The River Test

The Test at Wherwell

Recently, I was fortunate enough to be invited for a day's fishing on a beautiful stretch of the river at Awbridge by old friends, and as I don't actually fish, spent an hour after lunch reading a marvellous book, 'A Summer On The Test' by John Waller Hills, published in 1946. In it he tells the history of fishing on the Test and extolls its virtues as well as institutions such as the Houghton Club, which did - and still does - much to keep the river so well. He writes beautifully of course, and his prose has the marvellous limpidity of the river itself .

Chalk streams are regarded by their admirers with an affection which is unreasoning as true love ever should be, and of all such streams, the Test commands their deepest devotion. To appreciate its full individuality you have to go to the middle or lower reaches. The higher stretches are delicately beautiful, but you must get down about to Wherwell before the special qualities of the Test are apparent. There are its broad valley, the half cliffs, the swing and rush and depth of the river, and its strong clear volume. Most people think that Hampshire streams consist either of thin shallows, spread wide between flat meadows, or else still almost steamless depths, and it is a surprise to find the Test is strong, quick and deep. And, in spite of all the damage man has done and is is doing, it still keeps its character. Perhaps, to those who can look back so many years as I can, it has deteriorated. On the whole the hatch of fly is less plentiful, for you do not so often see those great volumes which were common thirty years ago. But I am satisfied that small fly is increasing and mayfly is quite as thick as any angler could want. In the upper reaches, too, trout are less abundant. Lastly, I am convinced, though the conviction rests on fallible personal observation, that the water is not as clear as it was. In order to appreciate the change, you have only to look at one of its pure tributaries, such as the Bourne, and you can then realise what the old Test was like. It was not so much that the water was stainless,: many streams are that, such, for instance, as the Dartmoor brooks: but it was as if it possessed a crystalline quality of its own, different from all other water. The colour of weeds and stones and gravel, seen through its medium, was not only not dimmed but acquired an added brilliancy and radiancy. This you do not see now, and in fact, even the upper Test is slightly tinged with colour. But still, in spite of the wear and tear of time, in spite of man and his many iniquities, the essential Test remain to us. She is still the greatest trout river in the world,: and it is to be hoped that this present generation will hand her on unspoilt to their successors. 

'A Summer On The Test' - John Waller Hills, 1946

The Test at Wherwell

See also The Joy of Fly Fishing

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De Profundis - Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

De Profundis is a wonderfully wise, profound and moving letter written by Oscar Wilde from Reading Jail, and is here read in the same jail by Stephen Rae for the BBC.

An excerpt:

'Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, - He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.'

They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.

I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me; and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.

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Old Swan House Garden in September

The garden in early autumn

The grasses and euphorbia seen through verbena

The brighter colours of autumn

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Lines of Thought – Isabel Seligman

Lines of Thought – Isabel Seligman


Isabel Seligman has written a marvellous book on drawing for the British Museum that I started reading while fishing with her parents. It's available at an exhibition of drawings from the British Museum in Poole but will be published at the end of September, when I'll be able to complete my reading.  

'Drawing is the clarification of thought.' – Henri Matisse

'I know of no art that calls for the use of more intelligence than that of drawing. Whether it be a question of conjuring from the whole complex of what is seen, the one pencil stroke that is right, of summarizing a structure, of not letting one’s hand wander, of deciphering and mentally formulating before putting down; or whether the moment be dominated by creation, the controlling idea becoming richer and clearer by what it becomes on the paper and under one’s eyes; every mental faculty finds its function in the task'.  – Paul Valery

'Be bold, have a go and risk your paper' - Samuel Van Hoogsgraten

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Art Gallery of New South Wales

Donald Friend

I have been lucky enough to visit the Art Gallery of New South Wales several times, most notably for the Freida Kahlo exhibition in 2016. I have always been interested in Australian painters since coming across a Sydney Nolan at Mel Watson's house in 1971 and a Donald Friend at Timmie Watson's house in Paddington at the same time (he was also a friend of hers). We even bought a strong Brett Whitely print 'Straight Head of Franny' for Harvestgate and that still hangs in Mosman.

The gallery has interesting examples of Delacroix, Bacon, Lucien Freud and Picasso, as well as the best of the local artists.

Click here for more photos from the gallery.    

The Rat Pack

Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Peter Lawford who - with Sammy Davis Jnr and Joey Bishop - comprised The Rat Pack

This photo comes from a website for 'cool' iconic images - the kind that has lots of Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper shots - but is possibly one of the images that most defines a whole era of 'cool'.  It's black and white of course, and the men are beautifully dressed and look totally at ease, just swinging along towards the next party. Notable is the absence of Sammy Davis Jnr - but in that era, although he joined them on stage, he wasn't able to socialise with them in public. Joey Bishop was also a member and wrote much of their on-stage material.

