The Best Hotel in the World?

Cliveden is sometimes described as the best hotel in the world. I don't know enough places which might fall into that category to judge, but it's certainly the finest I've ever visited. The glorious Italianate facade which greets you at the end of the magnificent drive is spectacular, but intimate - and indeed Cliveden still feels like a large country house rather than an hotel. An additional wing overlooking the famous swimming pool adds a number of more standard-sized rooms, but if you stay, take one of the rooms in the main house with their beautiful views across the front garden down towards the Thames.

You enter through the main hall - a marvellous panelled room dominated by a huge fireplace and hung with tapestries - and the original portrait of Nancy Astor. It's a perfect place for tea - or drinks before dinner.


You can have dinner in the Terrace dining room overlooking the garden, and it’s now done up like a pudding in an overrich terracotta but still lacks intimacy. Moreover, the chef still seems to think that the type of nouvelle cuisine where you need a golf trolley to find your way to disparate scraps of food on a vast plate is 'le mode’.. The 'haute cuisine' restaurant Waldo's in the cellars is more interesting and there are some fascinating portraits and photographs in the corridors - including a fine one of Christine Keeler. Breakfast can also be taken communally at a huge table in a magnificent room at the end of the house, just as it was when a private home - but now, only if you book for a large party.

The pool area behind a lovely old wall has been converted in to a full spa with a heated indoor pool, but it's still very easy to imagine the the beginnings of the famous Profumo / Keeler scandal there (for those too young to know about such things, there's a brief summary here)

Despite the grandeur of the house and its associations, it's marvellously relaxed and one quickly settles in to the lifestyle. Surrounded by a large park and formal gardens which are beautifully looked after by the National Trust, there is much to see before returning to the comfort of a chair by the fire in the library to contemplate starting some scandals of your own.

Favourite Comedy

I've always loved hand puppets since the days of Peter Brough, Shani Lewis, Rod Hull and the like- and the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre is wonderful!

The Poison of Bonuses

I worked in the financial services sector of the City for nearly 40 years, and from the 1980s onwards was increasingly astonished at the offering of US-style bonuses for doing an honest day's work. Such bonuses serve to skew individuals' performance towards a particular easily identified course of action - usually involving more risk - but more importantly are likely to erode people's personal values. Our work is performed as our duty to ourselves, our families and our colleagues and we should discharge it to the best of our ability at all times. We should not need the carrot of more money to do a difficult job; we do it because it is our job. Sometimes one just happens to be in the hot seat at the relevant time; if we weren't any good, we wouldn't be there. The chap at Barclays said to be getting additional compensation for finding outside capital is also just doing his job, and should need no more of shareholders' funds than his normal pay for doing it. To offer people large bonuses is to insult peoples' characters.

The Milky Way

Favourite Writings - The Lycian Shore

Photo by Kei Lawford. Click to enlarge

As I came down from the causeway through the theatre, a black snake like a shy god slid into the laurel thicket; I stepped over the stones rattled by earthquakes on their foundations, and climbed from terrace to terrace of corn where peasants built shallow walls round the pockets of ancient houses. The full ears, ready for harvest, beat their slight weight against my passing hand, as if they to would spend their weak resistance for the headland's warm and living peace. So remote, so undisturbed was the great hollow, that its own particular divinity seemed to fill it - complete in being as a cup is filled to the brim. There was no judgement here but only the consequence of actions; the good corn filled itself out in deeper places and the bad dwindled among stones, and all things were a part of each other in a soil that someone's building two thousand or more years ago had flattened or spoiled. A fair-haired woman, still beautiful, with green eyes, was reaping. I asked if I might photograph, and she called her husband, who came climbing up and stood beside her, and glanced at her and smiled when I said that she was like the English to look at: they were both pleased by her fairness, and there was a happy friendliness between them. He had the oval face of the Mediterranean, and she the straight northern brows: and the history of the world had washed over Cnidus to produce them both, from the days when their ancestors, in the oldest city of the peninsular, joined in building the Hellenium in Egypt, or sent the first caryatid to Delphi.

