A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day

The days gather, hemmed in by dark space, dark matter.  Our rocky orb careers through nothing, going nowhere, rocking from light to dark, warm to cold, tilting at windmills in celestial orbit, while we struggle with pain and ignominy in thrall to the gravitational force that pins us to the surface of this world.

Two whole years ago, themselves pure figments of maths, calculations that only relate to the space-time continuum of our spinning round the sun, itself spinning in the constellation which spins in relation to other bodies, other galaxies.....

Two years ago my family gathered in the cold and snow to inter my father's ashes.  We had been through the process of death and accepted the conflagration of cremation.  Now, in the presence of a priest, in the vicinity of woods where my brothers and I had played as children, we watched ash and earth combine.  No joy entailed, no great spirit of hope, but as a common denominator I guess we were relieved that the suffering was over, and that life, as our father had wished, would go on.

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY
by John Donne  

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

         For I am every dead thing,

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

                For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

         I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

         Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood

                Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

         Were I a man, that I were one

         I needs must know; I should prefer,

                If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

John Donne, famous for his loving, famous for his sermons at St Paul's, wrote about love, and life, and drew upon his wit and understanding to give us all some hope.  This poem is about love and loss, darkness and light, and uses words from the alchemist's handbook - limbec, quintessence, flasks, balm, elixir....  But it is not about failure, though it is about darkness.  There is some hope - I am re-begot.....

It's nothing new to observe that things cannot get worse.  The concept of the shortest day informs the idea that actually there is always going to be a regeneration, a rebirth. St Lucy, virgin and martyr, is the patron saint of blind people, partly because of her name's association with light and partly because she is often depicted in art as having her eyes upon a plate (her name is invoked to cure eye disease) and although her saint's day is December 13th, the proximity of this to the solstice and the symbolic connection with darkness excuses any confusion.  We are in the dark depths of winter - perhaps not the worst, yet, as the drawing out of January and the brief gloom of February are still to come - but it is the time when looking forward is so much better than looking back.....

Not every moment is doom and gloom

The family gathered to inter my father's ashes at Kingshill Cemetery, Berkhamsted, on the shortest, darkest, coldest day of 2010.

In Memoriam, Peter Colville Gibbs,

July 7th 1923 - November 7th 2010

Anna Stella Gibbs, Friday December 21st 2012

"... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.." John Donne, Meditation XVII

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhqs8x_john-donne-a-nocturnal-upon-st-lucy-s-day_creation

Lawrence of Arabia

On the 50th anniversary of the film, Lawrence of Arabia

Half a century ago, almost to the day, my whole school was rounded up in a rastrellamento and force-marched up to the Rex Cinema in Berkhamsted High Street.  This was before the wine bar effect, but the shell uplights were there and the gauze curtain, and the red plush velveteen seats....

Music played over a blank screen, then a man walked out to polish a motorbike behind the titles.  Then, looking a little odd, with toad-like goggles and not exactly the epitome of cool, the man accelerated up a fairly straight road in sunny visibility.  As he reached peak speed a couple of boys on wobbly bicycles appeared before him and in a trice the man was history, goggles hanging on a gorse bush, the man to die in six short days without recovery.

I was not conscious, on that day, as to why this man was so special.  I did not know that his death, a mere twenty-seven years before, had been Achilles to my father's generation.  Nor did I know that this film before our eyes, in vivid 70mm, was perhaps the finest moment of British cinema history, if not in the world of cinema.

As I watched the film unreel, some seed was sown in my mind.  It was not heroism, nor charisma, that later drew me back to read the writings of this man, nor to visit his tiny home in Dorset.  I feel it was the notion of anti-hero that grew in me, despite the great achievements and the undoubted effect of his leadership and interaction.

Lawrence's appearance in the film in arab dress in the Officers' Mess, the confidence with which he related to the complex issues of the Middle East and the concern he showed for the future of the area, for the development of independent rule - this was probably not what my teachers wanted me to admire; this was not what the Memorial Service at St Paul's had been all about.

What I was supposed to see was the triumph of imperialism, the brilliance of an Oxford mind, and the independent spirit of an scholar and sportsman who would not only honour and bless his opponents but who would outpace and outwit them with his nimble fitness.