There is an excellent film about the Rat Pack on YouTube here 

See Herry's Archives for some details of Peter Lawford's link to the family

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Post EU Referendum Blues

I avoided writing anything about the EU Referendum here as I, along with the majority of voters, hardly credited the possibility of Leave winning, and hoped that after it was over we could get back to managing significantly better (though still not out of the 2008 recession) than the rest of the EU and continuing to attract the foreign investment which has created many of the better jobs in recent years on the basis of our access to the whole of the EU market and our relatively light regulations.

That Leave won at all was a catastrophe, which has simultaneously unleashed some of the most unpleasant bigotry and racism that has been seen in this country in years and thrown us collectively into a state of utter confusion. As the Irishman, when asked how to get to a certain destination, put it, "Well, I would't start from here'. That Leave won by the slim margin of 4% points to the disgraceful negligence of the government in not setting a constitution-altering referendum margin at the normal 60 - 66%. And that on top of the sheer idiocy of putting the country's future into the hands of a population that had been fed a diet of anti-EU propaganda and misinformation by the majority of high-circulation newspapers for years.

The result has caused us to look at friends with mixture of bafflement and fury equivalent to discovering that they are Roundheads when you thought that they were Cavaliers, and to cause hostility even in families, particularly between the young and the old. And the problem cannot just be wished away, as it is with us constantly. I was talking yesterday to a young German gardener who fortunately had not experienced any of the hostility reported by many in some parts of the country, but who seemed unaware that she was actually now a pawn in the Brexit negotiations and could in theory be asked to leave her adopted country - as could the millions of Britons who now reside in EU countries overseas - and seem unaware that they too are 'immigrants' to those countries and similarly pawns in this appalling situation.

I have of course written to the Prime Minister as well as my MP, but beyond that, there is little anyone can do except watch in horror as the dire consequences unfold and the path forward remains almost totally unmapped.

I could write more, but have said enough. However, today I read a piece in the FT that puts the situation very well indeed and deserves to be repeated.

"It is utterly disgraceful, in a modern democracy, that we are left in a situation where a majority of Remain voters (for which read trade experts, economists, negotiators and civil servants, who are, for obvious reasons, more likely to be Remainers) are left to work out the detail of providing the evidence, strategy and implementation of a post-Brexit reality that exists solely in the heads of Leavers and has utterly no substance in reality.
There is no evidence, on paper, in research, economics, statistics or even common sense, to support anything less than a sub-optimal post-EU reality for Britian, regardless of which 'plan' it chooses. Moreover any misconception that any country could have any say, or ability to shape its place as a global power outside of bloc alliances shows a fundamental lack of any appreciation of the mechanics of the UK's role in the world, its geopolitics, strategy, security and prosperity.

It beggars belief any modern country can find itself in a position where a mass delusion becomes an accepted norm, which the entire substance and infrastructure of its state subordinates itself to a phenomenal act of self-mutilation, where any effort to debate or apply the usual legal, parliamentary democratic and liberal values, architecture, rights principle and function of a representative democracy with freedom of speech is met with - and let's not beat about the bush - a patently moronic mantra of 'Brexit is happening, so accept it', and which assumes that Parliament and the normal democratic process should have no say in the future regulation, implementation and structure of the Post-Brexit plan, because any plan would be so utterly sub-optimal that it could never, under any circumstances, make it past the common sense gatekeepers of Parliament or due process.

This is not just the EU we are leaving. We are leaving the modern world and entering a terrifying alternative reality of post-rationalism, the undermining of the UK's democratic architecture and potential fracturing of the very substance of the British state."

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Old Swan House Garden in August 2016

The garden is now pretty mature, having first been planted in the autumn of 2013 and the spring of 2014. The yew hedge is about four feet tall - and over five in places - and will be topped at about five feet as a screen for the drive. I made a plant list for the garden openings this year and surprised myself when I found that it ran to seven pages. Some of the plants are named (and some forgotten) in this video of a walk around the garden (be warned, it takes over 30 minutes!)

Looking down the garden from under the hazel with the grasses 'calling you' (Gillian Pugh)

The grasses in August

Peroskia and pheasant grass seen through verbena

Stachys, lavender and crocosmia

The summerhouse

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Favourite Places - Stockbridge

The view over Stockbridge and the Test Valley towards Stockbridge Down on a summer evening

Favourite Gardens - Heale House

I first visited the gardens of Heale House near Salisbury over 25 years ago and remember them - and the glorious C16th house - as particularly lovely. A second visit this week confirmed that memory. Several noteable features such as the superbly trained apple trees are comparatively recent plantings (1976) but now look satisfactorily ancient, and the line of silver birch below the garden on the south side of the house have been underplanted in the manner of Highgrove. The Japanese planting along the streams beside the tea house is charming and full of light and shadow and it all combines to create a marvellous serene and secluded garden.

There is also an exceptional nursery (as well as a good tearoom) where one finds delightful and unusual plants.

Click here for more photos of the garden.


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