Freya Stark-- The Lycian Shore
(I make no excuse for resuing one of my favourite writings, as no one reads back to when this was first posted, least of all me)

The National Gardens Scheme

I don't know if The National Gardens Scheme is replicated in other coutries, but I do know that nothing epitomises the spirit of the British Isles so well.

The piece below by Paul Johnson in the Spectator says most of what there is to say about gardening in England, though he properly concentrates on the relatively modest gardens that are on show for only a day or two while only alluding to the grander ones - which at the end of the day are equally the expression of one mind's love of nature, but are even more extraordinary in their compass - like the great garden at Athelhampton which we visited last week.

One of the best ways to appreciate gardens is through the eyes of a good photographer - and my personal favourite is Nigel Birkett, who kindly puts his photos on Flick for all to see.

'A gardener must be a philosopher but never an atheist'
There is no more English activity than gardening, and it has been so for over a thousand years. Indeed, there were Anglo-Saxon gardens before: traces remain. Gardens grew under castle walls, and were tended by the wives of men who wore chain mail. They took the place of water lilies when the moats were peaceably drained. The first great English essay, written by Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, is ‘Of Gardens’. I have just reread it. It is long, elegant but detailed and full of ripe knowledge, about nature and our intimate relationship with her.

Bacon is particularly good on the scents and smells of a garden which, stirred by faint breezes, he compares, in its coming and going, to the warbling of music. Thus he gives advice on planting accordingly, to create varying odours all the year round. He distinguishes between passive smells, and those you can arouse. Thus: ‘Those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three: that is, burnet, wild-thyme and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.’ Of course, you say, flowers had much stronger scents in that golden age. Not necessarily so: Bacon complains that some flowers which ought to smell gloriously do not, and instances bays, rosemary and sweet marjoram; and he complains that some flowers, once in bloom, expend their scent quickly: ‘Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smell, so that you may walk by a whole row of them, and find nothing of their sweetness; yea, though it be in a morning’s dew.’ The flower, he says, that ‘yields the sweetest smell in the air, is the violet, especially the white double violet’. As true today as when he wrote.

I was thinking of Bacon the other weekend when I went to an open garden day at one of our finest Somerset villages, Stogumber. There were 15 gardens on display, all within easy walking distance so each could be visited without undue fatigue. It is a noble place, crowded with old houses, kept beautifully painted, and with a pleasing mediaeval church, whose collection of silver vessels was likewise on show. Walking its sleepy lanes, and popping in every few paces to inspect a garden behind its proud cottage, was a rare delight. One sometimes thinks that Old England is gone for good, and looking around parts of London nowadays with its atmosphere of a degraded Levantine bazaar crowded with embittered people, it is hard to deny the malign change. But in West Somerset, on such an occasion, Old England is very much alive: gentle, personal, courteous, smiling, welcoming, anxious to show you what has been created, and explain it.

These small gardens on show at their best time of year are more fun and interesting than the grander affairs. To begin with, each is totally individual, made by one devoted person, or a couple. Then, the creators are there, on the spot, to answer your questions and tell of the experiments, surprises, disappointments and glories of their craft. What is so remarkable is the ingenuity with which each square foot of garden is put to use, to create intensity, variety and contrasts, an air of spaciousness and generosity in an acre or less. I saw nothing repetitive, no horticultural clichés, but on the contrary, originality and imagination, especially in the juxtaposition of colour, shape, size and texture of leaf, as though the gardener was a painter, composing carefully not only for the telling detail but the general effect. And they are quick to tell you of the happy accident, the surprise emergence in due season of an unusual bloom, unexpected but refreshing, and welcome. ‘That was a surprise,’ they say. ‘But then you never know exactly what is going to come up, or what precisely is happening in the winter under the soil.’ Gardening is like raising children, in a way: full of unexpected changes, even shocks; requiring a great deal of patience and love, and willingness to go with nature instead of trying to bend it to your will.