I believe I began to form at that time a model for myself.  Unorthodox, but perhaps not entirely ignorant of the mode;  independent but not aloof; adventurous but not foolhardy; complex but not confused. Of course these are ideals - Lawrence would not have claimed perfection and he was the icon, not the iconophile - and any relation between my inadequate self and the ideal is simply day-dreaming.

But we need heroes - or anti-heroes.  In part, the pin-up or the football star is there to give us hope, to help us aim higher than the mundane, everyday, unsophisticated and unimaginative dull reality that is the world of work.  We need the inspiration of whoever it is will take us beyond ourselves. 

Aircraftman John Hume Ross, also know as Thomas Edward Lawrence, also known as Shaw, was shy and elusive, though by no means retiring. He was the master terrorist, a proto-Bin Laden, though not afraid of action himself. He perfected the swiftness of successful attacks, using explosive devices and surprise. As an officer he was coercive, rather than demanding. A friend recounts how years ago he visited Hardy's Max Gate, Where by pure chance we happened to meet the widow of a sergeant who had served Lawrence in the desert: she said her husband told her Lawrence never issued an order; he always couched his requirements like requests, or invitations for advice (....do you think it would be a good scheme to....) He's a hard man not to admire.

Then, after 1922 when, as he himself wrote (in a letter on April 17th 1931 to a pilot who had flown with him to Egypt in 1919), by grace of Winston Churchill I was able to see the Middle East smoothly settled, I washed my hands of politics and enlisted.  Since then I have been happy whenever left alone.

Lawrence on his motorbike, near Southampton, 1932

As I watch the film again today, I wonder if the motorcycle accident could be read as a metaphor for the British/European intervention in the Middle East? The crash was caused by young boys on pedal cycles who escaped unscathed?  The huge power machine blundered through a thick hedge; the pilot, who lost his goggles (or vision) received serious head injuries, and subsequently died in agony.  The young boys could represent the diverse innocencies of the arab tribes; the motor bike the ill-controlled power of western governments, with the pilot full of good intentions but prone to over-confidence.

It is a stunning film, especially considering it is now 50 years old. Both the book and the film contain beautiful passages, portraying the desert landscapes, and the paradoxical hardness and gentleness of those who survive within them. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an extraordinary book, partly a military chronicle and, as E M Forster said, an unexampled fabric of portraits, descriptions, philosophies, emotions, adventures, dreams. I claim no expertise in this field but would think that reading this book should be requisite of anyone wishing to understand the complexities of the Middle Eastern world - and would hazard a guess that George Bush Jnr, for example, has not read it?

I know some heroic people, people who work harder than everyone else and then run a marathon, and don't let you forget it: those sorts of people. I was just hearing today about the SAS; apparently only about five per cent survive their twenty month training.  They must be heroes.  But stamina and crew-cut singleness of purpose do not make my kind of hero.  Lawrence had a gentleness beneath the surface, something which made him essentially vulnerable, because he felt for other people; he loved the disadvantaged and the lesser, as well as the fine and the wise.  He also had the ability to understand the complexities and contradictions of the Arab mind.  He was a great man.  Possibly the cause of his death was the very sympathy he had for the less powerful, and, in respect of the metaphor above, he left the road to give way to the less powerful?

On May 8th, 1933, he wrote to Lady Astor, that, Wild mares would not at present take me away from Clouds Hill. It is an earthly paradise..... After years of turmoil, it appears he had begun to sense some peace around him.

On December 22nd 1933 he wrote to Sir Edward Elgar about his Second Symphony (which Elgar himself called, the passionate pilgrimage of the soul):  We agreed that you must be written to and told (if you are well enough to be bothered) that this Symphony gets further under our skins than anything else in the record library at Clouds Hill.....

On Easter Monday, 1935, he wrote to Mrs Thomas Hardy to say that Clouds Hill is, going to be all right as a living place, I fancy.  The last three weeks have been almost unbroken peace.  I feel very indisposed to do anything more, and very tired.

Clouds Hill

Then on May 15th of the same year he composed a telegram to Henry Williamson, Lunch Tuesday.... and rode into Bovington Camp on his Brough motorcycle to send it.  On the way back he swerved violently to avoid two errand boys and lost control.

Moreton Church

T E Lawrence was buried at Moreton Church on May 21st, 1935. 

His memorial (in St Martin's, Wareham) shows him to be at peace, in his white marble head-dress, though it did not protect him in life.  I wonder where his spirit roams and what anguish clouds his mind as the sands of Arabia continue to swirl in confusion and distress?

