headline in a newsagent's window was 'Hide And Seek Champ Found Dead In Cupboard'.

Mightily intrigued by the implications of this, I was all for going in and buying a copy, but Patroclus restrained me most insistently, claiming that she would rather have her teeth pulled than be seen in close proximity to her father carrying a copy of the Sunday Sport. Or words to that effect. So I gave in.

Going, going, gong

2011-07-07T19:25:00.009+02:00

During my very first teaching appointment, uncertificated in a prep school, in the days when a pint of bitter cost one and fourpence and a packet of Senior Service half-a-crown, a Mr James Blades came to the school to give a lecture about percussion instruments. He was a very likeable man, spirited and enthusiastic, with a wide range of instruments, among which he moved with absolute confidence and mastery. Xylophone, timpani, snare drum, tubular bells, gong, traps (i.e. drumkit), shakers, rattles, bells and whistles, the complete 'kitchen'. The most dramatic moment came when he demonstrated his gong, a heavy Chinese instrument measuring about 40cm across. He claimed its original purpose wasn't to summon diners to table or to provide an orchestral boom, but to torture captives: they were tied to a post, the gongman blocked his ears with wax and built up a gradual crescendo with his beaters until the torturee could bear it no longer and cracked, spilling the beans.

Or it might be used to execute criminals: when a certain volume and reverberation had been reached, the condemned's eardrums burst and his head exploded, spilling the brains. Or something like that. 8- and 9- year-old boys, basically ratbag monsters, lapped this news up and wrote home about it the following Sunday, no doubt saying that when they grew up they wanted to be percussionists and/or Chinese executioners.

Years later, all degreed and certificated up, when a pint of bitter cost £2.40 and I'd stopped smoking, I was attending a summer school in Cardiff when the same man turned up again, by now Professor of Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music in London and universally known as Jimmy. He gave exactly the same lecture as I remembered from 20 years before, but tuned up and filled out musically and, in deference to our adult sensibilities, with the Chinese torture bit left out.

Curiously, everyone must have heard Jimmy Blades playing at some time or other. In 1942 he recorded the Morse code V for Victory, dit-dit-dit-dah (the same rhythm as the opening of Beethoven's 5th) on a favourite African drum for the BBC to preface coded messages to the French resistance. It was heard again in the film The Longest Day. More familiarly perhaps, he was the striker of the mighty gong that introduced J. Arthur Rank films. Not the one you saw on screen: that gong was a fake, made of papier maché. Jimmy Blades stood at one side with his much smaller Chinese gong and beater when the title footage was filmed, while the bare-torsoed gongman mimed his strokes.

He died in 1999. In a roundabout way (I was never a direct student of his) he taught me a great deal about percussion.

(I'd like to continue this, but there's the gong calling me to supper.)

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

2011-07-06T10:04:00.005+02:00

Our much-esteemed friend and neighbour Hector has set up an infra-red camera in a bamboo clearing on his land. All the local fauna*, rabbits, martens, jennets, wild boar, tigers, drop in from time to time, drawn there by scatterings of maize or fresh bones nailed to a convenient branch in camera range.

The other night another visitor made his presence known, although I doubt if he was much interested in pecking at shreds of meat. Here he is:

Nightingale (mp3)

There wasn't much to see on Hector's film. He - the bird - far from appearing as colourful as his song, looks like a dun-coloured dicky bird, a little bigger than a robin. Now that the summer heat has set in and his brood has flown the nest, he'll be flying back to Africa.

It's very considerate of him and his all-nite singing pals - you can hear them in the background - to vanish just as hot nights oblige us to sleep with windows wide open. If only those carousing Belgian holidaymakers up the lane would follow their example . . .

I'm glad to have a permanent record of nightingale song. A piece of music I'm writing just now ends with a nocturne featuring 'nightingale' song high up on solo violin. (Ottorino Respighi did the same with one movement of his suite The Pines of Rome, but he specifies a recording rather than an imitation.) Nightingale song is surprisingly percussive and I may find myself asking the player to tap with a fingernail on the finger-board or even on the body of the violin to produce the desired effect.

I understand Hector once played the violin, but I assure you the recording above is 100% genuine.

*spot the odd one out

Ferrari Testarusta

2011-07-04T10:03:00.003+02:00

Yes, there's been some talk about getting a new car.

Miss E., aka The Blue Kitten, rather fancies this model, as seen in the village recently.

But could there be a problem with low bridges and multi-storey car parks?

Putting the Bard in Bardou

2011-06-29T14:03:00.007+02:00

This appeared on line this morning. I think it's a super record of a concert we gave a couple of weeks ago in Bardou, a very special nearby hill village, despite the producers thinking that rather than add subtitles to the spoken bits - in the introduction - they would have both languages, French and English, on the go simultaneously. Actually, if you latch on to the English, your ear may block out the French and you can probably follow it through. If you need to, of course.

Despite one or two infelicities of intonation and an acoustic like the inside of a bedroom slipper (very intimate and cosy, all the same), I was reasonably pleased. The first sung item, by Anton Bruckner, otherwise known for vast symphonies, is called Locus Iste a Deo Factus Est (This place was built by God). The second, Bogoroditsye Dyevo (a needlessly complicated way, it seems to me, of saying 'Hail, Mary') is a setting of the Russian Orthodox words by Arvo Pärt, an Estonian composer born in 1936, I think.) The third piece is my own setting of Shakespeare's Orpheus with his lute made trees And the mountain tops that freeze...bow before him.

And of course the village peacocks have their say, too. You can find the post from which the You Tube clip was taken here.

Atomique ou pas?

2011-06-26T16:10:00.004+02:00

Today I bought a fez in the village street market. I don't know why.

H'm

2011-06-24T19:50:00.004+02:00

The music on the piano desk is a song called Aus meinem grossen Schmerzen, Out of My Dark Despairing, music by Robert Franz, words by Heinrich Heine, who I believe was once arrested and locked up for revolutionary activities and self-indulgent versifying.

Probably by the officer in pink.

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs

2011-06-22T09:05:00.006+02:00

Going to Aberdeen?

Speak like a native with our oh-so-easy Listen, Read, Speak method:

Northfield Episode 1 (mp3)

1. June, it's Aggie, Fred's Aggie here ... phone me back on 0778052736 ... now phone me back June and I tell you ... I swear it on the bones of my mother that I'm going to murder you and that homosexual Abdully 'cos you've just rotted the constitution of my boy ... if you want to take £50 off my boy I'm going to take £50 off your face, prostitute ... you'd better phone me back 'cos I'll come up to your house, June, and I'll put the whole lot of your house in a knot ... and you can tell [redacted] he'll get his throat cut ...

Northfield Episode 2 (mp3)

2. June I'm telling you you'd better get back to me because I swear afore this weekend's out ... if I get my hands on you ... and I'm telling you I'm going to rip you from arsehole to breakfast and that wee poof Henry Glass that you married I'm going to crop that and all ... you'd better go on the phone ... give me the money back, June, and we'll forget all about it ... or else you're dead and I don't give a f*ck who's in your house I'll burn the whole f*cking lot of you out ...

Northfield Episode 3 (mp3)

3. Look I'm very sorry, my dear, whoever you are ... I phoned up and left a message on your answering machine and made a threat phone call ... I'm sorry, I got the wrong person ... I hope I haven't disturbed you in any particular way ... sorry.

Increase your word power: crop - geld, emasculate

A priori at the Priory

2011-06-19T21:58:00.003+02:00

Well, I thought it was disastrous. A whole year on and the sudden memory still shocks me into panic palpitations in the middle of the night and dagger-thrust consciousness that everything I've ever attempted in my life is doomed.

The measure of the hype gives the measure of the fall. A year ago we - my little choir Les Jeudistes and I - were in full preparation for the first-ever performance of L'Imitation de Notre Dame la Lune, The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon. It was a cantata I'd composed for choir and string quartet, based on the poems of one Jules Laforgue, a little-known French poet of the 1880s. It was the most ambitious score the choir had ever tackled. We rehearsed till the crotchets and quavers fell out of our trouser bottoms. Posters went up on every public notice board for kilometres around. Local radio featured it, so did the local press, local English language magazines enthused about it, local music websites buzzed about it. And the word went round. Sisters, cousins and aunts fought to get in.

The result was a packed church, standing room only in the Priory of St Julian, an idyllic place shown above. Enormously gratifying. We'd arranged for a live recording to be made.

It's a curious thing, but conductors - in this case myself - very often don't hear what's being performed. They're too preoccupied with hearing in their heads what's coming next, and preparing for it. Many conductors conduct in anticipation, several beats, even a bar, ahead of what's actually being played. At the end of the performance I was pleasantly satisfied, having heard throughout what I felt, a priori, it ought to sound like.

A week or two later the truth was told as the recording became available. It was disastrous, I couldn't listen to it. I was deeply ashamed. The choir seemed to have forgotten the most elementary disciplines. They sang out of tune, the words were indistinct. The strings sounded tired and slack. Of the twelve tracks only four showed the faintest spark of the fire and energy and laughter we'd known during rehearsal.

I've just discovered - or, much nearer the truth, my daughter Patroclus has discovered for me - how to put audio tracks on line via Audioboo. We put a test out the other evening, to see if it worked. It did, brilliantly. We deleted it almost immediately in anticipation of this post, but all the same one or two managed to pick it up. So here are two tracks from The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon, Je te vas dire ('I'll tell you') and O félines Ophélies en folie ('O crazy feline Ophelias': you see how Laforgue loved to play with words). In both the men sing something pretty condescending, stuffed-shirt-pompous even, as if womankind owed them something. The women reply appropriately, teasingly, mick-mockingly. As they do.

People have been kind enough to ask to hear some of my music. Here's some, in the raw. I have to say the best music comes right at the end, after the singing has stopped.

Je te vas dire (mp3)

O félines Ophélies en folie (mp3)

Mikoyan and Gurevich

2011-06-18T11:49:00.006+02:00

Exciting, positive, Patroclus-led developments in the quest for how to spoon audio files into Lydian Airs posts will shortly be taking effect.

Meanwhile here is something that I found while browsing through the history of the cigarette, trying to discover whether Woodbines and Park Drive were the same cigarette, the former marketed in the south, the latter in the north of England. This essay into ultra-sophisticated marketing - think Silk Cut, think Strand - may keep readers diverted for a second or two, especially this one.

Happy weekend.

The G-word

2011-06-16T08:11:00.005+02:00

Today certain relatives are coming to stay. As you can see, my hair has turned quite luxuriantly dark at the prospect. And the knees of my trousers have gone again.

There may not be many posts for the next few days, as I shall be preoccupied with romping and playing horsey keep your tail up. Please excuse me.

Miss Tyrol Mystery

2011-06-14T12:04:00.004+02:00

The Ugly Duchess (Quintin Matsys, 1513)

Frequent mentions and appearances of beautiful women here lead me to attempt to redress the balance.

History gives as the ugliest woman ever Margarete von Görz, countess of Tyrol. She is maybe better known as Margarete Maultasch, which means Pocket-mouth, Bag-mouth. A strong character, she had many troubles, chiefly to do with producing an heir. She was married at twelve to a boy of eight. Dynastic needs eclipsed the lad's capabilities, so without bothering with divorce she married someone else, thereby alienating the lad's family. She defended herself against the charge of bigamy by claiming her first marriage was unconsummated. She was thereupon excommunicated, and it was perhaps at this time, telling everyone what she thought of them, that she earned her nickname.

The Ugly Duchess (Sir John Tenniel, c.1864)

Somehow the portrait up there at the top, the Ugly Duchess, by the Flemish artist Quentin Matsys, has been accepted as her likeness. This portrait appears to have been the model for Sir John Tenniel's Ugly Duchess (above) in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. While Tenniel's gives his Duchess a big mouth, Matsys' version tends towards the rosebud.

But there's something not quite right here. Margarete von Görz died in 1363, aged 51. Matsys painted his portrait in 1513, 150 years after her death. I don't know if Matsys ever claimed it represented Margarete von Görz. (It seems to me to have faint pre-echos of Tony Blair, as caricatured by certain cartoonists.) On the other hand much medical ink has been spilt claiming that what Matsys was illustrating, for reasons that are obscure, was a woman of some distinction, judging by her dress, in the toils of Paget's disease. This is a bone disease causing horrible deformities. Matsys' Duchess has all the symptoms. But why did he paint her?

Here's another (anonymous) portrait of Margarete von Görz, again from the 1500s. History certainly seems to have judged her unfairly. If he'd been around at the time, I'm sure Spadoman, that splendid connoisseur of travel, shadows and comely women, would have leapt to her defence.

Erm, defense.

Cupboard love

2011-06-11T20:20:00.009+02:00

Away overnight to a place called Dieulefit (pron. approx. 'Jerlfee') where the Hoboken Trio - photo above - was playing. Jerlfee is in north-west Provence, not far from Montélimar, where the nougat comes from. We've known Saskia (violin), Jérôme (piano) and Eric (cello) on and off for some years now, because although they're based in Paris they give concerts in our part of the world fairly frequently. They're usually put up locally, and last year Eric, who is also principal cello with the Orchestre de Paris, stayed with us.

Last night they were playing an all-French programme of music composed within the last 100 years. This included an extended piece of music simply called 'Trio' by someone called Lucien Durosoir. If you've never heard of him you've nothing to reproach yourself about: although he died in 1955, he has only just been discovered.

His son Jean-Luc was there last night, now a retired microbiologist of about 75. After the concert there was a get-together of musicians and friends, and Jean-Luc Durosoir told J. and me his father's story. A violinist, he had been called up in 1914 and had been assigned to an infantry regiment. By 1918 he was the only survivor of the 800 men in his draft. In 1917, having survived the holocaust of Verdun, he was transferred out of the fighting line and made a stretcher-bearer. After the war he took himself and his mother as far away as possible, without leaving France, from the 'civilisation' that had engineered this terrible war. He set up home in the pinewoods on France's remote Biscay coast, an area called Les Landes. Here Lucien Durosoir poured out music, composing feverishly, it was said, to rid himself of the ghosts and the agonies of the trenches. In the early 1920s his mother, not apparently an easy character, broke her pelvis and both femurs in a fall, and remained wheelchair-bound until her death in 1934. In 1935 Lucien married, and in 1936 Jean-Luc was born.

None of this music was ever played, none of it was ever published. All those sheets of music paper, carrying their musical images of anguish and tragedy, were piled up in a big cupboard and forgotten about.

Many years later, after the death of his mother, Jean-Luc opened the cupboard and discovered the extent of his father's musical legacy, all of it composed before he was born. Through various contacts the Trio was offered to the Hobokens, who specialise in the performance of new music, although their bread-and-butter is the music of Haydn.

So last night we heard it. It wasn't the first performance, and in any case the Hobokens recorded it in January. I wish I could say I enjoyed it. While the playing was excellent, I didn't enjoy the music at all. It was brutal, over-stated, unrelieved anger, angst, agony and anguish. I'm afraid I allowed my attention to wander - and to wonder if it wasn't so much the conflict in the trenches that troubled the composer so much as the daily conflict with his mother. But if Jean-Luc had wanted us to know this he would have told us.

Just now I'm composing a piece for the Hobokens, quite a long work in what I call strip cartoon form, that's to say lots of little episodes going to make up a complete narrative. It ought to be ready by Christmas.

Yes, we too have cupboards. But there's no room for angst in them.

Hodmandods are off, dear

2011-06-09T11:04:00.005+02:00

Coming down first - exceptionally, must be the third time this year - this morning to make tea etc. I noticed, gulping uneasily with apprehension, that one of J.'s local recipe books is open, ominously, at a page featuring a dish called Lou Cagaraoulat. This translates as something like Snail Casserole.