Gardens, especially small ones tended by one person, reflect character, and express aesthetic temperament, even a philosophy of life. I was particularly taken by one delicately composed of pale shades, which put me in mind of Milton’s Lycidas:

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.

By contrast, there was the blazing border based upon what Bacon calls the ‘French marigold’, but composed of many other fierce orange and yellow blooms, and a few furnace-reds. It sounds a horror but was actually, in its own bold way, a masterpiece of taste and vivacity, as though van Gogh, wisely advised by Fantin-Latour, had designed it in an inspired moment. But as the lady who created it said: ‘Oh, a lot of it was sheer luck, you know. Never happen again, most likely. But then, you don’t want too many repeats in gardening do you? I’m all for changing each year.’

I admired, too, the lady who had created a neat, spruce, serpentine path leading into the heart of her garden, with variegated mosses and plants of many shades of green, punctuating the granite squares — a miniature work of grand art, worthy of Vermeer. Gardens display tidy minds and tempestuous ones, the energies of the adventurous spirit and the cosy conservation of the virtuous one. Odd that Freud took no interest in the gardener’s mind; but then he was a city Herr, all parterres and privets. As well as all kinds of primitive instincts and irrational skills, there is a strong intellectual and spiritual element in raising plants, which both reflects personality and helps to shape it. All gardeners are economists, but of various kinds: expansionists and gradualists, exuberant or cautious. As Keynes said, gardeners can be bulls and bears, too. There is the kind, for instance, who can make perfectionist use of the daisy, recognising the truth of Chaucer’s point in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women:

That wel by reson men it calle may
The ‘dayesye’ or elles the ‘ye of day’,
The emperice and flour of floures alle.

There is also the kind that makes superb use of contrasting light and dark leaves in shrubs, and multiple shades of green, signs of a subtle, highly observant temperament — what you might call a Dorothy Wordsworth mind.

The Old Testament is full of references to flowers, especially their fragility, their evanescence. Samuel warns: ‘All the increase of thy house shall die in the flower of their age,’ and the Voice in Isaiah says: ‘All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.’ Gardeners know this. They perceive that dying is inherent in nature, and so is rebirth and renewal. Gardeners come close to the spirit of life and its creator. They are not wild enthusiasts, but gentle philosophers, and we may be sure that no great gardener is an atheist.'

Paul Johnson - The Spectator

Great Houses

Corfe Castle, Dorset (National Trust) Click here for rather too many photos of the castle

One of the beauties of our countryside are the many great houses which survive, often in glorious grounds, by allowing people to visit them. The Historic Houses Association lists 1500 such places and The National Trust a further 300.

Athelhampton, Dorset (Historic Houses Association) Click here for some photos of Athelhampton and its garden taken on a rainy day in July
Added to which the late Sir John Smith's Landmark Trust now lets out over 180 restored old buildings for short periods so that you can experience what it's like to actually live in such places.

The East Banqueting House, Chipping Campden (The Landmark Trust)
Many of the larger houses have cafes which, like the pubs, have undergone a huge improvement in quality and can give you a decent lunch or tea.

Apart from their beauty, they are important for the history that surrounds each of them. Click on the names of these houses for a brief summary - except the site of the East Banqueting House which, like Corfe Castle, fell in the Civil War. The Landmark Trust site records that 'In 1613, the newly enriched Sir Baptist Hicks began work on a house in Chipping Campden. It was a noble house in the latest fashion, with elaborate gardens. Thirty-two years later it was destroyed, wantonly, by the Royalists, as they withdraw from the town. Only a shell was left, now shrunk to a single fragment, but other buildings escaped the fire and are still there, together with the raised walks of the garden'.

Click on each photo for a better view

Favourite Views

Some of my favourite views are closer to home. This is of Koko waiting for her breakfast

New York Waterfalls

Photo by Vincent Laforet for the New York Times
What a great idea! Full marks to Bloomberg for giving Olafur Eliasson his head!