Kennington's effigy of Lawrence

At the very end of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,  Lawrence wrote that, I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us...... Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort.  

Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams....

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/clouds-hill/

Just recently, a friend who worked on several major films, including both Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia with David Lean, found his copy of the souvenir programme from the Royal Premiere of the latter film.  It's a fine document, with some wonderful images and a wealth of information about both Lawrence and the film.  Almost five years have passed since I first posted this piece, so now it is 55 years since the film was released, but nothing since then has diminished my admiration for the man, or the film.

A Night at the Opera

L'Elisir D'Amore

Gaetano Donizetti (1797 - 1848), a contemporary of Schubert, wrote some 73 operas and composed 'L'Elisir d'Amore' in 1832, a melodramma giocoso which would have pleased the Italian crowds of his native Bergamo, and which has hardly been out of repertoire ever since.

I have come to Covent Garden, to the Royal Opera House, to be entertained, and have with me a (small) bag of woes.  Life has the tendency to play tricks, tripping us up when least we need it, and this weekend has not been exceptional.  What I need is some kind of escapismo, a little touch of sunshine in this discontented winter.  And I am determined to get my money's worth.  I have a £12 ticket (such indulgence!) to the Amphitheatre Lower Slips Right, seat A106, and I am assured of a restricted view - so what's new?  My view on life has been restricted by circumstances all my days.

Anyway, whether I have a four figure seat or one in the gods, we can all use the same toilets (to put it bluntly) and the music is what I have come for. 

Although Donizetti was no Wagner, this story is based on the same premise as Tristan and Isolde, but set in sunny Italy.  The curtain rises on a pile of hay bales, with the enchanting Adina in relaxed mode.  Cutting a short story down to the minimum, she is loved by a young fellow (Nemorino - the nameless one) but he doesn't cut the mustard.  Along comes a recruiting officer (Belcore - Mr Goodheart) who shakes his uniform at Adina.  Then enter the charlatan (Dottore Dulcamara - Doctor Sweet and Sour) who claims to be able to cure all ills with his patent medicine....  What happens is that they all get confused and then with a few sips of wine it all comes right and Adina and Nemorino live happily ever after.  What could be better?  With constant movement of dogs, motorini, tractors, lorries, dancing, sunshine and wine, the opera zips along on a high wire. 

It's not tense; it's not dramatic; it is not bleak.  The coldest moment is in the interval when I take a glass of wine and overlook the Christmas decorations of the Covent Garden far below in the open air.  The show is perhaps not great art (though who am I to judge....?) but it is absolute escapism.  A delight for the eyes and ears.  The saddest moment is when Nemorino sings Una furtiva lagrima, one of the most affecting arias written for the bel canto tenor, and there is hardly a dry eye in the house - are we all so subsumed by the magical suspension of reality or have we had too much of the elixir of love in the interval?

The whole evening is bewitching.  From the transformed floral hall to the neo-classical grand facade, from the glassed-in viewpoint high above the champagne bar, to the chilly vista over central London, from the jocular fire curtain to the charm of the people seated aside me, I cannot believe my luck.  I am in heaven and  at the end I cannot seem to find my bag of woes.....

Una furtiva lagrima
negli occhi suoi spuntò:
Quelle festose giovani
invidiar sembrò.
Che più cercando io vo?
Che più cercando io vo?
M'ama! Sì, m'ama, lo vedo. Lo vedo.
Un solo instante i palpiti
del suo bel cor sentir!
I miei sospir, confondere
per poco a' suoi sospir!
I palpiti, i palpiti sentir,
confondere i miei coi suoi sospir...
Cielo! Si può morir!
Di più non chiedo, non chiedo.
Ah, cielo! Si può! Si, può morir!
Di più non chiedo, non chiedo.
Si può morire! Si può morir d'amor.

On my way home, standing on the tube, a young man gestures to offer me his seat.  I am for a moment dumbfounded, never having faced this perplexing accusation of age before.  For a moment I had been thinking how lovely Aleksandra Kurzak had been, dancing lightly, singing, smiling, (not at all unlike my little wife in some ways), even thinking of days in Italy when coloratura was the norm....  And then this boy offers me a seat....