Here's the recipe, for 6 people:

Ingredients

200 snails
2 onions
Coulis of 8 tomatoes
3 good slices of raw cured ham
½ litre of dry white wine
Salt, pepper
Garlic, sprig of thyme, 2 bay leaves.

Cook the snails for 1 hour in pressure cooker, covered with water well infused with the herbs, etc.
Drain well when cooked.
Dice the ham, fry to sizzling in a large casserole. Add the sliced onions, thyme and bay leaves and then the white wine.
Cook slowly. Mix in the snails when the sauce has thickened, cook for 10 minutes, then add crushed garlic. Each snail should be coated with the sauce.
Serve with white wine.

One damp morning some years ago I was surprised to find a van parked beneath our walnut tree and voices from the drystone wall by one of our little ponds. I went to investigate. A family of about 6 were busy picking all the snails lodging in the wall crevices, supposing themselves secure beneath the covering ivy. They were busy filling plastic supermarket bags with them. Any enterprising Brians trying to escape were ruthlessly shoved back in again. There must have been easily enough to complete the recipe above. They were our snails, beyond doubt. These people were nothing but common snail poachers.

What would you have done? Ask for them back? Ask them to replace every single one of them where they found them? Required them to pay for them?

Quickly weighing up the pros, cons and possible outcomes, I said I would have been pleased if they'd asked beforehand, but all the same I wished them bon appetit. Enjoy. After all, I wasn't going to eat them.

When J. came down I said Erm, you weren't thinking of ...

No, no, she said. If you look on the same page there's a recipe for olive bread I was going to try.

Phew.

Calashny Cove

2011-06-07T09:45:00.002+02:00

I do not know what's going on here.

Che hora c'è?

2011-06-05T12:18:00.006+02:00

A short but entertaining post here about very old books sent me looking for mine, which I keep in a cardboard box in my study hoping that generous applications of Oblivion will somehow improve them. I'm really waiting for the day when, unprompted, some specialist bookbinder and gold tooler will restore them to their original pristine state when they came out in:

1735: Poems by Eminent Ladies, particularly, Mrs Leapor, Mrs Pilkington, Lady Winchelsea

We allow'd you Beauty, and we did fubmit
To all the Tyrannies of it.
Ah! Cruel Sex! will you depofe us too in Wit?

COWLEY

1759: Plutarch's Lives Vols. 2, 3, 4, 6

1763: The English Expositor, being, A Complete Dictionary

1774: Homeri Ilias Vols 1 and 2

1815: The Satires of Juvenal, translated by James Sinclair, Esq.

1816: Tales of my Landlord, collected and arranged by Jedediah Cleishbotham, Schoolmaster and Parish-Clerk of Gandercleugh [actually Sir Walter Scott]

1818: Carmina Q. Horatii Flacci

This last is the Odes of Horace. I did Books 1 and 2 of the Odes as a set book for A level Latin. I wish the examiners had chosen something else, because at 18 I really wasn't old enough to appreciate the mature wisdom, wit and quiet sophistication of these short poems.

Horace apparently was in the excellent habit of putting any writing away for seven years, probably in a cardboard box in his study. At the end of seven years he would retrieve it, and either destroy it, glad that he didn't have to suffer the shame of anyone else looking at it, or rework and polish it, by which time it might be of a standard for publication.

You may be interested to know that I wrote this post in June, 2004. I wouldn't expect any comments until 2018.

Canon to right of them, canon to left of them

2011-06-03T18:37:00.007+02:00

Writing about that canon Sumer is icumen in the other day brought to mind another extraordinary canon. (A canon is a sort of round, a tune that harmonises with itself when sung at staggered intervals.)

Here's one of very little musical interest, despite having been written by Mozart. It's dated 2nd September 1788.

Grechtelt's enk, grechtelt's enk, wir gehn im Prater.
Im Prater? Im Prater? Izt lass nach, i lass mi net stimma.
Ei beileib, ei jawohl, mi bringst nöt aussi.
Was blauscht der? Was blauscht der? Izt halt's Maul! I gib d'ra Tetschen!

It's a little fly-on-the-wall snapshot into the Mozart household in Vienna. He and his wife Constanze had two surviving children, Karl Thomas and Franz Xaver. Here's the (loose) translation from the very coarse Viennese dialect:

Mozart: Get ready, both of you, get ready, both of you, we're going to the Prater.

KT and FX: To the Prater? To the Prater? Give me a break, don't talk daft.
Oh right, oh indeed, you're not getting me to go out.
What's he yapping on about? What's he yapping on about?

Mozart: Shut your gob, now, or I won't half fetch you a clout.

The Prater is a large park in Vienna. I don't expect its famous Ferris wheel, scene of Harry Lime's murderous philosophising in The Third Man, was there in Mozart's day. I wasn't sure whether this homely little scene improved or detracted from my impressions of Mozart as an artist of the greatest sensitivity and refinement, but then I saw in my mind's eye the four of them, Mozart, Constanze, Karl Thomas and Franz Xaver singing it - it's not hard - round the dinner table, or marching line abreast to the Prater, having finally got their coats on. Could they have dissolved into fits of giggles? (Not, I hope, those idiotic giggles we had to put with from Tom Hulse playing Mozart in Peter Schaffer's film Amadeus.) Definitely to Mozart's credit, I think.

(This is the only trustworthy portrait of Mozart as an adult, painted from the life by his brother-in-law. It's unfinished: he's supposed to be sitting at the piano. The pair to it, which was finished, shows his wife Constanze.)

Another fine product from Norfolk

2011-06-01T13:46:00.003+02:00

Dinahmow, she who puts the Ee! in Queensland, suggests that my choir 'Les Jeudistes' might like to have a crack at Sumer is icumen in. In fact it was one of first songs we ever learnt when we first got together more than 10 years ago.

It's one of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever composed. First of all, it's a canon, like a round, for example Three Blind Mice or Row, Row, Row your Boat, only much more complicated. Composing canons is demanding enough, but Sumer is icumen in, sung by three different soprano voices, is hardly simplified by being sung over a rota or ostinato of mens' voices singing the same thing over and over again.

So while the tenors sing 'Sing cuckoo! Sing cuckoo! Sing cuckoo!' something like 40 times, while...

the basses sing 'Sing cuckoo now! Sing cuckoo now! Sing cuckoo now!' about 40 times as well, while...

over the top of this the sopranos are singing the following words, not together but staggered, at intervals:

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing 'Cuckoo!'
Groweth seed and bloweth mead
And spring'th the wood anew.
Sing 'Cuckoo!'
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Low'th after calve cu,
Bullock sterteth, buck everteth*
Merry sing 'Cuckoo!'
Well singst thou 'Cuckoo!'
Ne swik thou never nu.

This translates as: Summer has come, loudly sing 'Cuckoo!' Seeds grow and the meadows blow, and the wood comes to life again: sing 'Cuckoo!' Ewe bleats after lamb, the cow lows after the calf, bullocks spring up, deer jump about*: merrily sing 'Cuckoo!' You sing 'Cuckoo!' well: Don't ever stop now.

The extraordinary thing about this song is its age. Originally it came from Reading Abbey, and it's attributed, maybe not very convincingly, to a monk called John of Fornsete or Forncett, which I understand is a place in Norfolk. Its date? About 1250, maybe a little earlier.

The only Western music that survives - apart from this song - from the 13th century is church music, at that time either plainchant or primitive attempts at harmony that sound exceptionally barbaric to our ears. That this solitary, highly-crafted, musicianly jewel should exist in such a sludge is one of the mysteries of music, suggesting that alongside the church music of the time there were very lively secular developments that remain to be discovered.

I spent a long time trying to find a reasonable performance on YouTube, and came up with the one above, sung by a lively Australian group (not unlike Les Jeudistes) called Lumina Vocal Ensemble, for the especial delight of Dinahmow. Most other performances are dreadful (including the especially dire The Wicker Man adaptation) and you wonder at the gross conceit of some people that they dare put their feeble caterwaulings on public display.

* Some who should know better translate 'everteth' as 'fart', God knows why. If John of Forncett had meant 'fart' he would have written 'bucke farteth'. It's not as if this word didn't exist in the 13th century. The word 'fart' is even older than 'Norfolk', where I believe the phenomenon is unknown.

Top lines from Chaucer No. 103

2011-05-30T11:43:00.005+02:00

Actually they're edited from The Washington Post's annual round-ups of topical neologisms. But Chaucer would have enjoyed them.

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph, v.. To walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavoured mouthwash.

9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle, n. A humorous question in an exam.

12. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

13. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

14. Cashtration, n. The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

15. Reintarnation, n. Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

16. Giraffiti, n. (Ital) Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

17. Sarchasm, n. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

18. Inoculatte, v. (Ital.) To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

19. Osteopornosis, n. A degenerate disease

20. Karmageddon, n. It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

21. Decafalon, n. The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

22. Glibido, n. All talk and no action.

23. Dopeler Effect, n. phrase The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

24. Beelzebug, n. Satan in the form of a mosquito which gets into your bedroom at 3am and which cannot be cast out.

Les Jeudistes Scottish Choir Tour No. 5 (final)

2011-05-28T11:11:00.010+02:00

Desperate times

We spent the final night of the tour in the Holiday Inn, Ayr, a mile or two down the road from Prestwick Airport, a dismal place whose motto 'Pure dead brilliant' illustrates a characteristic Scottish thrift in its simultaneous combination of hyperbole and litotes.

The return flight, to Girona in northern Spain - the nearest airport to our base in France offering convenient flights to Scotland - meant checking in at 5.30am. We arranged to meet in the hotel foyer at 5.15, ready to embark in the minibus for the airport. The hotel reception staff said they didn't do wake-up calls, so we left it to the troops to manage their own mobile alarms. We suggested setting them for 4.30am.

Easier said than done. We should all have done it then and there, before saying goodnight, rather than leave it to each individual:

*Few if any had changed the time on their mobiles on arriving in Scotland some days earlier.

*Some were uncertain whether UK time was an hour ahead of, or behind, French time.

*And did the UK put clocks forward an hour at the end of March? Or did they put them back?

*Some had failed to advance their mobiles to take account of Continental summer-time.

*Did this mean that UK time was two hours ahead of, or behind, France?

*Some were uncertain if Spain and France had the same time.

The upshot was that alarms rang at 2.30, 3.30, 4.30, 5.30 and - the following morning, to M.'s annoyance, his mobile having been switched off for the flight - 6.30.

A further consequence was that M. and E., two of the lads, as they liked to call themselves having discovered that this is a popular term for 'man' in Scotland, had virtually to be dragged out of bed at 5.30 by one of the lassies, as they liked to call themselves having discovered that this is popular term for 'woman' in Scotland.

(Actually I should excuse E. from all this horological uncertainty. He leads a charmed life disdaining any kind of technology. He has no mobile, iPad, iPhone, anything like that at all. The most up-to-date artefacts he has about him are a comb and a two-coloured crayon. Sometimes I'm quite envious...)

But they all made it. Head lassie B. has put up a photo gallery of the whole trip here. Do have a look, tho' you would hardly gather from it that this was a Seriously Grand International Choir Outing and that we actually gave a few concerts here and there.

As for J. and me, we weren't flying back but returning a few days later by car. Of course I too in my imbecility miscalculated the alarm, which rang at 3.30. I wasn't too disgruntled. I went back to sleep for a bit. We both got up to drive the troops down to the airport, I went back to bed on return and got up for breakfast 3 hours later, by this time feeling really quite gruntled.

Les Jeudistes Scottish Choir Tour No. 4

2011-05-22T19:36:00.004+02:00

I know I sometimes write the first thing that comes into my head, and anyone reading these effusions is clearly graced with the greatest forbearance (or has no idea how best to spend his/her time), but today's post is something special.

No, it's no illusion, no trick photography. It's the Sultan of Oman's Mounted Pipe Band. Look, you can quite clearly see the camels, with bagpipers mounted. How you do this I've no idea. And just think, the other day I could have found out, but the opportunity passed, and unless any of the myriad camel-mounted pipers that come here every day can enlighten me, it will have passed for ever.

We took Les Jeudistes to Cawdor Castle. It's the one in which Macbeth murdered King Duncan, according to Shakespeare. (In fact Macbeth, who reigned in Scotland - as it often does - at about the time of William the Conqueror wasn't a bad king at all. His queen was called Gruoch, or maybe she was merely clearing her throat when asked what her name was.) It's a fascinating place to visit, and I've known this castle for many years. I once borrowed - by permission of Earl Cawdor, a Campbell - the castle dinner gong for a performance in which I was playing percussion of Carmina Burana in nearby Inverness.

I arranged for a piper to meet Les Jeudistes, thinking we might as well go the whole hog. Mutedly resplendent in mainly blue tartan, he met us at the turnstile, led us in procession to a well-known march called The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill to the castle drawbridge, where we were all photographed with him. When he stopped playing I asked him what his pipe-history was: usually pipers have served with some military unit or other. He wore a silver badge with a stag's head on it, the badge of Clan Mackenzie which eventually became, together with the motto 'Caberfeidh', the emblem of the Seaforth Highlanders, now merged into The Highlanders.

Yes, he'd served with the Seaforths, he said, but after leaving and before taking full retirement he'd been appointed piping instructor to the Sultan of Oman. Here he had to learn not only to ride camels but to play the pipes while riding. I was tempted to think he was pulling my leg, but he was a very serious-minded gentleman, not at all like his interlocutor, so I imagine it must be true.

Les Jeudistes thanked him and moved into the inner bailey, just beyond the drawbridge. Although open to the skies, the acoustic was excellent. Despite our rule never to sing out of doors, we thought we might have a go just this once. We formed up and sang a couple of our Occitan folksongs. Heads appeared at doors and windows, mulberry-uniformed staff forsook the cafeteria to listen. Enthusiastic applause. Not having perfect pitch, I borrowed J.'s tuning fork to find the right pitch. I suppose I could have borrowed the gong again if I'd thought of it.

There's another stag's head on the heraldic shield above the gate. This time the motto is that of the Campbells of Cawdor: Be Mindful.

I don't think we'll forget.

Les Jeudistes Scottish Choir Tour No. 3

2011-05-20T12:40:00.008+02:00

Tir nan Og

Ullapool, far away on Scotland's remote north west coast, has a dreamy, Local Hero quality to it, a siren-song that calls you to ditch everything and just lap yourself in the still waters of Loch Broom, cradle yourself in the mountains of Wester Ross and stay there forever. There's a Gaelic expression for it: Tir nan Og, which means something like the 'country of the ever-young'. Or fairyland.

It's not like that at all, of course. Things are seldom what they seem. Les Jeudistes enjoyed the 50-mile drive there, oohing and aahing at the North Highland scenery, especially when after miles of bleak moorland you suddenly begin to descend towards the Atlantic coast with its temperate climate (thank you, Gulf Stream), lush vegetation and seductive views of the little town and port of Ullapool. And maybe in keeping with the unreality of all this there's nowhere to pull in and take photos. Except maybe of the road sign that says 'A835 Stornaway/Steòrnabhagh', which is about 50 miles away by sea across the Minch. To be fair, the road sign shows an image of a car ferry. Place names are given in English and Gaelic in this part of the world.

We're due to share the concert programme with a New Age folk-band calling themselves Pineapple Tuxedo, and it would need someone like Geoff with his encyclopedic knowledge of such things to explain why. And a Gaelic choir, calling itself Coisir ghaidlig an iar tuath. (I'll spare Geoff that one.)

Ullapool High School

We rehearse in the almost brand-new theatre attached to Ullapool High School. Hardly anyone has a local accent, virtually everyone we meet speaks the speech of southern England. Have they all been seduced by Tir nan Og? We meet members of the Gaelic choir. They're all super people, we get on very well. There's an American among them, and I think instantly of Local Hero. Few, if any, speak a word of Gaelic. The songs they sing they've learnt by rote. They have the gist of what they're singing about, but not much more. They rely entirely on their elegant and very musical conductor, Lisa Macdonald, who is a native speaker.