Favourite Books

I'm not that keen on Camus, still less on Sartre, but this is a marvellous piece of biography / literary criticism and makes me want to read Camus again with fresh eyes - particularly 'The Rebel' - the book in which he argued for a moderate humanistic stance against Sartre's 'absolutist' view of Marxism

Notebooks, 1951-1959 By Albert Camus (reviewed by Richard Eder in the IHT)

Albert Camus was one of the two pillars of postwar French literature. The other was Jean-Paul Sartre, his comrade in letters if not quite in arms (during the Resistance, Camus dangerously put out a clandestine newspaper, while Sartre stayed safely studying and writing). Then in the early 1950s, they bitterly split.

Camus's pillar stood in Paris, but in a sense it belonged elsewhere: perhaps among the Corinthian columns in North Africa's Hellenistic ruins. He was a French Algerian, of course, but the point isn't his provenance but his temperament. He was Mediterranean, a creature of sun and water, fierceness and the senses.

In Paris, with its cool symmetries, he was, to adapt a French saying, uncomfortable in his skin - the constricting ideological precision that Sartre and his fellow intellectuals fitted on him. They treated him as a marvel, and then when he rebelled against their leftist rigor, they condemned him.

This odd unsuitability, both of emotions and the mind, comes to life in the third and last volume of Camus's notebooks, appearing in an English translation (by Ryan Bloom) 19 years after they came out in French.

The split took place when Camus took issue with the absolutism of revolutions. Seeking to realize their ideals, he argued, they end up using violence and tyranny. It was an attack on Soviet Communism at a time when Sartre and his followers were becoming its increasingly rigid supporters.

They insisted that overt repression, however repellent, was the only way to fight the insidious structural tyranny of colonialist capitalism. One must choose, painfully. No we mustn't, Camus rejoined: neither be killers nor victims.

In his notebooks Camus excoriates "the newly achieved revolutionary spirit, nouveau riche, and Pharisees of justice." He names Sartre and his followers, "who seem to make the taste for servitude a sort of ingredient of virtue."

He mocks their conformism: cowardly, besides, he implies, citing the story of a child who announced her plan to join "the cruelest party." Because: "If my party is in power, I'll have nothing to fear, and if it is the other, I'll suffer less since the party which will persecute me will be the less cruel one."

Camus writes more generally: "Excess in love, indeed the only desirable, belongs to saints. Societies, they exude excess only in hatred. This is why one must preach to them an intransigent moderation."

A convenient refusal to take sides, as Sartre and his circle insisted? There was nothing convenient in Camus. He was closer to Milovan Djilas, once a hard-line Communist, then jailed by Tito, and in the end proclaiming his battle-won political credo: "the unperfect society."

The most interesting aspect of the "Notebooks" is not politics but its personal substratum. Beneath Camus's ideological quarrels is a deeper unhappiness with the critical bent of the Paris intelligentsia.

"Curious milieu," he writes of La Nouvelle Revue Française, "whose function it is to create writers, and where, however, they lose the joy of writing and creating."

It is, in part, the Southerner's discomfort with the North, with the centralization dating back to the Capet dynasties that drew France's energies up to Paris. On a trip to Italy, Camus writes: "Already the Italians on the train, and soon those of the hotel as well, have warmed my heart. People whom I have always liked and who make me feel my exile in the French people's perpetual bad mood."

He writes of his mix of happiness and depression after winning the Nobel Prize - "frightened by what happens to me, what I have not asked for" - and the angry attacks it provoked from the Paris left. He writes of his wife's depression and his lovers (many). "I don't seduce, I surrender." Later he varies this to fit Don Juan, who, not surprisingly, fascinates him: "I don't seduce, I adapt."

He travels to his birthplace. "Honeysuckle - for me, its scent is tied to Algiers. It floated in the streets that led toward the high gardens where the girls awaited us. Vines, youth." It was a memory that fought against politics. Camus could not put aside the reality of the French settlers. The vicious war between French forces and the National Liberation Front - the Algerian nationalists - was his own civil war.