I smile in what I hope is a gracious senior declination of gratitude, and my heart bleeds a furtive tear.  I love the world.  I love the kindness of strangers.  I could die of love.....

Pass the elixir!  Keep it flowing!

No Photographs, Please.... We're Royal

Acute Mourning Sickness

I am in bed.  I have been so for more than a week.  The death of Larry Hagman has laid me low, and were it not for a serious lack of Bupa I would be in a private hospital.  A cute mourning sickie they call it.  Terminal Dynastic Syndrome.  I could not go on.  A world without JR.  How could that be?

I have been infected with a worldwide virus.  Somehow someone none of us knew has affected all with deep superficiality.  OK someone shot JR.  But someone shot JFK and then Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and then James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King and then two months later Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, and then Squeaky Fromme tried to shoot Gerald Ford but misfired, then John Hinckley Jr had a go at Ronald Reagan (but only punctured a lung).  I mean.  People shoot people (when they have guns).

I am distressed.  The word Dynasty sends me into tube stations or finds me buying sandbags on ebay.  This virus is dangerous, and it seems that millions may be infected without even recognising the symptoms.

Not that I ever watched soap.  My closest encounter with the genre was when, in 1969, I asked Warren Beatty how he was getting on in “Compact.”  Never been good with names.  I should have known it was Doug Beatty I wanted to meet.  Ever since then, perhaps in subliminal shame, I have eschewed all TV programmes that run in sequences.  There was something called “Beautiful” my wife used to watch when we lived in Italy, but I would leave the room at the opening chord of the theme.  Same with Corrie, East Enders, and so on…..

Then Larry Hagman suffered and degenerated into dust.  Ozymandias.  And yet I am brung down.  My feelings outweigh my understanding.  Black holes appear all over my body and I find myself in need of a House Doctor. 

So I am wasting away.  Made ill by the absence of a Dynasty I no more asked for than I elected to invade Britain with Willie the Conqu.  The subconscious is a wonderful thing.  As long as it doesn’t surface.  In my bed I play mental scrabble with myself to while away the hours and forget Dallas.  I have the letters SXAECBGURO in my hand and cannot think of a word or phrase (valid since 1917 – the Windsor Rules) that I can make with this.

Tish.  My nurse brings me a cold compress.  A tisane. Royal Jelly.  Anything to soothes my frets.

And then I hear that the Duchy of Cambridge is pregnant.  The third in line to the thrown is about to be bored.  A certain Dynasty is not to be Terminated. Yea!! I can rise from my frailty, cast off my mourning shrouds and breathe again the cool air of Windsor….. Hyperemesis gravidarum notwithstanding (and no memory of my stopping the family commute every day for weeks for my wife to gracefully vomit on the verge before work will affect this); I wish no one ill, but I want to dance down the street, shimmy on the trestle tables left out from the Jumbly party, and shout Halleluiah, Who Cares!  The Dynasty is on the road again!  Without any rancour we can all look forward to a secure future of Honours and privilege and everything that Grates about Britain….

Bring back Larry Hagman.  At least he was a star! 

The Larry Hagman Foundation: 

“Evil does Good” (That's what it says!)

http://www.larryhagman.com/

London 2 - Canary Wharf

Canary Wharf etc



Memorial Stone, The West India Dock, London



As Dr Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life...."  Although it is easy to tire of what you know, and parts of London may breed a familiarity which palls after a while, the fascination of the city is boundless.

I find myself with a little time to spare in London's dockland.  Old enough to remember the dock strikes, but only half aware of the way that shipping and consequently docking has changed, it is a revelation to visit the area, to see the extraordinary contrast between the old and the new.

The Museum of London Dockland is housed in Wharehouse No 1 of the West India Dock, one of only two that survive from their construction in the early 1800s.  The complex was designed to take care of the increasing commerce in sugar, coffee and rum, products of the developing slave trade.

The different floors of the building (there are four) were made to store different goods - with heavy hogsheads of sugar on the lower levels and coffee, cocoa and cotton at the top.  The roof was burnt in 1901, but these wharehouses continued to be used until the docks closed in the 1980s (the others were destroyed by bombing in 1940).  After some years of dereliction, this one was brought back to life as a museum reflecting East End life, telling the story of slavery, and following the history of London and the Thames throughout the centuries. 