Between rehearsal and concert we stroll down to the water's edge. It's still, sunny and so warm. We sit on the sea-wall, drinking in the view up Loch Broom, lifting up our eyes to the hills. The pull of Tir nan Og is very strong. We could sit here, a happy little band of musicians enjoying each others' company, for ever. It's hard to pull ourselves away, return to the theatre, put on uniform and take the stage. Pineapple Tuxedo (P Tux for short) kicks off, bass guitar, electric guitar, accordion and bagpipes played without the drones. We follow with all my Shakespeare songs, and I'm conscious how curiously incongruous they are in this never-never land.

At the interval there's a big surprise. The pipes and drums of Ullapool High School, girls and boys, are drawn up for us in horse-shoe formation on the front concourse, 17 pipers and a dozen drummers including a small lad with a bass drum so large that he probably sleeps in it and rolls to band practice like a hamster in a wheel. They play several military marches, some in the wild harmony that the limited bagpipe scale allows, and far from being dressed in kilt, tunic and plaid like soldiers they're all in ordinary clothes, jeans, trainers, football strip tops and so on. At the end they form up in ranks and march off into the distance, maybe into the very heart of Tir nan Og. But more likely to home, chicken nuggets, Coca-Cola and the X Factor, or whatever.

In the second half the Gaelic choir sings, maybe a bit diffidently, finishing with a phuirt-a-beul, very rhythmical singing that does duty for dance music when no instruments are available. Les Jeudistes are fascinated. They've never heard anything like this before, a rapid, urgent, toe-tapping succession of sometimes nonsense syllables. Could we do that? they ask, and I skirt round the enormous effort needed to learn this hyper-exotic music at such a far-distant remove from my beloved Brahms or Schubert by saying maybe they could persuade the lovely Lisa Macdonald to come and teach us.

We follow with our Occitan songs. We're on level ground with the Gaelic choir here. None of us is a native Occitan speaker. It's all an elegant pretence, one I sometimes feel quite uneasy about, especially when it comes to bilingual road-signs. All the same at the end of the concert I put a few words of Gaelic together, almost my entire vocabulary: Gaidhlteachd gu brath! Tapadh leat, agus oidhche mhath. ('Gaeldom for ever! Thank you, and good night.' Sorry, my spelling might be a bit wonky). I might as well have spoken to my knees for all anyone in the audience could make head or tail of this. The one person who might have understood, Lisa Macdonald, had to go home early to relieve her babysitter.

That's Tir nan Og for you. You have to face up to reality some time.

Les Jeudistes Scottish Choir Tour No. 2

2011-05-18T10:02:00.004+02:00

At the door of Whinnieknowe, the retirement home where my mother is a few months into her second century, Eloi the basso profundo, perplexed by all the un-French Ws and Hs and Ks, asks me how you pronounce it. He might well be extra aware of the pitfalls of pronunciation: only that morning at breakfast Paul, our B & B proprietor, addressed him as 'Elloy' instead of 'Elwah'. General laughter. I pronounce it for him, telling him it means a small hill (knowe) covered with whins (gorse or broom).

We install ourselves in the south drawing room. We're all in uniform, red tops, black bottoms. Christine the accompanist settles herself at the Clavinova. She doesn't like electronic pianos. There's no control. This one is particularly brassy, even honky-tonkish in the higher registers. Christine does her best to draw a flowing cantabile out of it. It needs all her very considerable skill.

We've come to sing to the residents, who have been placed round the outside of the room. They're all more or less sane. My mother isn't among them. Maybe she's chosen not to come. She can be quite capricious. She's also almost totally deaf, so there isn't much point in her coming anyway.

We set off into Le Cantique de Jean Racine, a serenely beautiful sacred motet by Gabriel Fauré. We sing it in French, but the theology is so abstruse that no one would be much the wiser whatever language we sang it in. About three quarters of the way through the doors open and a flurry of attendants eases my mother's wheelchair through. She makes nods and becks and wreathèd smiles to all the company, who respond appropriately. Through the music, now coming to a close, I hear someone asking 'Fa's thon wifie?' This is local dialect for 'Who's that lady?' (My mother stays in her room most of the time.) Le Cantique comes to an end. They've sung it beautifully, despite this interruption. Polite applause.

Taking into account that my mother's entry has spoilt the other residents' enjoyment of this piece, and that my mother herself hasn't had a chance to hear it, and that maybe a particularly persuasive carer has got her to put her hearing aid in for once, I say to the company 'Would you like to hear it again?'

'No,' someone says from the other side of the room.

Les Jeudistes Scottish Choir Tour No. 1

2011-05-17T11:20:00.003+02:00

Best joke of the tour :

J-C, when offered a slice of pressed tongue:

No, thanks. I don't much care for tongue. Somehow I don't relish the thought of eating something that's come out of some creature's mouth.

I'll have an egg instead.

AWOL

2011-04-29T10:55:00.004+02:00

I hear there have been recent reports of a 10-strong foreign choir, due to sing in remote parts of the Celtic fringe, flying into the UK and then absconding.

If you have been, please stop worrying. It's not my choir. Indeed, at the time of the Disappearing Choir, my troops were busy rehearsing for our forthcoming concert tour. I can account for everyone of them. At the time in question they were arranged in their usual semi-circle round the piano in our...well, I don't know what to call it.

In France they say salon, which I suppose translates as saloon, but that doesn't give the right idea at all. It's just a space between our sitting and dining areas large enough to accommodate 8 people of mixed nationalities, conductor and pianist.

We've put a programme together of church music, which is mostly good to sing whatever one's beliefs, including a magnificent piece called Abendlied, a motet written by Josef Rheinberger, the Pride of Leichtenstein, the only composer I know of who came from the tiny Alpine principality which, since we're on the subject, I believe you can hire by the day for a consideration and which, just to complete the topic, I once walked across in about 45 minutes way back in the days when any present under 50-year-olds were but zephyr-blown ripples on the surface of the gene pool.

So some church music, and a set of Languedoc folk-songs. You might get the wine-and-olives, aubergine-and-honey, goat's cheese-and-fennel flavour of these from their titles and summaries:

La lauseta (The lark)
(Who'll provide meat and drink at the birds' wedding?)

La croquinhòta (My little pal)
(Let's take a walk and see what a topsy-turvy world this is)

Lo cipressièr (The cypress tree)
(My love is lost in sad cypress: for me the month of May will never return)

O up! As pas entendut? (Hey, haven't you heard?)
(In the village they're organising a cuckoo hunt)

Lo boièr (The herdsman)
(Despite his goodly soup, the herdsman's sick wife goes to heaven with her goats)

So some church music, some local folk-songs, and then a set of 14 Shakespeare songs from my own pen for choir and piano. We've already sung most of them in France, but this will be the first UK performance, due to take place in Ullapool, in the far north-west of Scotland, then in Nairn (some miles east of Inverness) and finally in Grantown-on-Spey as part of a festival called Speyside in May. Exciting times. (And I'll be off-blog for a week or two.)

Wish us luck. The troops are so wildly excited by all this that I wouldn't be surprised if they too absconded.

Two a penny

2011-04-26T09:40:00.001+02:00

B. came round the other day, bearing gifts as he often does, because he really is the most generous of souls. Very seasonably, he brought us a box of hot cross buns of his own baking. In an earlier existence in south Devon, B. was a baker. In moving to France ten years ago and more he lost none of his skills. He still turns out Christmas cakes and mince pies, birthday cakes and hot cross buns to order; in fact he made our wedding cake when J. and I got married just over three years ago. He has completely seduced the local French with his craft and is probably the most popular man in the village, particularly as he and his wife P. are also adept at ballroom dancing, a highly-prized skill locally.

B. told us once that in parts of Devon it was the custom to place a hot cross bun at the highest point of the house. This would protect the house from evil spirits. At the time he told us this we were in fact building a new house, and it had reached the stage where the roof timbers were being assembled. B. appeared that Easter with a clutch of hot cross buns still warm from the oven, and it required no little sacrifice to set one aside as protection money for the Evil One.

So we asked Alain, the foreman builder, if he would climb up among the roof trusses and fix the sacrificial hot cross bun to the highest point. Rarely have we been looked at so pityingly, but all the same Alain found a 15cm nail (a French nail, to be sure) and a hammer, clambered up and transfixed B.'s bun to the very apex.

I had to climb up into the very shallow loft a few weeks ago, to look at a vent that might have been giving trouble. I flashed the torch up into the apex, and there was B.'s bun, still intact. I touched it: it was rock-hard, as well it might be after nearly seven years. I would like to be able to say that under its influence J. and I had become expert ballroom dancers, but I'm afraid it's not so. On the other hand, we've never been troubled by evil spirits. If you had to give up the Bossa Nova or Beelzebub, which would you choose?

Exactly.

Spring Greens

2011-04-24T11:35:00.005+02:00

Is your name Green?

by 'Nomenclator'

1. 10 years ago one Sally Barnes, who worked for a Yorkshire branch of Tesco's, spent £2000 on cosmetic surgery to make her look less like Su Pollard, an actress who enjoyed her hour or two of fame in a TV sitcom called Hi-de-Hi. This Su Pollard once entered a talent contest and came second to a performing dog. The contest, an early edition of Opportunity Knocks, was hosted by a certain Hughie GREEN.

2. Stanley GREEN, however, who died in 1994, was a London sandwich-board man, whose message, sometimes in pamphlet form, was that carnal lust is brought on by eating beans, meat, cheeseburgers and particularly by sitting down. This was the message he brought daily to the Oxford Street crowds and cinema queues, some members of which occasionally attacked him. He cycled daily from Northolt to his work, standing in the saddle.

3. Mary GREEN, maybe a 17th Century ancestress of the above GREENS, claimed to have a licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury allowing her to practise alternative medicine. She had cures for:

a) Windy Vapours
b) Glimmering of the Gizzard
c) Falling of the Fundament
d) The Scotch Disease
e) The Wombling Trot.

Mrs GREEN also produced publicity flyers in rhyme, one of which from 1685 read:

The Cramp, the Stitch,
The Squirt, the Itch,
The Gout, the Stone, the Pox,
The Mulligrubs,
The Bonny Scrubs,
And all Pandora's Box.

Please underline as appropriate:

I feel this is an honourable surname and I am privileged to be called GREEN

I am going to change my name by deed poll to GREEN

My name is/is not GREEN and I do/do not wish to be associated with this twaddle and refuse to read any of it.

Good morning.

Next week: 'Nomenclator' asks: Is your name Welshcreep?

The Ashes Series

2011-04-22T12:40:00.007+02:00

Driving to Montpellier, the big city, the other day, the in-car conversation between J. and me was mostly about the scattering of funerary ashes. It's a topical subject with us at the moment, and special measures are being taken to carry out our scatteree's wishes.

Luckily the scatteree had been as practical and sensible as we might have expected and hadn't imposed too impossible or unwelcome a load on the next of kin. No last wish, for instance, to have ashes scattered on the outgoing tide at the Cape of Good Hope, or in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, or thrown to the four winds from the top of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, the deceased having once been seduced by a poem with these magical names in it and having been led away by the Grim Reaper before he/she had a chance to alter the will. Or, come to that, on the moon, theoretically possible, but where presumably the scatterers would have the embarrassment of the ashes hanging in mid-air, if there was any air for them to hang amid, in the absence of gravity as we know it.

The most recent issue of The London Review of Books carried a very readable piece about the business of death. We learn, for instance, that cremation ashes are relics of the hard bits, bone mostly, ground up into a kind of grit. Foreign bodies impervious to great heat, the remains of stents, dental implants, ceramic hip-joints, etc, are raked out before the ashes are delivered to the customer. Having that sort of mind, I suspect that the whole business of cremation may be liable to more-or-less honest error, and that what goes on behind the velvet veil may not always be what it seems. I sometimes feel the same about abattoirs.

We learn also that the life of death, so to speak, is 25 years, that's to say about a generation. It's after this period (unless the deceased is someone very notable indeed) that graves become forgotten, physical memorials decay, while memorial funds, always dodgy and the very devil to administer, run out of puff much sooner than that.

When I made a will some years ago I specified exactly where I wanted my ashes scattered. It was the only specific request I made, and I don't know why I made it. It's not appropriate now and it would put my next of kin to fearful trouble. Every other disposition I left to them, to do whatever they felt appropriate. After all, all that dreadful paraphernalia of funerals is for the living, not for the dead, and I can't imagine that ex-I would have the slightest concern about or involvement in the whole wretched business. So I'm going to change it, and leave the scatter venue, if any, up to them. If to aid them in their choice I had to identify the places where I had been truly happy, there would be an awful lot, but two places would be paramount: the playing fields at school (so the scattering would probably have to be done secretly, at dead of night), or in bed.

H'm.

Elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree

2011-04-20T12:10:00.002+02:00

I don't know what might have triggered it, but during a wakeful moment in the night I found myself thinking about childish ripostes that passed for wit when I was a 9-year-old:

Q: 'What are you doing?'
A: 'MYOB' (Mind your own business)
or
A: 'Ask no questions, hear no lies.'

Q: 'What are you looking at?'
A: 'Elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree'

Q: 'What's for dinner?'
A: 'YMCA' (Yesterday's Muck Cooked Again)
or
A: 'Yum yum, pig's bum.'

Q: 'What's the time?'
A: [Whatever the time happened to be] 'Half past nine, hang your knickers on the line. When the policeman comes along, take them down and put them on.'

[The implications here are deep. Is the assumption that you only have one pair of knickers? Why the policeman? Questions of scansion aside, why couldn't it be the greengrocer, muffin-man, hall porter, lance-corporal, etc.? Why should the policeman cause this reaction, maybe before the garment has dried? Does the policeman's advent somehow speed the drying process? Or are there considerations of public decency to be taken into account?]

Then there was the immortal

Q: 'Wotcher, cock.' (Still current occasionally)
A: 'Wotcher.'
Q: 'How's your mother off for dripping?'

There was something obscenely suggestive about this, something I could never quite pin down. I went back to sleep before arriving at any conclusion.

Berkeley Square, all change

2011-04-18T10:22:00.003+02:00

Awaking from a drowsy numbness the other night at about two o'clock, I was so struck by the fluting cascades of bird-song through the open window that I got up and went downstairs, opened the front door and stood for several minutes listening on the flagstones outside, still warm from the previous day's sun.

The nightingales are back. Hearing them for the first time in spring is something like hearing the first cuckoo in other climates. Mid-April is about right, though. Whatever it is that guides these little birds, slightly bigger than robins, on their migratory course from southern Africa back to Europe hasn't failed them. I don't think I've ever read anything about the effects of climate change on migration habits, but I don't expect I've looked in the right places.

A full moon silvered everything as I stood outside in bare feet with little else*. It was exceptionally still, with no sound apart from the ever-present distant murmur of the river. And, of course, the song of the nightingale. Nor was there only one: I could detect four or five, maybe more, each fainter as the distance between their territories swallowed them.

Experts say that it's only the males that sing. Opinion is divided as to whether they sing to mark their territory or to attract females. Maybe it's both. At any rate they sing until the summer heat closes in, but this coincides with birth and feeding of the nightingale chicks, so all the pairings-off must have been made some weeks before. And they sing during the day. There's one singing outside my window as I type this at 10 o'clock in the morning.

My small choir is preparing for a mini-tour of Northern Scotland in less than three weeks' time. They'll defend their corner, certainly, but how many will attract mates with their singing remains to be seen. If we make it, that is, because there's a question-mark over one of our songsters: he fell out of a tree the other day and injured himself. I haven't yet asked him if he was singing at the time. Fingers crossed for him, tho' I think he'll be all right.

