Early Autumn Morning

The water meadows beside the Test at Whitchurch on a spectacular October morning. Click here for some more photos

Favourite Poetry - October

Dew and sun beside the Test

The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one , – 
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds’ the squirrels scold.
The rich scene has grown fresh again and new
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness,—who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

 Edward Thomas

Favourite Poetry - Hiawatha

I had forgotten how much I used to like Longfellow's Hiawatha (full text behind the link)

 Downward through the evening twilight,
 In the days that are forgotten,
 In the unremembered ages,
 From the full moon fell Nokomis,
 Fell the beautiful Nokomis,
 She a wife, but not a mother.

 By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
 By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
 Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
 Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
 Dark behind it rose the forest...

Favourite Places - the Boat House

The boat house, somewhere in deepest Sussex

Favourite Places - Mudeford

Mudeford is a charming old fishing village at the narrow entrance to Christchurch Harbour distinguished by a having its main beach (the Spit) separated by the harbour channel and reachable only by ferry. Over the years a superb collection of colourful beach houses have been constructed on the Spit and are now highly sought after. From them one can have a clear view of the Needles at the western end of the Isle of Wight. Click here for some more photos

Lots Road Power Station

Lots Road Power Station, Chelsea, which once supplied the electricity for the Underground, seen across a muddy Thames from the Battersea side. Click the photo for a larger view

Favourite Places - Lainston House

Lainston is a classic late C17th country house outside Winchester, for many years the home of the Craig-Harvey family. Now an hotel, it retains all the old house's beautiful features but one can now eat outside on the tented terrace and enjoy the superb view of the lime avenue and parkland below. Click here for some more photos

Favourite Places - A Hampshire Garden

The summerhouse

I am not going to reveal where this enchanting place is as it's of course a private house - except that it lies in my beloved county of Hampshire. But you can click below for some more photos and dream of the peace and beauty that lies among these fields. Favourite Places - A Hampshire Garden

Illustration by William Nicholson

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

THE Velveteen Rabbit

OR
HOW TOYS BECOME REAL

by Margery Williams

This has strong echoes of my favourite piece from Le Petit Prince - the Story of the Fox

The Joy of Cricket

Lords

Ok, this one's going to be a tough sell. Cricket is probably the least known and understood of the major games played internationally. And those who play it are only countries with long ties to Britain such as India and Australia (though not the US or Canada) and as with football and rugby, it is a game which owes its development and spread to being part of the unvarying curriculum of the the British public schools.

Lords

I have just been lucky enough to be asked by a member of the MCC to visit Lords for the third day of the Test Match between England and India. It was an enthralling spectacle for one who understands the game; a crashing bore for anyone that doesn't. For one, each game is played over five days and a single innings by one side can last two or three days. And a single innings by one batsman can also last as long, though it rarely does.

Hurstbourne Priors Cricket Ground, Hampshire

By chance, I grew up a few miles away from the ground where cricket was supposed to have first been played in about 1750 - Broadhapenny Down in Hampshire, beside which is a pub, The Bat and Ball, dedicated to the game. And when young my brother and I played endless games of cricket on the lawn at home, with straw bales behind the wicket to stop the ball.

Its appeal has been endlessly evoked in literature; from the classic description of a village cricket match in 'England Their England' to the dry prose of the almanack of cricket, Wisden. But this short piece from an Australian summarises its appeal concisely:

'Cricket invokes passion among the one billion people who play it. And Test cricket is the most passionate of all, with national pride bubbling close to the surface of the match.

International relations can be soured by controversy; in the 1930's Bodyline Test, the English captain's tactic to play the man led directly to serious calls for Australia's secession from the Commonwealth. Prime ministers and the king intervened.

The passion grows from the spirit of the game, its beauty, complexity and subtlety. One has to plan, to have a sense of strategy and exercise skill. It is not about might, but about psychological confrontation and domination.'


See also John Updike on Baseball

Driving Movie

Driving down Sheep Pond Lane from Corhampton Down towards Droxford and across the A32 at Merington's Garage. Then on over the Meon towards Soberton. Music by The Poges


View Driving Movie - Droxford in a larger map

Favourite Poetry - Poesie mondane, Bestemmia 619

                                                             Assisi, originally uploaded by HerryLawford.

I am a force of the past.

Tradition is my only love.
I come from the ruins, and churches,
and altarpieces, the abandoned
villages on the Appennines or on the Prealps,
where brothers have lived.
Like a madman I wander on the Tuscolana,
On the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I observe the twilights, and the mornings
over Rome, and Ciociaria, and the world,
as the first acts of the After-History,
which I partake of, by chronological privilege,
from the extreme border of some
buried age.

"Poesie mondane, Bestemmia 619” - Pier Paolo Pasolini

India the Cradle of Language, Astronomy and Science

Whitefield, Bangalore. Click for large

India was preeminent at unveiling knowledge in the ancient world. The Sanskrit language, which is the mother of all languages, is the oldest, most systematic language in the world. Its numerous verb roots and affixes produce words that give precise expression to diverse ideas - from mythology and philosophy to science and mathematics, from poetry and prose to astronomy and anatomy.