Outside, by the statue of Robert Milligan, Deputy Chairman of the West India Dock Company when the foundation stone was laid in 1800, the waters of the dock still support sundry vessels, but the real business hereabouts takes place in offices, high in the masculine towers of Canary Wharf, rather than on the quays and in the basins.  Token cranes stand as memorials to the stevedores who thronged here, but they are lost in the shadows of the glass harbours of ebusinesses. 

As I contemplate the passage of time, I am approached by a man and his wife.  "Do you know how to get to Bow?" he asks.  "We wanted to walk there...."  I have to plead unfamiliarity with the geography of the area, and he explains that he grew up nearby, "When the Police Station was just a house.....  It's all changed now....."

It certainly has, though the museum does a good job of preserving something of bygone times; it is not for us now to complain about "progress."

On Cabot Square (which commemorates the Italian adventurer who sailed from Bristol) I enter the Credit Suisse offices and my business takes me to the seventh floor, with a view over the dock, and beyond to Stratford East. The meeting I attend is the Annual General Meeting of the Royal National Children's Foundation, and a large cheque passes from Credit Suisse to HRH the Princess Royal, Patron of the Foundation.  A number of young people tell of how they have been given a chance in life, through boarding education funded by the charity, to rise above their difficult backgrounds. 

Outside, heading home in the gathering dusk, treading the hard ground of East London, but surrounded by  a staggering forest of glittering buildings aspiring to the heavens, it strikes me how this image of power and fortune rising from the ruins of the old East End is a symbol of how the material world could benefit others so much more than perhaps it does.

As yet, however, although the world has moved on from the slave trade that brought wealth to the merchants of the West India Dock, there is much more to be done to reduce the gap between the peaks and the troughs of our society.  I stare up at the phallic rise of Canary Wharf. 

Dwarfed.

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Docklands/

http://www.rncf.org.uk/

An Old Man's Winter Night

In the warmth of a public house

The Sun Inn - the cold grate

It is December, and the frosts have begun. I warm myself in the pub by a real fire, grateful for the shelter and the simple fact that while I pay my money for a pint of English ale, I do not pay an entry fee nor have to put money in the slot for the logs or coal that glow behind me.

I have no express purpose in sheltering here; no assignation, no absolute need, no agenda.  But it is warm.  And I will confess, on the rack if you must, that I enjoy a small amount of beer.....

Terry comes in.  Terry has been retired some years.  He is fuming:  he has just been informed that his winter fuel allowance has been cut in half, on the information that someone else was living in his house in September, roughly at the time he came back from his annual holiday.  No one else lives at his house.  For years he has had his allowance, and for years he has lived alone.  The conversation circles round the outrage, the possible explanations, the way to resolve the problem, the inhumanity of the department of work and pensions.....  How this misinformation has filtered through is a mystery, but someone is playing Kafka in Harpenden....

And as I sit by the bickering fire, spitting and niggling in the grate (the fire that is), this (not the beer, I should say, but the fire, and the concept of the allowance) brings to mind Robert Frost's poem An Old Man's Winter Night, which I studied, quite anachronistically, as a boy.

An Old Man's Winter Night

Robert Frost

  

All out of doors looked darkly in at him

Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,

That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.

What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze

Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.

What kept him from remembering what it was

That brought him to that creaking room was age.

He stood with barrels round him - at a loss.

And having scared the cellar under him

In clomping there, he scared it once again

In clomping off; - and scared the outer night,

Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar

Of trees and crack of branches, common things,

But nothing so like beating on a box.

A light he was to no one but himself

Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,

A quiet light, and then not even that.

He consigned to the moon, such as she was,

So late-arising, to the broken moon

As better than the sun in any case

For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,

His icicles along the wall to keep;

And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt

Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,

And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.

One aged man - one man - can't keep a house,

A farm, a countryside, or if he can,

It's thus he does it of a winter night.

My mother, some two months off 90, some two years widowed, lives alone.  That phrase, "At a loss," is chilling.  All of us reach out to oblivion, in the end, and, like wallflowers and elephants, we may fade away.  Frost's poem brilliantly and beautifully captures that,

What kept him [sic] from remembering what it was

That brought him [sic] to that creaking room was age.

This is not gender specific.  It is the truth of winter.  And winter is both actual and metaphorical.

We will all need our winter fuel allowances.  And those allowances, whether pecuniary or otherwise, should never be rationed.



http://www.ageuk.org.uk/