*Yes, I KNOW

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

2011-04-15T15:41:00.004+02:00

I'm sorry, I've been very irregular. Unsettled times here, with a death in the family and many comings and goings, largely to the benefit of Michael O'Leary of Ryanair. In the course of them J. brought back from Pret à Manger at Stansted airport a BLT sandwich for me, a rare treat.

Francophiles (and I've lived here too long to call myself a francophile) sometimes drool at the notion of a crusty baguette sliced horizontally and filled with good things, but I've had enough of them now to long sometimes (i.e. often) for an ordinary Anglo-Saxon sandwich. So J.'s gift of a BLT sandwich was wondrously toothsome and so packed with lettuce, mayonnaise, tomato and mini-slices of cold streaky bacon that eating it required close attention and both hands.

So it would never have done for that hardened gambler the 4th Earl of Sandwich (one of those people like Hoover or Cardigan who gave their name to something that has since become quite ordinary, tho' I don't know what the Iron Duke would have made of wellies) who according to legend arranged for a couple of slices of beef (with horseradish) to be clapped between two slices of bread so that he could both eat at the gaming table and hold a hand of cards at the same time.

The best bacon sandwich I remember had everything exactly right. Back bacon, slightly salty, done to a sublety below crisp. Allowed to cool a little, so that the ample spread of butter didn't melt completely. Sourdough bread not sliced too thick. This glorious confection I had at an extraordinary place in California called Desert Centre Café.

It was plumb in the middle of the desert between Southern California and Arizona next door. It was just an adobe-style café with an immense parking area, some petrol pumps and what seemed to be a vast vehicle repair shed. There was nothing else for about 50 miles, it seemed, although the postal address of this Nirvana of the Bacon Sandwich was 44,321 Ragsdale Road. This has brought back such irresistibly droolsome memories that I think I must go and make one for myself right now. But it won't be the same. There's no relish quite like nostalgia.

For crying out loud

2011-04-03T19:23:00.005+02:00

Watching a Rossini (that's him above) opera during an idle moment this afternoon, I was reminded that he only wept three times in his whole life.

Once when an early opera of his failed.

Once when he heard Paganini play.

And once when a truffled turkey fell into the water during a river picnic.

The last time I wept was when watching a biopic about Brahms. As a solitary old man he was not very good at looking after himself. At a particularly poignant moment, when one of his most deeply-felt slow movements was playing in the background, he was shown struggling to open a tin of pressed tongue. The patent opener (this would have been in the 1890s) broke, leaving a small hole through which he was reduced to scraping out pathetically small shreds of this really rather nasty meat with the wrong end of a teaspoon. The notion that this elderly, lonely man, creator of such very beautiful things, should be reduced to this . . . well, although not usually that emotional, something gave way and I could not hold back the tears.

Suits me

2011-04-02T11:57:00.004+02:00

Sometime in the 80s, when I was working in North-east Scotland, an elderly friend who had once been celebrated as the smallest chaplain in the 8th Army, who had ridden crucifix, as you might say, in 1944/5 with Field Marshal Montgomery's armour into Caen, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin - this mini-chaplain gave me three suits. They were no use to him, he said. He was long retired, he'd never worn them and never would now and they were much too big for him anyway.

My job required that I should wear a suit and tie every day, so the gift of three unworn suits was not to be sneezed at. I accepted gratefully.

I took them home and tried them on. They were well tailored, although the material wasn't what I would have chosen, being mostly bright blue (which in parts of Scotland is code for being Protestant and a Glasgow Rangers supporter), and the fit was pretty button-bursting, making me walk like Frankenstein's monster after vasectomy.

But maybe a competent tailor could make alterations? Three free suits meant a saving of about £600 at mid-80s prices, also not to be sneezed at. I consulted a Mr Gordon Kelso, a tailor who worked in a Banffshire town called Keith. At the time my work took me to Keith occasionally, so with me and Mr Kelso it was but the work of a moment to fix up an appointment for 5pm on a certain day, after the meeting I was due to attend had finished. I would take the suits, he would measure me up and see what he could do.

With the suits done up in a parcel on the back seat, I drove to Keith on a perfect early summer morning, so sunny and warm that it was the keenest of pleasures in that often harsh climate to drive with the window right down and enjoy the onrush of the balmy Banffshire air, resting my left elbow on the sill and singing the while. In the best of moods I parked, greeted my colleagues cheerily and began the day's work.

About lunchtime a violent thunderstorm burst, with shattering claps of thunder and torrential, stair-rod rain. Street drains overflowed, municipal flower beds were washed away, the river Isla was full to bursting its banks.

Shortly before 5 the rain stopped and the meeting ended, having found solutions to every educational problem then current except the trifling matters of how to fund, staff and implement them, and I returned to my car. You've seen this coming, of course, because you're so much more intelligent and common-sensical than I am...

...I'd left the driver's window open. Fool. Imbecile. Cretin. And as there is no means of driving a conventional car except by sitting in the driver's seat and operating the controls, I had no choice but to plump my backside in the swamp, the morass that was the drivers' seat and work out how to explain convincingly to Mr Kelso, when he took my inside leg measurement, that...

...but enough of this. This tale of tailoring was brought on by a certain fascination with the adverts that Mr Raja M. Daswani puts in newspapers and magazines. He's often in Private Eye, for example, advertising Raja Fashions, a bespoke tailoring service in Hong Kong. The copy style is individual, to say the least, and somehow quite endearing. I looked for it on line, but could only find the Canadian version. Substitute British terms for Canadian ones and it's exactly the same as the UK version.

I wondered why there appeared to be, behind the figure of Mr Daswani measuring the shoulders of an elegant lady customer, a portrait bearing some resemblance to Col. Ghaddafi. Scroll up and have a look. Having nothing better to do I contacted Raja Fashions, whose Rita replied very courteously that the Ghaddafi-like figure, far from being the self-styled Colonel, had been included deliberately and was in fact Mr Daswani's spiritual teacher. My respect for Mr Daswani leapt upwards immediately. How many of us keep portraits of our spiritual teachers - not the same as religious ikons - on the wall while we work?

I know I don't. I couldn't answer for Mr Gordon Kelso.

Calooya Calella

2011-03-31T19:16:00.005+02:00

Here we are back in one piece after a few days in Catalunya, having heeded Rosie's sage advice here a few days ago to steer clear of any roadside hold-up stratagems.

The latest trick to persuade you to stand and deliver is to stage an accident at a quiet spot where two cars appear to have collided. 'Victims', usually children, lie down by the roadside or even in the road in poses of suggestive of dreadful agony and bloody injury, liberally spattered with tomato ketchup or strawberry jam. The 'survivors' wave you down frantically. Being the kind-hearted Anglo-Saxon that you are (as indicated by your number plate) you stop, whereupon your car is surrounded by chattering, wailing, gesticulating Romanians. As soon as you leave your car to lend a hand, they drive off in it with all your luggage, cards, passports etc, the dead and maimed magically come to life and spring into activity and drive off at high speed in the old bangers that have been arranged to look as though they collided. You speak no Spanish, your mobile has disappeared, you're in the middle of nowhere, you can't prove who you are and you feel that in the course of your life it's just possible that you may have spent better days than this.

Another trick which we managed to avoid involves traffic lights. You stop at a red light, someone taps at your window and informs you that you've got a flat rear tyre. Of course you have: this bloke has just punctured it. He offers to help you change it, but first explains that you have to set up your warning triangle not less than 30 metres down the road. You open the boot (i.e. trunk, Spadoman), fish out the triangle, trot along the pavement to set it up and meanwhile your new friend has disappeared with all your luggage.

There is an entrancingly beautiful stretch of the Costa Brava that we try to get away to every now and again. It's too steep and rocky and furrowed with cliff-girt inlets for there to be much development. There are a few tiny fishing ports and the occasional modest marina. It probably hums unspeakably with tourists in summer, but off-season we can count on having it more or less to ourselves. Below is part of the coastal walk from Calella de Palafrugell to Llafranc. Irresistible. And not a wrecker in sight.

Give me the moonight

2011-03-26T12:55:00.006+01:00

Some years ago, in circumstances that are too convoluted to go into here, J. and I found ourselves in a St Raphaël nightclub with, among others, some Charlton Athletic supporters.

Although very dark inside, we could just about make out a large central dance area with smaller alcoves round the outside, separated from each other by what appeared to be glass screens. I suppose there were about 15 of us in the group. Some kind of mermaid-hostess suggested we might like a to buy a bottle of vodka at about £500. This seemed a bit steep, even divided between 15, particularly as one of the 15 was a notorious drouth* and would probably want to share it with the hostess and her merpals.

It was possibly at this moment that I quietly drew J.'s attention to the dim outline of a bald-headed old git in the neighbouring alcove, saying perhaps we didn't need to feel embarrassed about being the only people of our generation in the place if they let mildewed old codgers like that bloke in. I then realised that the glass screens were in fact mirrors. In the gloom I was looking at myself. We left unobtrusively.

We haven't been near a nightclub since. We're planning to go to Spain before long. It's a road we've often travelled. In a tiny village well south of the frontier called Tor there's a sign saying 'Bar Nit', I assume the Catalan for nightclub. In a monstrously unlovely place called La Jonquera there are immense flashing signs advertising a nightclub, maybe more of a giant bordello, called Moonight. No, I haven't mis-spelled it. Moonight.

I don't think we'll be stopping at either.

*Drouth: Scots word for drought, thus figuratively a boozer.

Not Herne Bay, surely?

2011-03-25T10:01:00.003+01:00

I was rehearsing a song out of The Merry Wives of Windsor the other night with our two tenors, M. and J-C. (not featured in the photo above). The words are:

Fie on sinful fantasy!
Fie on lust and luxury!
Lust is but a bloody fire
Kindled with unchaste desire
Fed in heart: whose flames aspire,
As thoughts do blow them, higher and higher.
Pinch him, fairies, mutually;
Pinch for his villainy;
Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about,
Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out.

The hordes of Merry Wives Of Windsor (or of Verdi's Falstaff) buffs that come here daily will recognise this as the song the children of Windsor have been taught to sing while, dressed as fairies, they torment the lewd lecher Sir John Falstaff, who has been promised a midnight forest tryst by one of the women he fancies, on condition that he disguise himself as local bogeyman Herne the Hunter by wearing horns. It turns out to be a honey-trap, of course, but Falstaff suspects nothing.

We will be singing this in Scotland in early May. The long wake of life throws up some bizarre eddies.

Beastly rotten swiz

2011-03-22T17:02:00.004+01:00

No one managed the desired identification from four days ago, so once again the prize (Burkhardt's Travels in Nubia, 1st edn, bound in morocco, spine slightly damaged) is withheld until next year.

L-R : Perowne, a submariner - Beaumont, a boulevardier - Chris - Sheba the lab assistant (thank you, Rog.) - Mr Putnam, a mustachio'd usher.

Mwah mwah, Muammar

2011-03-21T10:54:00.007+01:00

On the principle of trying to find something good to say about people, however desperate their villainy, I want to extend a big thank-you to Col. Ghaddafi.

And, to be fair, to King Idris, Mussolini, Giolitti, the Karamanlis dynasty, Haroun el Rashid, Unkh-el Tomh Qhob'leh and everyone else who at some stage or other has ruled Libya, for their very great personal kindness. In their time they must have given me several tons of the sacred soil of Libya, and their generosity knows no end.

Delivery arrangements are haphazard but effective. It works like this. Vast dust storms blow up in the Fezzan. Zillions of minute particles are swept up into the atmosphere, borne wherever the wind blows them. Mostly humid incoming weather systems coming in from the Atlantic gather some of them up, swirl them about and deposit them in raindrops.

Local winds have all got names, Mistral, Tramontane, Autan, Grec, Albigeois. And the Marin. The Marin, warm and wet, starts in North Africa and blows northwards off the Mediterranean, laden with ochre-coloured particles that J. and I call Sahara Dust. It unloads its rain on the first land obstacles it comes to, especially the hills where we live. Sahara dust gets everywhere, into the minutest cracks and crevices, discolouring everything it lands on.

Almost all of it lands on the ground, as it has been doing for millions of years. The ground round here is very stony, shards and lumps of slates, schists and marble, tortured and twisted from the original limestone by immense geological pressures. All these bits are bound together in a sort of natural concrete by a very fine-grained ochre-coloured clay, the result of aeons'-worth of Marin winds bearing their tribute of Libyan dust. It sets pick-axe hard when dry, has no other virtue and only the coarsest weeds will grow in it.

Drystone wall-building occupies a lot of my time at the moment. Drystone ramparts might be a better description. Just now I'm trying to catch up on the lower rampart with the steps in the photo below, which has advanced quite a lot since the photo was taken. I pride myself on jig-sawing the stones together and never using cement. I don't need to: the invisible bits of stones are all set in solid Sahara dust clay. It's not cheating, is it?

So I'm obliged to you, Col. Ghaddafi. Thanks to you my walls are a lot less tottery than your régime appears to be.

Bang-on japes and wizard wheezes

2011-03-18T09:39:00.010+01:00

The other day Rog posted a school photo, and in a sense we got two for the price of one because Dave happened to go to the same school, although there were a few years between them. I don't think anyone identified them without help.

There's mine up there, from more or less the same era. The same century, anyway. There were too few of us to justify the rolling camera they had at Rog's and Dave's place. Someone called Lionel Austin from Lee on Solent used to come every May to take ours, with that ancient sort of camera with sliding plates and a black fabric light-excluding hood for the photographer put over his head.

If you've nothing better to do you can find me in it. The only clue I'm prepared to give is that if you think the early, unspotted, vintage Chris is in the lowest row, 6th from the right, please consider that you may be mistaken.

I remember school photos of the Rog/Dave type. They were taken by a special camera that had to traverse the rows of several hundred kids in an arc in order to get them all in. It was a wheeze - actually, now I come to think of it, we used to say 'jape' - it was a jape for the lad on the extreme left, once the camera had started its arc, to nip round the back of the tiers of benches and tables to reappear on the extreme right, thus having his photo taken twice. Lad? I expect the ladettes of the time were just as much up for this kind of jape as the lads.

It wasn't so very different at dormitory fire drill. We had canvas shutes, tubes of canvas mounted on a hinged frame beneath the window sill. When the fire alarm sounded, the head of the dormitory had to open the window, lever up the apparatus and push the bulk of the canvas out of the window, so that it unrolled itself as it descended to the ground. To avoid being roasted alive and done to a crisp you had to climb into the canvas tube and slide down it, controlling your speed by pressing your knees, elbows and heels against the canvas. Wonderful fun for an 11-year-old. Legend had it that in some heroic age long past kids had managed to run back indoors and up the stairs through the supposed smoke and flames for another go. A wizard wheeze, as I suppose we might have said, a bang-on jape. Happy days.

Elvis: Pure Dead Brilliant

2011-03-15T18:12:00.007+01:00

Our friend A. came round the other morning, coincidentally following my car back from the village in a blue van I hadn't seen before.

A. is writing a monumental history of rock and roll. From what he tells me it will be encyclopedic, including rockers past and present. He mentions William Blake and Coleridge in almost the same breath as Jack Kerouac and Malcolm X. Nor will ephemera like Pinky and Perky and Mr Blobby be missing.

But Elvis will be the star. I've never come across anyone with such a universally all-embracing knowledge of any one person as A. has of Elvis. Not just Elvis, but Elvisdom, the lookalikes, the mysteries (e.g. Elvis' twin), the resurrections, the Elvis-based sects and religions. It sometimes seems to me that A. is more interested in Elvis the phenomenon than in his music. In search of material A. has travelled the Elvis trail from start to finish. Or has he?

