Good Morrow, friends. St Valentine’s is past
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV Scene i
What is love? This huge essential word. It motivates us so strongly, and at the same time it is ubiquitous and clichéd. Patently, it ranges from something quintessential within our psychological core, to the softest, most whimsical, peripheral frond and feather of feeling.
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I am re-reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It’s a striking, indulgent, flawed novel, I think. Not entirely successful, but somehow it communicates a – to me, irresistible – sense of beauty, loss and yearning which repeatedly draws me back. Given my age, I cannot read the narrative without hearing Jeremy Irons’ melancholy tones, or see in my mind’s eye anyone but the young, impossibly golden Anthony Andrews as Sebastian. The luscious TV adaptation was on screen just as I was applying to Oxbridge, so the book evokes a complementary nostalgia in me for my own past: youth, hopes, idealism and magical moments when I was at College, timeless and elevated far from my upbringing. Et in Arcadia Ego.
The sentence, ‘It is time to speak of Julia’ (Brideshead Revisited Part II – Brideshead Deserted Chapter 2) has long stayed in my mind because it chimes with my enduring, college-born, obsession with names and the function of naming as an entry point to how we use language.
Continue readingSometimes I dream of being in a familiar house, opening a door and finding a forgotten room. This is a common dream theme, a recurrent trope. The discovery brings with it with a strange small mis-step lurch of emotion: how can I have overlooked this so completely? To mis-apply Eliot, we ‘know and do not know’ the space: it is both a new, fresh opportunity and also restoration of something long lost. It’s slightly magical. Eliot again:
Footfalls echo in the memory
TS Eliot Burn Norton
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
In the dream, as in the poem, this time we follow the path, we open the door or, in my case, we climb the staircase.
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At the top of our road is a thoroughfare named Portway. It heads roughly east to west, with houses and side roads along its southern edge and West Ham Park bordering to the north. This park was originally part of the Upton Park/Ham House estate, where, in the 18th century, Dr John Fothergill created a botanical garden ‘second only to Kew’. Alongside the wide green open spaces, the football pitches and sports areas and playgrounds, all essential parts of a living, vital community resource and sanctuary – in other words, of an urban park – there is an ornamental garden, where remain traces of the design and layout of Dr Fothergill’s garden, with trees planted by him. The ornamental garden is, to me, the heart of this haven in east London.
The gate we use to go into the park – the one nearest to our house, also closest to the ornamental gardens – is designated Portway Gate.
Continue readingStephen Sondheim died on Friday November 26th. ‘91 year old man dies peacefully in his sleep’ is not unexpected news. But the impact was great, and in a small way I shared it. Others will be able to articulate the richness, the complexity and masterfulness of Sondheim better than I can. I think comparisons with Shakespeare are both inevitable and appropriate. And this from me who, generally, doesn’t really like musicals.
Continue readingSometimes we know when we are about to create significant memories: a marriage vow, a graduation, a last visit to the vets. But other times they creep up on us and only that wise counsellor, hindsight, recognises significance. So with us, walking along the South Bank, for a purpose I cannot remember, maybe 15 years ago, when I said ‘I wouldn’t like to live in London with a young family but perhaps, when the children have left home, a little flat near the centre might be fun’.
Continue reading‘Our possessions outlast us, surviving shocks that we cannot; we have to live up to them, as they will be our witnesses when we are gone. In this room are the goods of people who no longer use them’
Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light pp66-67
I like change, but I approach it crabwise and incrementally. I sidle up, try to consider it from all angles. I review and rehearse each step, until that one feels comfortable, and I can look towards the next. I am easily alarmed, and superstitious, and like time to adjust. Since March, however, the pace has been disconcerting, the big conceptual shifts overlaid with urgent practical tasks.
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I made a cake at the weekend. I don’t often bake these days but it was my son’s birthday and traditions are reassuring. My mixing bowl is a Mason Cash – you know the type, surely in the UK it is the ur-mixing bowl of mixing bowls. Continue reading
Another national lockdown returns me to Dickens. I have written already about the reassurance and pleasure provided through long novels. Good audiobook versions are my substitute for live theatre: more than anything else, this is where I can find compensation for the things I miss – shared space, face to face interaction. Headphones increase the intimacy, encouraging and enabling the retreat from the outside world and full immersion into a new one.
I am a re-reader as much as I am a reader – I love revisiting works, rejoicing in both the deep pleasure of the familiar and in the always-to-be-found thrill of something new, something overlooked last time or simply striking afresh because I – or my circumstances – have changed. At the moment it’s Nicholas Nickleby (again) which means just me and Alex Jennings inside my head.
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In the midst of what, for convenience, I’ll call the ‘second lockdown’ I have rejected Zoom. My head recognises its benefits, but my heart has rebelled. Continue reading
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