I expect I've mentioned before that in early May my little choir Les Jeudistes, in which A. sings, will be undertaking what they are pleased to call their World Tour of Scotland. They did their World Tour of Kent and Sussex a couple of years ago. The first leg of the journey takes them from Girona, in northern Spain, just the other side of the Pyrenees from us, to Prestwick, south of Glasgow. It's the only budget out-and-back route from our part of the world direct to Scotland at a sensible time of day.

J. and I were in Prestwick Airport (motto: Pure Dead Brilliant) a few weeks ago. I was surprised to find, in the departure lounge, The Elvis Bar. Why this should be I didn't know.

Did you know there was an Elvis bar in Prestwick? I asked A.

No, he said, in surprise: he'd never heard of that before. He doubted if there was a direct connection. Elvis had only been out of the USA twice, once to Canada and once to Germany, when he was doing his National Service. The best-known song that had come out of that was an extraordinary un-Elvis-like ditty called Muss i denn, muss i denn zum Stätelei hinaus, and....WAIT! When he flew back from Germany, he stopped off in Ireland, wasn't it, or could it have been Scotland?

I looked it up today. It was indeed Prestwick, then a US Air Force Transport Command base. There's not only the Elvis bar, there's a plaque commemorating his visit. When Les Jeudistes arrive, A. will feel particularly at home. It will be an auspicious start.

'I haven't seen that van before,' I said to him when he left. 'I saw it in the mirror as I was driving home. I thought for a moment it was that Barbe Bleue bloke behind me.'

[The Barbe Bleue - i.e. Bluebeard - bloke drives a blue van round the villages selling cheap clothes. 'Bluebeard' doesn't have the resonance here it does elsewhere.]

'It's extraordinary,' A. replied. 'You might as well drive a blue sales van around the UK with 'Jack the Ripper' blazoned all over it.'

'Selling ice-cream,' I said.

Bore War Wear

2011-03-13T22:29:00.002+01:00

J. very kindly gave me a Kindle for my birthday a few weeks ago. It took a little time to get it up and running, because there seemed to be a problem with accessing an English-programmed Kindle from a permanent address in France. We've surmounted this now, I don't quite know how, probably by sorcery, and there are only one or two greater pleasures in life than propping it up (on a stand that comes with a snazzy leather cover J. thoughtfully added to the pack) and READING at MEALTIMES. Especially when I'm on my own, as I am now for a few days.

I'm reading a curious work on Kindle by Conan Doyle. Unusually for the creator of Sherlock Holmes and lesser beings like Brigadier Gérard and Professor Challenger, it's a very dull history of the Boer War, 1899-1902.

The tedium is relieved partly by well-I-never-knew-thats! Spion Kop, for instance, probably the most famous of the stands at Anfield, home of Liverpool Football Club: I never knew that Spion Kop was a South African hill from which an area of western Natal might be spied upon. Fortified by the Boers in 1899, it cost the lives of hundreds of Liverpudlians trying to capture it. The Kop is their memorial.

And maybe the first signs of Conan Doyle losing the plot, which he did later in his life with aberrations like believing in fairies? I came across this extraordinarily perplexing sentence:

Every requisite for a great victory was there except the presence of the enemy.

This reminded me of a paradox by Jean-Paul Sartre, who seems to have played at 10, but not for Liverpool, unless navy blue is their away strip. If you can't read it up there at the top, embiggenise™ it, as my friend Dave says. I expect he means 'belargify' it.

Blood and vanity

2011-03-12T12:00:00.003+01:00

Carcassonne is:

1. A medieval fortress-city (above) almost the size of Windsor Castle, to a large extent a fanciful reconstruction by a 19th Century French architect called Viollet-le-Duc

2. An unexciting modern French town trailing down from the fortress heights like a moth-eaten musketeer's cloak (and if you're asking whether it's the cloak or the musketeer that's moth-eaten, the answer is it's both)

3. An airport, a lifeline to Blighty for those that need it, where you hear more English spoken than French.

I don't why I'm telling you this, because Carcassonne has got very little to do with what follows. When I first came to live in France 20 years ago, there wasn't much to keep body and soul together, so I signed on at an estate agency, innocent of any idea that in France there is no one so vile and universally despicable as an estate agent. I stayed the course for about 18 months until I couldn't put up with it any longer.

I learnt my way about the area by driving about at my expense taking in properties for sale. I got an extra 5% commission on properties I took in. These were always called by the name of the vendor. One was called Schleintzauer, the then owner. It was a two-story house, stone-built with about half an acre of scrub adjoining on the edge of a hamlet called La Garrigue. It was a waterless place, alive and beautiful with cystus, rosemary and wild thyme in spring, but otherwise a hill-top desert with only breathtaking views over the Languedoc plain below and the thin burnished gold line of the distant Mediterranean beyond to commend it.

The front door of Schleintzauer, surrounded by a Passiflora (passion fruit) vine and with panels of coloured glass, opened into a rather nasty general purpose kitchen-dining-sitting room with a floor of what I learned to call ciment fondu, a smooth concrete. Exceptionally, it was a wet day when I took Schleintzauer into the listings. I questioned M. Schleintzauer, a man originally from Alsace, about a large dark patch on the floor a couple of metres from the door. Was it damp? I asked. (It seemed unlikely, given the arid La Garrigue climate.) It came and went, he said. He didn't know what it was. He couldn't get rid of it and it wouldn't go. If I came back on a fine day it would probably have gone. It wasn't anything to bother about.

Eventually Schleintzauer sold, I can't remember to whom.

Some years later I started a new choir. The nucleus was formed of people who had already sung under my baton. We searched about for a name, and a woman called Marcelle suggested, prosaically, Le Choeur des Hauts Cantons, The Choir of the High Cantons. The term 'canton' usually suggests Switzerland to me, but in the south of France it's used to describe collectively the scattered settlements in this very hilly and sometimes mountainous region. Marcelle's suggestion was adopted and Le Choeur des H C eventually grew from the initial 18 members to just over 50 at full strength.

I got to know Marcelle quite well. She became Deputy Treasurer, a post with no functions and no responsibilities. She was a short, dumpy woman of about 65, with a voice the better for being masked by all the other altos round her. She laughed a lot, walked with a limp, had only once been out of the region, on a coach tour of the Tyrol, spoke Occitan, the local sub-language - and as a teenager had lived at La Garrigue.

Yes, I said, speaking to her once, I knew La Garrigue quite well, especially the house M. Schleintzauer used to live in, the one on the edge of the hamlet. A sad house, Marcelle said. She'd lived nearby, but it was because of what happened there that her father had taken her away to live near La Salvetat, miles away to the north.

The story came out. When the occupying Nazis moved north in August 1944, summoned by Hitler to defend northern France from the invading allies, the local resistance fell on the columns of Germans. Only they weren't Germans, Marcelle said, they were Hungarians and Cossacks and Russians. (Marcelle didn't even call them soldats, soldiers: she called them soudards, a derogatory word meaning irregular military thuggish riff-raff.) They'd been sniped at by resistance fighters on the rocky road up to La Garrigue. As a deterrent from further attacks, they'd seized several innocent people from the hamlet, dragged them into the nearest house and had shot them, together with the house owners. When the column had passed, Marcelle's father was among those who recovered the bodies. There was a massive pool of blood beyond the front door. In the August heat it was vital to bury the bodies as quickly as possible. And blood dries quickly.

The slaughter house was Schleintzauer, as you've guessed. No one lived in it thereafter for years. It has changed hands many times since.

As I drove through La Garrigue on my way back from Carcassonne yesterday, I noticed 'Schleintzauer' was for sale again. It was a damp day, with heavy clouds scudding across from the Mediterranean. I wondered if that dark patch was still showing.

Mimosa formimosissima

2011-03-07T11:35:00.007+01:00

It's mimosa time here. All along the valley there are splodges of vivid yellow, like egg-stains on a green waistcoat. This specimen grows outside the village doctor's surgery. This photo and all the good wishes that this harbinger of spring can bring are dedicated to everyone, but especially to IE, that well-known connoisseur of yellows.

I'm so very lucky with my little corner of the blogosphere, where spring seems to be perpetual. All the same there are times I feel I let the side down through my utter inability to express through Lydian Airs what others seem able to do so effortlessly. Dave scores so well, displaying to an envious world both his photography and his painting. Spadoman's and Rog's photos lead me willingly by the hand into other worlds. Indeed, Mig has published a book of her photos, several of which have already graced her place. Rosie deeply intrigues us sometimes several times a day with her fascinating artistic inventiveness and passion for guitar music. Sarah gives us rich insights into her artistic flair, techniques and projects. Geoff produces such polished, pointed writing (he's produced a book as well, did you know?) , his rapier thrusts a fine foil for Vicus' masterly axe blows. All this in addition to those heady and subtle accounts, like Z's, of daily life and day-to-day events. And I couldn't let this little round-up pass without bowing the knee to Mamma. (Never mind the Italian, smell the pictures. And no, she isn't my mother, just a wonderful Italian cook.) But what is a humble composer to do, a non-flowering plant in this garden of delight?

When I left school all I wanted to do was to write music. With disdain I threw away any chance - then - of university. (I made up for it later on.) I counted a pilgrimage to the grave of Beethoven in Vienna as valid a qualification as any degree. I enrolled at 18 on the staff of a prep. school. You could do this then. I'm sure you can't now. I expected to have plenty of time for composition in free periods, evenings, weekends, while trousering a modest salary at the end of each term. (First term's salary: £25.) Some hope! After three years of this, gradually becoming sucked further and further into education, it was suggested that I should do something to put some letters after my name.

So with this qualification and that, I sank deeper and deeper into education, while eventually climbing a few rungs of the hierarchy ladder. Over the years composition receded further and further, apart from a few sporadic outbursts. Shortly after coming out of education when I was 49, an extraordinary publishing opportunity fell into my lap (I'll save this story for another day). Composition took a seat even further back while I wrote some books.

Now, freed from all that, I can devote time to writing music, but I'm very much afraid that the Muse who excited and thrilled me so all those years ago is now past child-bearing age, is fast becoming raddled, wrinkled, muffin-topped and no longer much interested in romps on the bed of musical invention.

But I keep trying. Something that keeps the flame flickering is that Patroclus, who holds the key to so many doors, is coming with her basketful of Blue Cats and kittens to see us in June. She'll maybe show me how to post pieces of music. Then I shall feel, if not the equal of the greats in Para. 2 up there, at least no longer a non-starter.

You've been warned.

Through a local lens No. 8

2011-03-05T16:59:00.007+01:00

In Through a local lens No. 7 a few days ago I posted photos of the disused railway bridge just outside the village.

Several readers complained of dizzy spells.

I hope those affected will draw comfort from the photo above and find it a suitable antidote to vertigo. This is a hole in the ground not far from the village school canteen. It leads down into an extensive network of caves and underground chambers, I'm told. I've never been down there, and I can't say that I'm much drawn to.

We have a friend M., an ample German lady who is a dedicated and single-minded speleologist with a flair for invention. Using the principle of surveyors' infra-red lasers and fibre optics, she has developed an instrument for plotting the shape and size of caves in three dimensions. The data collected can be displayed on computer screens, not just for the sake of mapping but to aid exploration and even rescue, should anyone fall down this or any other local hole. As you can see, this one is completely unprotected, but it's narrow and triangular. On both counts it's unlikely that M. would feel there was much danger of her falling in irretrievably.

I expect the myriad of claustrophobiacs who come here every day will now begin to feel uncomfortable. I'm sorry. Next time I shall post a photo I took the other day of a mimosa tree in flower outside the village doctor's surgery, for the greater convenience and comfort of hay fever sufferers among my readers. You can't please everyone all the time.

Turnips and taters

2011-03-04T14:29:00.002+01:00

I once worked on and off for B., a retired RAF Squadron Leader, who has now been dead for twenty years at least. In addition to many other foibles he used to give his occupation, for reasons best known to himself, in hotel registers and the like as 'Domfosticator'. Sometimes, returning to the same hotel after several years' absence, he would be found to have promoted himself to 'Senior Domfosticator'.

I got to know B. a year or two before I was first married. Retired from the RAF, he ran an outdoor education centre on Southampton Water, where I worked occasionally. By one of those very curious and gratifying coincidences that keep cropping up in life, he was my uncle Roger's CO in the early days of World War 2: my uncle's first RAF posting was to the barrage balloon unit covering Southampton docks, a unit commanded by Sqn Ldr Domfosticator. Unknown to each other, many years later both he and my uncle attended my first wedding, but the coincidence was never sprung, and I only realised it when details of my uncle's RAF career, about which he rarely spoke, came to light after his death in 2008.

Shortly after their service in Southampton, both went their separate ways in the RAF, my uncle to become a Flight Lieutenant (Navigator) in 488 (New Zealand) Sqn - although he had no connection with New Zealand - and Sqn Ldr Domfosticator, profoundly deafened by anti-aircraft fire, was posted to the RAF Provost Marshal's department in Italy.

He used to say of the people of Naples, where he was based after its capture from Hitler's and Mussolini's troops by the advancing Allies, that whenever an air-raid siren sounded, they would wait in the street until the Allied bombers actually appeared overhead. If the markings were American, they would scurry for the shelters as fast as possible. If they were British, they carried on their business normally: RAF bombing, limited to strategic objectives, was pin-point accurate.

B. was a fine man, although not without certain inexplicable traits. (Why would a man pretend his wife was his cousin? Why would he walk away when the name Chaliapin was mentioned?) Until his death he remained a firm family friend. When they were 5 and 7 or thereby my children took the word 'domfosticator' under their wings. We used to sing in the car - but only along a certain lane in Scotland - 'Turnips and taters and domfosticators' over and over again to the same three notes. (G,A,C rising, for the myriad of musicians who come here every day.) Happily the lane wasn't very long.

If you've read so far and wonder what the word 'domfosticator' means, I'm sorry. I don't know. Perhaps you do?

But I didn't invent it, Rosie.

Folk flock focus

2011-03-03T12:28:00.004+01:00

Just now I'm assembling and arranging a short collection of local folk-songs to add to the repertoire of my choir, Les Jeudistes. Local folk-songs are mostly written in a language called Occitan, which has as many dialects as there are valleys to have them in. There's no regular spelling and pronunciation varies widely. So it's not easy.

This is the latest, Lou Boièr, the herdsman or ploughman. I can't decide whether it's a ballad of great beauty, a simple, artless crying from the heart, or hopeless twaddle. It's well within the vein of local folk-song falling into two categories, desolate and mournful or relying on spirited nonsense. (Skip to the translation if you'd prefer.)

Quan lou boièr ven de laoura
Planto soun agulhado,
Troubo sa femno al pè del foc
Touto déscounsoulado.

"Se'n es malaouto, digas 'Oc';
Te faren un poutage
Amb uno rabo, un caoulet,
Uno lauzéto magro."

"Quan sérai morto, rébound me
Al pus priou de la cabo:
Metras mous pes a la pared
Lou cap jous la canelo.

E lous roumious que passaran
Prendran d'aïgo ségnado
E diràn : 'Qual es mòrt aicí ?
Es la paura Bernarda !

Que 'n es anada al Paradís
Al cél, ambe sas cabras.'"

[My translation (if any of the myriad Occitan buffs who come here daily would like to suggest corrections, please go ahead):

When the herdsman returned from ploughing,
He laid down his goad.
He found his wife at the fireside,
Completely disconsolate.

"If you're ill, say 'Yes';
I'll make you a soup
With turnip, cabbage
And a lean lark."

"When I'm dead [she said], bury me
Just inside the cellar [i.e. undercroft for animals]:
Put my feet against the wall,
My head next to the spring.

And the pilgrims that pass
Will take the holy water,
And they will say: 'Who is dead here?
It's poor Bernarda!
May she have gone to Paradise
In the sky, with her goats.'"]

My attitude to folk music is to a large extent summed up in the following delicious story, which I first came across in Charles Rosen's The Classical Style. Haydn's music is supposedly full to overflowing with folk tunes he'd picked up from his earliest childhood in his native Danubian region on the borders of Austria and Hungary.

A certain professor of musicology, trying to prove this theory, reckoned that the most effective way of doing so was through field research. He travelled round the villages of the region singing the best of Haydn's tunes to see if the local peasantry recognised them.

The peasants were given a bigger tip when they claimed to recognise a tune than when they didn't, and it didn't take long for them to adjust their memories in accordance with the depth of the professor's purse. The more enthusiastic the 'recognition', the larger the tip. And to this day, the story goes, the country folk of that region still sing the songs the professor taught them.

It might have been the soup that did for poor Bernarda, of course.

Get me to the font on time

2011-02-27T10:59:00.004+01:00

Rustle, rustle, whisper, whisper, tee-hee, giggle, giggle. Note-passing in the back row? A silent but deadly? Risqué mobile phone photos?

It couldn't have been this, of course, because this happened in the mid-90s. It wasn't in school, either, but during a rehearsal of the 50-strong French choir I used to conduct.

One of the sopranos asked if we would sing at her daughter's wedding. While - like most choirs - we had a wide funeral repertoire, there wasn't much pacy, festive stuff suitable for a wedding. There was general agreement about taking part. Monique, the choir president, suggested a gospel song, O Happy Day.

The title seemed tailor-made for a wedding. Not being all that strong on gospel songs, I didn't realise until we'd started to learn O Happy Day that it's a happy-clappy adult baptismal hymn. No matter. A few of the choir had just enough English to understand the title, but the rest of the words were far, far beyond them, explain them though I might.

To avoid any copyright issues I re-arranged the music, writing the words in English, syllable by syllable, underneath the music in the usual way. They couldn't have had more expert advice on how to pronounce it.

But they hated singing in English, almost as much as singing in German. We can't do other languages, they said, it's not in our blood. (Very occasionally you would overhear them speaking Occitan, sister language to Provençal, and sometimes they'd surprise you with their fluency in Spanish. But English, no.)

Rehearsals went badly, mostly because they found the words so difficult, but suddenly, inexplicably, it all came right. This was during the rehearsal in which there was all that paper-rustling and passing of notes, or whatever it was. Back row complicity. And not just the back row. The whole lot seemed to have some smug secret. When we came to run through O Happy Day, the words were strongly accented, but otherwise seemed reasonably convincing. Did it matter, anyway? Who listens to the music at weddings? All the same, I was relieved.

Monique, a neat and collected lady, wasn't president for nothing. She turned out to be the culprit. No, not for juvenile misbehaviour. She had typed out, to the best of her understanding, a phonetic version of the words for the ease and convenience of the troops. She'd distributed it surreptitiously while they were singing other things. I came across it in a forgotten folder the other day. There it is, up there.

Despite a problem distinguishing between 'watch' and 'wash', Monique clearly deserves a prize for the most outrageously nonsensical representation of an English text ever. The actual words are:

O happy day, when Jesus washed,
O when he washed,
When Jesus washed, he washed my sins away,
O happy day!

He taught me how
To watch, fight and pray,
And live rejoicing every day,
Every day.
O happy day!

A foe to graphic art?

2011-02-25T10:46:00.008+01:00

A few days ago we were in Scotland for a long weekend, principally to attend a family reunion and a belated celebration of my mother's 100th birthday, which heavy snow prevented most of the more widely scattered family members from attending in December.

Featuring in this view from our hotel room over the Moray Firth towards the Black Isle (not really an island) and the snow-covered hills of Easter Ross beyond are three Highland cattle. This has no connection whatever with anything that follows.

Our travels also took us to Ullapool, a lively community on the shores of Loch Broom on the remote north-west coast. We went there to prepare for a choir concert in May. In Ullapool - in fact all over the Highlands and Islands - all the signs are in English and Gaelic. We visited Ullapool High School, where every door has a sign in Gaelic. Ceann na h' sgoil (or something very like*), it said on the Head Teacher's door. Ceann I know means 'head'. It's pronounced something like 'kyen', with a very short 'y'.

'If I'm Ken,' said the Head Teacher (whose name is actually Pete), 'that makes my wife Barbie: better not tell her, she'll...'

But we never discovered what effect this might have.

Only one of the many people we spoke to in Ullapool had anything like a local accent. None of them spoke Gaelic. Although I have a great fondness for languages, I still wonder what purpose this bilingual signing serves.

Outstanding photographer at the reunion was The Blue Kitten, aged two and a half. The samples of her work below may give some flavour of the event as well as the colour of the carpet:

Maybe you can make out a shelf with cards on it in the Kitten's photo below? My mother invited us to look at them. On the extreme left is a red card, which some friends sent to her to congratulate her on reaching 100. It features an angel trumpeter, a detail from a painting from the Italian Renaissance. My mother is very deaf indeed and often things have to be written down for her. One of her retirement home staff, failing to make her hear, looked about for something to write on. Nearest to hand was this card.

In addition to a congratulatory message and her friends' signatures, we could also read 'Are you ready to go to the toilet?'

*If any of the myriad Scots Gaelic speakers who come here every day would like to correct this, please don't hesitate.

Through a local lens No. 7

2011-02-23T07:00:00.002+01:00

Good pedigree, I suppose. In 1889 Gustav Eiffel, he of the Eiffel Tower, put his name - or that of his studio - to this railway bridge. Before they closed the railway some 25 years ago, this bridge carried it over the river Jaur. Devoid of its rails, it now forms one of the most spectacular parts of the 40-mile trail for cyclists, walkers or horse riders into which the old line has been converted. A mile or so further on it passes the foot of our garden.

If you don't have much of a head for heights you really have to steel yourself to walk across it. What horses feel about it I don't know, but I shouldn't care to be crossing it on a bucking and plunging horse suddenly seized with vertigo.

In its heyday this line carried the then famous Lamalou Express. This was a direct rail link between Paris and Lamalou les Bains, a thermal spa not very far from here. In Lamalou there are natural hot mud springs supposedly good for all sorts of ailments. Initially the springs were particularly recommended for venereal diseases. The artist Toulouse Lautrec, supposedly afflicted, bought a house nearby so that he could conveniently drop in as the need arose. History does not relate who, and in what circumstances, first found the mud to be beneficial. One can only wonder.

Lamalou prospered enormously, even to the extent of building a casino for the afflicted. It's still quite a prosperous little place, and the regional centre for physiotherapy has now grown up rounds the springs. For a long time it was rumoured that the Italian mafia sent its wounded there for rehabilitation. If you came across a swarthy man with his arm in a sling operating a casino fruit machine, you might legitimately wonder which was the one-arm bandit.

Nice one, Olive

2011-02-21T07:00:00.002+01:00

Some weeks ago I was writing about our first-ever crop of olives from the young tree (below) which my choir gave J. and me three years ago.

We harvested the olives, a very small but highly flavoured variety called Cailletier, soaked them in frequent changes of cold water for several weeks, drained them, and then soaked them in brine for a day or two.

J. then bottled them in olive oil with some bay leaves, a sprig of thyme and one or two of the immature lemons that fell off the tree when it blew over in a sudden gale some days ago.

They're the tiny olives round the edge of the salade niçoise pictured above. They're delicious. Somehow I don't think they're going to last very long. I wish you could be here to try them before they disappear.

Lean and slippered pantaloon

2011-02-18T07:00:00.003+01:00

Today is my birthday. This clearly entitles me to be extra sentimentally sententious.

My favourite present is having nearest and dearest, kith and kin, who are good to me and grandchildren who although as yet tiny seem to have been launched pretty well.

Now I'm going to have to choose which cake I prefer. (Vicus, dear friend: I'm told both jumpettes are vegan.) Would you help me to choose? Naturally, there's a piece for everyone.

Not much hair today, gone tomorrow

2011-02-16T10:29:00.005+01:00

I wouldn't like you to think that you weren't kept up to date with Lydian Airs day-to-day trivia, and it's in this spirit of candid openness that I record that last week I had my hair cut.

I go down to the village to Sophie. I used to go to the men-only barber, but he doesn't open very often. Before that we had an itinerant hairdresser who came to the house, but this person's tongue was so loose about the not always very glorious doings of other clients that we preferred not to imagine what might be related about us, so we moved on.

Sophie, as lively a conversationalist as she is good as a hairdresser, acknowledges that business is always a bit flat during the waxing moon. Past full moon, as it will be very soon, business picks up. Local wisdom has it that growth follows the phases of the moon. Hence it is more economical, particularly for her lady customers, to patronise her under a waning moon.

It doesn't matter much to me. There's so little hair left that I'm grateful for any growth, whether the moon be waxing, waning, new or blue.

An elderly seafaring man

2011-02-15T09:51:00.003+01:00

Sometimes during our occasional forays into Essex we go for lunch to a little quayside place, a café-cum-restaurant with an art gallery and gift shop next door. If the weather allows we sit outside, overlooking endless salt flats, low-tide mudbanks and skeletons of derelict boats. We go there chiefly because they do an excellent dressed crab.

On a recent occasion a small, squat, elderly man with cropped hair, nothing like the drawing above, came and sat alone at the table next to us. When a waitress passed, he asked her to bring his coffee. So she did a minute or two later.

I'd seen him there before, but had never spoken to him. Did he recognise me? I don't know, but catching my eye he cocked his head and said 'All right, mate?' I told him I was fine, and so began an extraordinary conversation. I don't know why people open up to me uninvited. Maybe I look gullible.

Far - for the moment - from being an elderly seafaring man, he told me he had been in the RAF. He was now 86, so that was all a long way behind him. He'd been in Bomber Command in the war. In fact he'd flown with 617 Squadron, the famous Dambusters.

'Ah,' I said. 'Guy Gibson, VC.'

'I knew him well. Very well. Actually I was his navigator.'

This was astounding. I had an idea that Gibson's navigator on the famous Dambusters raid was someone called Terry Taerum. An unusual name, which is perhaps why it stuck with me for so many years after reading Enemy Coast Ahead, Gibson's own account of the raid on the Ruhr dams, when I was 12 or so. Was this really Terry Taerum?

'So your name's Terry?' I asked. I'd never met a war hero before. A dwindling breed, as the years pass. I shook his hand, with some pride.

'The name's Reg,' he said, looking away. 'I'm not long back.'

'Where from?' I asked.

'Belgium. I go there most weekends. I got a 42' yacht. Sail it out of Ramsgate. Put in at Ostend. Load up with stuff. Smokes for the lads. A few crates of beer. Have a mosey round. Put the car on the back, go for spin. Look up old pals. Got a girl there too.'

'You put a car on the back of your yacht?'

'Sure,' he said. 'A little Citroën.'

I supposed it might be possible. There might be other possibilities too. Fancy took over: some lines of W.S.Gilbert, the words half of Gilbert and Sullivan, swam into my head:

O, I am a cook and a Captain bold
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And the bosun tight, and the midshipmite,
And the crew of the Captain's gig.

- and this person, the elderly seafaring man in Gilbert's drawing above, claimed to be all these personages because once, having been shipwrecked in the Indian ocean, he'd survived in an I'm an elderly seafaring celebrity: get me out of here sort of way by eating them all. Had Reg's Lancaster bomber once ditched in the North Sea? Had he been obliged to eat his fellow crew members to stay alive? Was this why he was so cagey about the whole business?

In due course Reg got up and left, apparently without paying. We shook hands again. He'd parked his car, a blue Fiesta, at the foot of the sea wall.

When we went in to pay our bill I asked the woman at the cash desk about Reg.

'Oh, don't pay any attention to him,' she said. 'He's harmless. He'll tell you anything. He used to be a hospital boilerman. He comes in every day. No, of course he doesn't have a yacht. We give him his coffee. He's all right, is Reg. Only he does imagine things.'

'So he's not a cannibal, either?'

'He told you that? That's a new one. Here, Linda, you know what Reg has been telling this gentleman...?'

I shouldn't have let him start, really.

I'll be gone by Christmas

2011-02-12T11:50:00.009+01:00

Being at a loose end last night I spent a happy half-hour glancing through the 1899 edition of The Times Atlas of the World. It's a big book, not something you can conveniently curl up in an armchair with, and whatever dilapidated state it may once have been in, it has now been handsomely restored by a friend with a great gift for bookbinding. It's a privilege to have it on our bookshelves.

I arrived at the Western Mediterranean page. I have a deep Platonic love for Mediterranean islands, Platonic in the sense that apart from Sicily I've never got inside any of them, so to speak, except in my mind or through the pages of others, which is sometimes the best form of travel, especially when curled up in an armchair beside the fire on a winter's night. All the same there are several I would dearly love to visit in the flesh, Crete, Lampedusa, the Aegadian Islands, Stromboli, several in the Aegean and finally, at the end my travellings, like Odysseus, Ithaca.

There's one Mediterranean island I shall never get to, though. I was very surprised to discover on page 44 of this 112-year-old atlas, lying conveniently between south-western Sicily and Tunisia, an island called Ferdinandea. Beside it was marked 'July-December 1831'. I'd never heard of it. What was this?

As so often Uncle Wiki came to the rescue. In 1831 the inhabitants of a Sicilian coastal town called Sciacca (where J. and I once stayed in a hotel full of very fat Germans taking the cure; our comparative leanness seemed out-of-place and ill-mannered, as though we'd gone there deliberately to taunt) assumed the smoke on the horizon was a burning ship. Vessels were sent to investigate. They discovered lava from an undersea volcano breaking the surface, spreading and solidifying into quite a reasonable little twin-peaked island.

It didn't take long for the Royal Navy to appear on the scene and for a party of bluejackets to plant the Union Flag in the volcanic detritus, claiming the island for Great Britain in the name of William IV (who 'appeared' here the other day). They called it Graham Island, after Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty. The then Italian kingdom of The Two Sicilies also claimed it, calling it Ferdinandea after the Neapolitan King Ferdinand II. So did the French, who called it Julia. Spain also cast envious eyes on it. Diplomatic wrangling over ownership went on for some months. Ownership was settled when Ferdinandea/Graham/Julia cocked a snook - to use a Thackerayesque expression of the times - at the whole lot of them by completely disappearing beneath the waves five months later, at about Christmas time.

Apparently it's still there, a few metres below the surface. It last made the headlines in the 1980s, when USAAF bombers attacked Libya in a stand-off with Col. Ghaddafi. Assuming the radar-defined shape just below the surface to be a Libyan submarine, depth charges were dropped on the sunken Ferdinandea. We're not told what damage was done, but as King Ferdinand had through his fondness for punitive explosives earned himself the nickname 'Bomba' no doubt he would have been hugely gratified.

No relation of Dave's

2011-02-11T09:51:00.004+01:00

Auntie Jessie, a regular worshipper at her Yorkshire chapel, died and was buried.

In due course the question of a headstone arose. The family asked the monumental mason to engrave her name, date of birth, date of death, etcetera. The monumental mason asked them if they would like a text as well. They thought for a while, and then said 'SHE WAS THINE, LORD' would be a suitable epitaph in every way.

Some days later the monumental mason rang to say the headstone was finished, and would the family like to check it before installation? The family were surprised to discover that the inscription read 'SHE WAS THIN, LORD'.

'Happen you've missed out the E,' they said.

The monumental mason apologized, said he would put it right forthwith, and would proceed to set the headstone up. The family agreed.

When a little later the family went to pay their respects at the grave, they found the inscription now read : 'EE, SHE WAS THIN, LORD'.

(Sorry if you've heard it before. Sometimes these gems take the slow boat across the Channel.)

Canteen fever

2011-02-07T11:18:00.003+01:00

The other day Dave kindly offered to take any photos I might need to be taken. Alas, this was after my feeble unfocussed effort of several weeks before, shown above, to capture a package of 'Aunty's' Spotted Dick. I chose a red table napkin as a background, because I wished to emphasize the burning, blood-red, vital qualities of this splendid dessert. But there's never a Dave about when you want one, so I can only apologize for the quality and hope you understand the sincerity and conviction that went into the taking of it. At least the date's in focus.

'Aunty', whoever she is, makes individual portions. Into the microwave an individual portion went, J. being no lover of canteen puddings. It didn't need much lubrication, just a dressing, a veil, of a kind of de-natured cream called Bridélice, a word which looks like a rather unpleasant matrimonial condition (although pronounced 'breed-day-lease'). In any case we've re-christened this cream Dulux.

It was excellent, a worthy sacrifice on the altar of noshtalgia, a longing for comfort food particularly associated with childhood, a sort of à la recherche du pudding perdu. I've only two complaints, viz.:

1. I remember Spotted Dick as a lumpish grey suety roly-poly pudding with currants or sultanas embedded. 'Aunty's' was more of a sultana sponge, and

2. We bought these puds in an Essex Tesco's while on a UK visit. They're made in and imported from NEW ZEALAND. I'm sure my sense of eco-outrage should have totally eclipsed my pleasure in eating it. But I'm afraid it didn't. Clearly I am a weak vessel.

Ghoulies and ghaisties and things that go tra-la-la in the night

2011-02-04T11:09:00.005+01:00

William IV (1830-1837)

My choir Les Jeudistes is going on tour in Scotland in May.

We met last night to discuss the programme. Not just what we're going to sing - that's long been settled - but where we're going to visit as well. French ideas - and they may not be limited to France - about Scotland are extremely stereotyped. I don't quite know what to do to meet their expectations.

They want to visit a castle. Luckily there's a very good one just in the locality where we'll be staying. This is Cawdor castle, home supposedly of Macbeth. No problem there. It's open to the public. Besides, I feel a certain affinity with this castle, having once borrowed the castle dinner gong for a performance of Carmina Burana I was playing in in nearby Inverness.

But the castle isn't enough. They want ghosts.

They also want to visit a distillery. Again, there's one on the doorstep, the Royal Brackla. It has the 'Royal' prefix because it once supplied whisky to William IV, uncle of Queen Victoria. The choir isn't necessarily expecting ghosts at Brackla, but if William IV would oblige our lady choir members would be most gratified.

Then they want whales, seals and dolphins.

And a piper.

And one wants to buy a kilt. Does it matter if you don't have a name associated with a particular tartan? she asked. No, we replied, in the absence of a MacDubois tartan you can wear whatever you fancy. With one or two exceptions all that tartan business is a complete fiction, popularised by Sir Walter Scott and William IV's older brother, George IV. There are hundreds of tartans now, many never seen in Scotland.

We got the clan tartans book out. She rather liked McLeod of Raasay, a mostly yellow confection with black and red stripes. If she wore it, she asked, would a real McLeod of Raasay take exception? Might she be made captive by McLeod clansmen? Endungeoned in Raasay Castle, never to be seen again, save as a mouldering cadaver?

Not the least doubt of it, we said. How do you think there come to be so many ghosts in Scotland?

Rude shock horror drama probe

2011-02-02T18:15:00.005+01:00

Our peaceful, innocent viewing last night of Part 1 of a French TV adaptation - a very good one, a miracle of condensation - of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu was rudely interrupted by a heavy crash from outside. It was a dark and stormy night, not fit for man nor beast, and, thinking that a sudden gust might have carried away some items of garden furniture, I rushed out to the back of the house, to find that the only damage was to the birds' fat-ball bucket, whose lid had blown away. This happens several times a year. We get through a lot of lids.

Easily the least appealing element in our climate is a wind called the Tramontane, the 'across-mountain' which blows in monstrous gusts sometimes for days on end. It's the same wind as the better-known Mistral, which funnels down the Rhone valley well to the east of us. Cold and usually dry, the Tramontane blows off the Massif Central and when it reaches our valley it doesn't know where to go, so it blows in all directions at once, up and down as well as sideways. When the Tramontane's blowing in autumn, we can watch giant flurries of leaves blowing left to right along the back of the house. Moments later, another capricious gust will blow them all back again, right to left.

But last night it wasn't leaves. It was our precious lemon tree. I bought it for J. about five years ago. The usual practice here, where winter frosts are common, is to grow lemon and other citrus trees in pots or tubs on trolleys, so that they can be wheeled inside when temperatures drop below freezing. For the past few winters we've opted out of tugging it into the garage every time the mercury drops, and we've wrapped it in a blanket instead, a thin fabric several times folded that I could confidently say looks like ectoplasm if I'd ever seen any.

Anyway, last night a particularly violent gust upended it, ripped at the blanket like a Mills and Boon heroine's bodice, scattered lemons far and wide, smashed the terra cotta pot and made a few small gashes in the house wall for good measure. We bought a new pot this morning, the ever-helpful M. Hector came up this afternoon to assist with replanting it, and J. and I have just put its blanket back on, because it's freezing fast again.

Why am I telling you all this? Day-to-day events aren't really the Lydian Airs style. But today is Chandeleur (Candlemas) in France, when like Shrove Tuesday in the UK pancakes are served. Yum. And of course there'll be no shortage of fresh home-grown lemons to squeeze over the delectable, golden-brown, smiling pancakes. Why, they've even picked themselves.

Through a local lens No. 6

2011-01-30T14:36:00.007+01:00

This is a place called Fréjo. It's about half a mile upstream from where we live. It's where the Fréjo spring gushes out of the rock at the foot of the cliff into the river Jaur. It's a popular place in summer, but today there was no one else about, and maybe just as well.

There's a cave behind the waterfall. I'm reminded of the Scottish Gaelic practice of taghairm, which means wrapping yourself in a bullock-hide and somehow getting in behind a waterfall. This enables you to see into the future.

I did a very foolish thing at Fréjo. Finding on the river beach a large and very heavy piece of inch-thick white melamine-coated chipboard, which must have been washed up there recently when the river was in spate, I launched it back into the water. I thought it would break up and disperse in the rapids a little further downstream, an easier way of getting rid of such an eyesore than carting it up to the nearest disposal point.

I'm afraid it was so waterlogged that it refused to float. It just slid into the calm water in the photo and came to rest hip-deep on the river bed, a worse eyesore than it was before.

If I'd had a bullock-hide handy and had managed to wade across the river and install myself behind the waterfall I'd have foreseen this, of course. There's never a bullock-hide about when you want one, is there?

Nimrod no more

2011-01-28T18:26:00.009+01:00

So it looks as if the last rescue bid has failed and what remains of the once-powerful fleet of mighty Nimrods, the RAF maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft, is consigned to the breaker's yard.

The Nimrod was once my bread and butter, in a sense. The ever-shrinking RAF Coastal Command lost Ballykelly in Northern Ireland, St Mawgan in Cornwall, not to mention overseas bases, and finally concentrated in RAF Kinloss in Morayshire, due for closure soon.

Many of the children of RAF Kinloss personnel came to my school. We lived close by, and I have lively memories of this once-great aircraft. Sometimes the landing lights of a Nimrod, returning from some reconnaissance mission maybe far to the north of Iceland would show as a distant gleam on the eastern horizon, bright as the setting Venus, closing and intensifying as the aircraft prepared to land. Sometimes woods and fields round us would stink of the paraffin they used - I believe - to pre-heat the engines. Sometimes, when the wind was in the west, there would be the shattering roar of the four Rolls-Royce Spey engines as a Nimrod took to the air. Classes sat in stunned silence for a moment or two, rounders games froze, telephone conversations were suspended until the noise had passed. Sometimes the locals were entertained by the drama of this great plane rising vertically, a monstrous, leviathan noise, but this practice was frowned on by the RAF authorities and was eventually stopped.

I was lucky enough once to fly in a Nimrod. In the days when some of the fleet was based at St Mawgan, there was a frequent movement of kids between my school and the school in nearby Trevisker in Cornwall. It seemed sensible for the two schools to compare notes, maybe formulate some common policies, whatever might be possible to smooth out the schooling problems of children subject to frequent postings. So I flew by RAF Airlines to St Mawgan for a 24-hour visit. It didn't turn out to be all that useful, because St Mawgan closed down soon after, but I had a lovely time. I seem to remember signing a piece of paper saying I wouldn't divulge anything I'd seen on board, but at this remove I can't see much harm in mentioning what I saw outside. Chiefly memorable was the magnificent view of the Isle of Man and the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland silhouetted against the setting sun on the return leg.

When RAF Kinloss celebrated its 50th birthday in 1989 we made them an immense birthday card in the shape of a Nimrod, and filled the bomb-bay (actually the cellophane and paper roundel on the fuselage) with individual cards from every one of the 250 or so kids in the school. (Press cutting above from The Northern Scot, a fine local paper.) Even at that time it seemed to me unlikely that the role of RAF Kinloss would survive for another 50 years. The Cold War was over, the Russian nuclear submarines they tracked so unsparingly were more dangerous to their own crews than anyone else. To me, a mere civilian looking out of my office window at RAF Kinloss kids running about in the playground, it appeared that the Nimrod's anti-submarine role in defending the realm was fast becoming a bit part, while orbiting satellites were beginning to take star billing in maritime reconnaissance. Like other sections of the armed services, maybe it was easier to look back than into the future.

As a tiny unwitting echo of this, sometimes the kids used to sing on bus journeys He took a Flying Fortress up to 40,000 feet to the tune of John Brown's Body. Some teachers banned it, I think more because of the indelicacy of expressions like They scraped him off the tarmac like a dollop of strawberry jam and the chorus Glory, glory, what a helluva way to die than because of folk-memory evocations of World War 2 Battle of the Atlantic glory that never really left them.

More extraordinary, and instantly banned, was There were ten German bombers in the sky, sung to the tune of She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes. It was a reducing song, like Ten Green Bottles. The refrain went Till RAF Kinloss shot one down, whereupon There were nine German bombers in the sky. And so it went on. No other local schools sang it. I don't dare guess what service ethos these songs hinted at. What with archaisms like Flying Fortresses and German bombers, they more properly belonged to the immediate post-war generation. Logically it should have been me singing them.

But the RAF were first rate neighbours, invariably supportive and anxious to help and contribute, and for my part it was extraordinarily reassuring to know there was a fully equipped hospital, fire service and - at the height of the 80s IRA menace - an armed response unit just round the corner. Not many schools could claim that.

Giving ourselves the crêpes

2011-01-26T15:03:00.007+01:00

Montpellier, Tuesday morning. It's a perfect January day. Don't need a coat. I've got a couple of hours to kill before lunch, which I've booked at a little side-street crêperie called Le Kreisker. I stroll across the massive central square of Montpellier, the Place de la Comédie (see above), to buy a copy of The Times, printed in Marseilles, and settle in the sun on the terrace of a café called Le Yams. (Can't explain this: no idea what it means. 'Kreisker', incidentally, means 'city centre' in Breton. The 'ker' element, for the hordes of philologists who come here every day, is the same as the 'caer' or 'car' meaning 'town' that you get in sister-language Welsh, e.g. Caernarvon, Cardiff. Le Kreisker has a Breton theme to it, there are Breton bagpipes and round black beribboned Breton hats hanging on the wall, even though here in the Languedoc you couldn't get much further away from Brittany without getting very wet. Can I get on with my story now, please?)

On my right - at the far end of the photo - is the massive Opera, decorated like a wedding cake, all cornices and finials and crockets and swags and other architectural goodies. Two enormous panels announce the season's repertoire: The Barber of Seville, Samson and Delilah, La Traviata, Die Fledermaus and others and I find myself daydreaming . . . just suppose, in the legendary manner of somebody asking from the stage 'Is there a doctor in the house, please?' a tuxedo'ed figure, shaken by some desperate backstage emergency, appeared from the curtain saying 'Is there a conductor in the house, please?' I suppose I could volunteer and take them off the cuff through Die Fledermaus or La Traviata, The Barber at a push. I dream on until . . .

. . . the Yams waiter brings me my coffee, a café au lait. I take my time. I could stay here all day without anyone urging me to order anything else or vacate my table. There's an article in The Times by their columnist Ben Macintyre about the development of Indian English. He's describing the same sort of thing that happened to Latin: amoeba-like, it fractalised over time into Italian, Spanish, Romanian, French, Portuguese, Catalan and so on. English is doing the same, and always has done and always will, because language is a vital, living organism that feeds on change, and people who try to pin it down definitively, once-for-all, are no lovers of language in my book.

In an encouragingly non-patronising article, Ben Macintyre quotes from an apparently apocryphal 1909 letter written by a Bengali (Bangladeshi?) complaining about the lack of loos in trains of the period:

Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on platform...

Apocryphal or not, I wish I could write like that.

J. and I are booked for lunch at 1pm. About 20 minutes beforehand I pay my bill, fold The Times, put it in the bag in which there's a new cravat (sometimes called 'Ascot' here) I've treated myself to, saunter across the square and amble down the Esplanade, a tree-lined pedestrian avenue leading down to Montpellier's second opera house, a vast modern complex called Le Corum, where we've agreed to meet. Lunch at Le Kreisker is as usual excellent. The buckwheat crêpes are melt-in-the-mouth, light and lacy. I have egg, cheese, tomato and ham in mine, the more moderate J. has egg, spinach and sour cream. We share a green salad. As those Indians in all seriousness might say, 'super-duper.'

Lydian Airs Behavioural Science Dept.

2011-01-22T10:33:00.008+01:00

Today I'm wondering how many:

Revolutions
Insurrections
Conspiracies
Seductions
Romances
Epiphanies
Gambling debts
Apoplexies
Duelling scars (Dave)
Betrayals
Civil actions
Musical Awakenings (IE)
Welsh Topographical Awarenesses (Dave denies it)
Affirmations (Z)
Arstronomical phenomena (Rog)
Female Control Psychoses (Geoff)
Navigational Errors (Vicus)
Punctuality Problems (Sarah)

have had their origins on the back seat of the bus.

Lydian Airs Travel Notes No. 26

2011-01-21T07:00:00.002+01:00

Breakfast in the Shangri-La: A Useful Guide to calling Room Service

Room service (RS): Morny. Ruin sore bees.
Guest (G): Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I dialled Room Service.

RS: Rye...Ruin sore bees, morny! Jewish to odor sun teen?
G: Uh...yes, please: I'd like some bacon and eggs.

RS: Ow July den?
G: What?

RS: Ow July den? Pry, boy, pooch?
G: Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry. Scrambled, please.

RS: Ow July dee bay come? Crease?
G: Crisp will be fine.

RS: Hokay. An San Toes?
G: What?

RS: San Toes. July San Toes?
G: I don't think so.

RS: No? Judo one Toes?
G: I feel really bad about this, but I don't know what 'Judo one Toes' means.

RS: Toes! Toes! Why Jew Don Juan Toes? Ow bow tinglish mopping we bother?
G: 'English muffin'! I've got it! You were saying 'toast'! Fine. Yes, an English muffin will be fine.

RS: We bother?
G: No - just put the bother on the side.

RS: Wad?
G: I mean butter - just put it on the side.

RS: Copy?
G: Sorry?

RS: Copy? Tea? Mill?
G: Yes, coffee, please, and that's all.

RS: Wan Minnie. Ass ruin torino fee, strangle ache, crease bay come, toesan inglish mopping we bother honey sigh and copy? Rye?
G: Whatever you say.

RS: Tendjewberrymud.
G: You're welcome.

(I believe this or something very like it appeared in the Far East Economic Review several years ago. My son Nibus sent it to me in 1999. It resurfaced while going through some old papers. WARNING: There may be more.)

But what's 'torino fee'?

Making a meal of it

2011-01-19T12:46:00.003+01:00

We had twelve people round our dining table the other day. It ought to have been a specially blessed occasion, and as far as the meal was concerned it certainly was. C., an amiable Swiss lady who lives some distance away, did all the cooking and brought the entire meal, plus wines and coffee, to our house in her car.

Entrée: Avocado dressed with salmon mousse, salad with vinaigrette

Main course: Chicken pie in a rich creamy sauce

Cheese: Camembert, Gouda, Mimolette, Brie

Dessert: Iced lemon mousse

C.'s guests were all those volunteers who had helped her organise last summer's series of concerts. It was her more than adequate way of saying thank you. J. was delighted merely to lend our kitchen and supply cutlery, glasses, etc. and clear away afterwards.

It was a superb meal. We sat down at about 12.45 and didn't get up until 4pm. I wish I could say the time flew by, and that the conversation was sharply illuminated with flashes of French wit. But it didn't and it wasn't. Two of the company decided the opportunity was ripe for long uninvited monologues about

a) The origins of local place-names (22 minutes)

b) The probable effects of the imminent reorganisation of French local government (38 minutes).

I sat next to C., feeling for her and desperately hoping that this brutish commandeering of her event hadn't taken the lustre off her hospitality. I told her quietly that in the UK three topics of conversation are traditionally avoided at table in polite society: sex, religion and politics. She was genuinely surprised. I felt I was carrying everyone else's boredom.

I hereby make public apology for deliberately creating a between-course diversion to limit the first monologue by inviting everyone to come to the window to see a distant mountain-top chapel the speaker had just mentioned, St Martin du Froid, St Martin in the Cold. I even supplied binoculars to spin the interruption out while everyone had a look. (This tactic of desperation had its price: the window became covered in fingerprints as people pointed it out to each other.)

As for the second monologue, maybe I should have created another diversion, but I chickened out. It's so easy to become known as a disruptive, subversive and thoroughly irresponsible element. And when in Rome, of course...

Conjecture in black and woite (conclusion)

2011-01-17T14:25:00.011+01:00

One of the books that arrived here over the Christmas period was Prefaces to Shakespeare, by Tony Tanner, a Cambridge professor of English and American Literature. As you might imply from the title, this book consists of the introductions Prof. Tanner wrote for every one of the plays in the Shakespeare canon, an immense labour.

I became very excited indeed about it, to the extent of getting up in the middle of the night to read a bit more, then a bit more, then just another little bit more. (It's true, my reading filled in the gaps between small-hours Ashes over-by-over reports.)

The previous three posts in this series (which have led to some very gratifying private outcomes, incidentally) have been nibbling at the edges of the idea that the ancient house I lived in for a few years as a child, St Margaret's in Titchfield, Hampshire, was associated with Shakespeare. It's pictured above, showing the Tudor or pre-Tudor tower and the rather disproportionate Georgian wing, added in about 1800.

In particular there was the persisting tradition that he'd written Romeo and Juliet there, if not at St Margaret's, then at the nearby and now ruined Place House, the former Titchfield Abbey. Both great houses belonged to Shakespeare's friend and patron Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.

My grandfather, a man with an even longer nose for this sort of thing than mine, came from his native Lancashire to stay at St Margaret's once. Somehow he discovered the name Gobbo in the 16th-century parish registers in Titchfield church. Not a common name. Where else do you find it? Why, in The Merchant of Venice. No proof, of course, but another faint pointer to the possibility that Shakespeare, with his magpie mind, picked up and developed several ideas from Titchfield and his association there with Henry Wriothesley.

The most powerful of these seems to me to be the figure of Juliet. I wonder if her creation owed anything to Margaret of Anjou, the 15-year-old French princess who stayed at St Margaret's the night before her wedding to King Henry VI in 1445? (As far as I know she and Henry had never met before the wedding.) Shakespeare's source was a long, dull 1562 poem called The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet, by Arthur Brooke, who had put it together in English from several Italian versions of the story. Brooke puts Juliet's age at 16, which we can just about accept.

But Shakespeare goes out of his way to emphasize a younger Juliet. In the play, with Romeus changed to Romeo, the Nurse works Juliet's age out almost to the day. She is just 14 and hardly into stays. Romeo and Juliet directors, whether of play, film or ballet - the 1966 film of Prokoviev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, otherwise stupendous, is made ridiculous with the 47-year-old Margot Fonteyn dancing Juliet opposite Nureyev's Romeo - directors who cast Juliet as a girl obviously older than 14 disregard Shakespeare's powerful projections of innocence, exploitation and betrayal, without which the play falls back on the lesser, West Side Story, issue of the rivalry between two noble families. (I would like to explore the powerful 'Vestal Virgin' concept of sacrifice some time, but clearly not just now.)

Tony Tanner came up with another idea that sent shivers down my back. (Excuse me: these sudden trembling enthusiasms are meat and drink to me and I hope they never leave me) Romeo and Juliet, with its possible St Margaret's connections, was written at the same time as A Midsummer Night's Dream. And it's true, Mercutio's speech from Romeo and Juliet starting 'O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies' midwife...' has - in content and atmosphere - somehow strayed out of R and J into A Midsummer Night's Dream. Similarly, the Pyramus and Thisbe sub-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream is a well-meant parody of . . . Romeo and Juliet. It's as though the two manuscripts lay next to one another and paid each other visits in the night.

Much of A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in woodland. At St Margaret's there was a formal garden, shown below, with box clumps a 7-year-old could jump over, and a central path leading to a gate which opened into The Wood. I expect it's built over now, what's left of it, and it's hardly likely that the same wood grew 350 years earlier, when I imagine, with no justification whatever, Shakespeare chewing the end of his quill, staring out of one of the St Margaret's lattice windows towards The Wood, reciting to himself and testing the balance and euphony of the lines (e.g. 'Dare I put 9 Os into "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"') he was putting into the mouth of Juliet, or of Mercutio, Oberon, Titania or indeed Margaret of Anjou, as she appears in Henry VI.

The Wood had another, indisputable, legacy. When I was about 8, I and another lad happily coincidentally called Jimmy Shakespeare made a fire in a hollowed-out and fallen tree trunk. The draught turned a little play-fire into a raging inferno, which soon spread to the surrounding trees. The Titchfield fire brigade saved most of The Wood from destruction, and my other principal memory is standing in front of one the canvas hoses as the firemen prepared to void the tank of water no longer needed, now that the fire was out. Despite being told to stand aside, I somehow failed to, being not so much a child, more an imbecile. I received the full force, knocking me to the ground. A richly deserved outcome. I probably deserve it again for all this unwarranted conjecture. Thank you for bearing with me, if you have.

Conjecture in black and woite (3)

2011-01-13T07:00:00.007+01:00

Margaret of Anjou, hot-blooded, proud and wilful, went on to become a major figure in the Wars of the Roses, taking a leading role from her unwarlike and unstable Lancastrian husband, King Henry VI. She became a target for the opposing Yorkist forces, who slung every dollop of mud that came to hand. One of the slanders concerned the night before her wedding, spent in St Margaret's, the house I was privileged to live in for a few years when I was quite small. She was not alone, apparently. Fingers were pointed at William de la Pole, later Duke of Suffolk, an influential figure who had arranged Henry's marriage with Margaret, had stood in for Henry at the betrothal ceremony in France which preceded the actual marriage in Titchfield in 1445. It was he who had escorted Margaret from France to Titchfield. The most you can say about such allegations is 'well, they would say that, wouldn't they?'

5 years later, as the full fury of the Wars of the Roses was about to burst, William de la Pole was captured by Yorkists at sea, off Ipswich. His possibly headless body was left on the beach at Dover, where Queen Margaret had it recovered and taken care of. He had long been her favourite. She gave him a decent burial at Wingfield, in Suffolk.

What stands out for me in this account is the association of St Margaret's with a passionate young girl of noble family, on the edge of adulthood, being forced into an arranged marriage. I'm not quite certain what 'passionate' means in this context: a hapless martyr to her emotions, maybe.

Almost a century later Henry VIII broke with Rome, not so much over matters of doctrine as of authority, principally the authority to enable his divorce from Anne Boleyn. Short of money, it was also an expedient time for him to close down, annex or sell off the great religious houses, a 1536-9 movement known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, an astute courtier and able servant of both Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, a Londoner called Thomas Wriothesley (pronounced 'Risley') bought out the Abbot of Titchfield before his Abbey and its estates could be suppressed.

In due course, for services to Henry VIII, Thomas Wriothesley was created Earl of Southampton. He transformed Titchfield Abbey into a palace, which he called Place House, I don't know why. It's a ruin now, pictured above. Other estate houses were upgraded and enlarged. Maybe St Margaret's was among them. Thomas Wriothesley's grandson Henry, 3rd Earl of Southampton, was a favourite at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. In the early 1590s, in the course of court activities he met an up-and-coming poet and playwright, rising 30, attractive and intelligent, witty, educated and companionable, drawn to London from his native Warwickshire. His name was William Shakespeare.

Rubens' Venus and Adonis, in a presentation Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton would have appreciated

Southampton and Shakespeare got on very well. In 1593 Shakespeare dedicated his long and sexually palpitating poem Venus and Adonis to Southampton, which maybe says more about the dedicatee than the poet. In the summer of that year the London theatres were closed because of the plague. It's a possibility that Shakespeare first came to Titchfield then, partly to escape the plague and partly to pursue his friendship with Henry Southampton.

I suppose it's also a possibility that, in riding together about Place House, Shakespeare asked his host - by now his patron - how Anjou Bridge, a bridge over the Meon close by the former Titchfield Abbey, had got the name it still has today. If he knew the story, Southampton would have been in a position to tell him about the passionate 15-year-old French princess, her overnight stay at St Margaret's and the marriage that had been arranged for her. Maybe those House Detectives, exploring the connection between St Margaret's and Romeo and Juliet in that BBC TV programme didn't look quite far enough outside the frame.

And for the multitude of serious historians whom come here, I did entitle this mini-series 'Conjecture....'

(to be continued or even concluded, who knows?)

Conjecture in black and woite (2)

2011-01-10T14:52:00.008+01:00

When my mother bought St Margaret's, a great house on the edge of the Hampshire village of Titchfield, one of the first things she did was commission a stained glass window by an artist called Donald Brookes. The window, installed in the porch beneath the tower, showed St Margaret surrounded by flames. There are several St Margarets in the lists of saints, so which St Margaret my mother or Donald Brookes had in mind is a guess.

My money goes on the earliest, St Margaret of Antioch, who belongs in the same Apocryphal Saints Club as St George and St Nicholas and many others. She appears to be the same person as St Marina or St Pelagia. Maybe there's some kind of sea element here: the word 'Margaret' means pearl, 'Marina' speaks for itself and 'Pelagia' is a Greek word for marine. According to the legend the first St Margaret, a devoutly Christian shepherdess, received an offer of marriage from a Roman notable, on condition that she renounce her faith. She refused. She was tortured in an attempt to make her change her mind, and was eventually done to death, burnt, maybe. She worked various miracles involving dragons during her torture. Virgin and Martyr, she became the patron saint of childbirth and pregnant women, shepherdesses, those falsely accused, exiles and, curiously, those suffering with kidney problems. She became a Christian cult figure in England at the time of the crusades, roughly 1100-1250.) In essence she is a personification of courage, determination and faith.

Almost exactly 500 years before Donald Brookes' window was commissioned and installed, another Margaret, much less shadowy, comes into the picture. In the early 1440s King Henry VI, aesthete and slightly unbalanced son of the victor of Agincourt, was looking for a queen. The choice fell on Margaret of Anjou, a French princess with strong continental dynastic connections. Margaret was sent for from her home in Lorraine (she was born in Pont à Mousson, now an ironworks town known to every Frenchman because the name is cast on innumerable manhole covers), she sailed across the Channel and put in at Titchfield Haven, then a small port on Southampton Water. From Titchfield Haven she rode the four miles inland to Titchfield, where she was due to be married the next day, April 23rd 1445, to the 23-year-old Henry VI.

The wedding venue was the chapel of Titchfield Abbey, a Premonstratensian monastery by the banks of the river Meon. The Titchfield Abbey lands (I expect 'messuages' is the correct term) included a guest house or just possibly a small convent on the hill to the west of Titchfield village. Or maybe St Margaret's was just one of the eight manors with which Abbey was endowed. However it might have been, this was where Margaret of Anjou spent the night before her wedding. Maybe it was in her honour that the house (or its predecessor) that we lived in half a millenium later was called St Margaret's.

Margaret of Anjou was a month past her fifteenth birthday. The historian Paul Kendall describes her as 'already a woman: passionate and proud and strong-willed'.

(To be continued. Sorry, Vicus.)

Conjecture in black and woite (1)

2011-01-07T15:49:00.010+01:00

When I was quite little, five or so, we moved from the Gloucestershire/Warwickshire borders to Hampshire. My mother was anxious to start a new life, as happens to quite a lot of us one way or another, and with some money that had come her way she bought an extraordinary house, the one pictured above, on a wooded ridge overlooking a village about halfway between Portsmouth and Southampton. It was called St Margaret's, sometimes St Margaret's Priory, although any ecclesiastical connections it ever had are lost - but not beyond conjecture - in the fog of medieval history.

It was one of those properties you read of sometimes where nothing has been touched for many years, and even the dust is antique and the spiders' webs themselves are museum pieces. My first memories of this house are connected with the antiquated lighting system: somewhere in the outbuildings was an apparatus - I can still smell it - that converted calcium carbide into acetylene, which was piped into gas-brackets in the house to light it at night. Once having given up its acetylene the whitish calcium carbide waste was dumped by the wheelbarrow-load in a forgotten laurel-screened corner which I called the 'woite' (I had a West Midlands accent then) where a little girl called Anne and I used to go to see which of us could pee the most and make rivers in the chalky deposit.

Having bought St Margaret's from a Miss Parry, who had lived there alone like a latter-day Miss Havisham for the previous quarter of a century, my mother set about modernising it, at least to some extent. Water and electricity were brought in, but sewage and waste water (apart from a few trace elements on the woite) were still piped to an enormous brick-lined cess-pit, also surrounded by laurels. Alas, the money fairly soon ran out, the business idea of selling antique furniture in period surroundings never took off, and in less than five years my mother was obliged to sell and move to a more modest house elsewhere. The developer who bought it divided it into three separate properties, which is how it is today. So we were the last people to inhabit St Margaret's in its totality.

It was only after leaving St Margaret's that I slowly began to realise what an amazing property it was. Parts of it were very, very old. Some years ago the rather catchpenny BBC TV series House Detectives featured it, but I think the presenters were too busy promoting themselves as 'characters' to make much of a fist of it. They dated some of the beams, by drilling holes into them, at around 1620, but they seemed to be blind to the architectural style of the earliest part, the tower and the premises at its foot, which scream Henry VII (1485-1510) at the very latest.

It was an extraordinary hotch-potch of a house to have the run of, a template and sampler of English architectural history. The tower, so exciting for a small child to climb, but so frustrating when reaching the top to discover that I was too little to see over the parapet, came from the mid to late 15th Century. The principal rooms were Tudor, very probably on much earlier foundations. In about 1780 a Georgian wing was added, and maybe 100 years after that a range of Victorian kitchens, pantries, sculleries as extensive as anything below stairs in Downton Abbey was added.

House Detectives had invented for themselves a mission: could Shakespeare possibly have written Romeo and Juliet at St Margaret's?

(to be continued)