Sanskrit's vast array of words gives it an incredible wealth of expression. There are 65 words for 'earth' and 70 for 'water' alone. By applying various suffixes, the word for 'water' can be multiplied into 280 words to describe specific types of rain.

'The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure - more perfect than Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either'.  Sir William Jones, British Orientalist (1746-1794)

The world's first university existed at Takshashila, in the north-west of ancient India, as early as 700 BC. The minmum entrance age was 16 and there were 10,500 students - not only Indians, but people from Arabia, China, Babylonia, Greece and Syria came to study. 68 streams of study were offered, including Vedic literature, logic, grammar, philosophy, medicine, surgery, archery, politics, military strategy, astronomy, astrology, accounting, commerce, documentation, music and dance.

In mathematics, India has always been pre-eminent, inventing the both zero and the decimal system. The earliest records of the zero in writing include an inscription on the Sankheda Copper Plate found in Gujarat dated 585-586 BC. The concept of 'zero' can also be found in Sanskrit texts of the 4th Century BC and is clearly explained in Pingala's Chandah Sutra of the 2nd Century BC. The Brahama-Phuta-Siddhanta of Brahamagupta (7th Century) also contains a lucid explanation of the zero. From here is is said to have been rendered into Arabic books around 770 AD which were then carried into Europe in the 8th Century.

'It was India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols (the Decimal System)....a profound and important idea which escaped the genius of Appolonius and Archimedes, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.' Pierre-Simon Laplace, French mathematician (1749-1827)

The highest prefix used for raising 10 to a power in today's mathematics is 'D' for 1030. As early as 100 BC, Indian mathematicians had specific names for numbers up to 1053. In the Anuyogdwara Sutra, written in 100 BC, one numeral is raised to 10140.


The word 'geometry' seems to have emerged from the Sanskrit word 'gyaamiti' meaning to measure the earth. And the word 'trigonometry' is similar to 'trikonamiti' meaning measuring triangular forms. Euclid is credited with the invention of geometry isn 300 BC but the concept of geometry emerged in India in 1000 BC from the practice of making fire altars in triangular and rectangular shapes.  The Surya Siddhantha treatise of the 4th Century describes detailed applications of trigonometry which were not introduced into Europe until the 16th Century.

The value of Pi was known in India by the 6th Century BC. It is given in the Sanskrit text Baudhayana Shulba Sutra as being approximately equal to 3. Aryanhatta in 499 BC calculated its value as 3.1416.  In 825 AD the Arabian mathematician Mohammed Ibna Musa affirmed: 'This value has been given by the Hindus'.

The Baudhayana Shulba Sutra shows that Pythagoras's famous theorem was in fact formulated by Baudhayana in the 6th century. He states: 'The area produced by the diagonal of a rectangle is equal to the area produced by it on two sides.'

1000 years before Copernicus published his theory of the revolution of the earth in 1543, Aryabhatta stated that the earth revolved around the sun. 'Just as a person traveling on a boat feels that the trees in the bank are moving, people on the earth feel that the sun is moving.' In his treatise Aryabhatteeyam, he states that the earth is round, it rotates on its axis, orbits the sun and is suspended in space. He further explains that lunar and solar eclipses occur by the interplay of the sun, moon and Earth.  

1200 years before Newton, the law of gravity was known to the Indian astronomer Bhaskaracharya. In his Surya Siddhanta he notes: 'Objects fall on Earth due to a force of attraction by the Earth. Therefore the Earth, planets, constellations, moon and sun are held in orbit due to this attraction'.

In Surya Siddhanta, Bhaskaracharya calculates the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun to nine decimal places. The difference between this measurement and a modern measurement is only 0.0002%


Indian astronomers had words for calculations of time as small as 34,000th of a second and as large as 4.32 billion years.

Shushruta, known as the Father of Surgery, practiced his skill as early as 600 BC. He used cheek skin to perform plastic surgery or reshape the nose, ears and lips with incredible results. Modern surgery acknowledges his contribution by referring to this method of rhinoplasty as the 'Indian Method'. The early surgeons had over 125 types of surgical instrument and were so advanced that they could cut a hair longitudinally. Shushruta describes the details of over 300 operations and 42 surgical processes. Ancient texts show that the Indians were among the first to perform amputations, caesarean and cranial surgery. They used medicated cotton pads to heal wounds.

'In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the earth but not adhereing to it, inhabiting cities but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but being possessed by nothing' Apollonius Tyanaeus (Greek traveller, 1st Century)

'If there is one place on the face of this earth where all the dream of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it in India'. Romain Rolland (French philosopher 1886 - 1944)

'The ancient civilization of India differs from those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece in that its traditions have been preserved without break down to the present day.' Arthur Basham (Australian historian 1914-1986)

'In religion, India is the only millionaire....the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen it once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.' Mark Twain (1835-1910)

From the 'Understanding Hinduism' Exhibition at the Sri Swaminarayan Mandir in North London

Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, London

 Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

The Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, north London, is an incredible edifice. It was designed and constructed entirely according to ancient Vedic architectural texts and no structural steel was used. Almost 5000 tons of marble and limestone were shipped to India and carved by 1500 artisans and then shipped on to London. In all more than 26,300 carved pieces, including intricate designs made with Indian Ambaji marble, were assembled like a jigsaw all within three years. The construction of the mandir was a labour of love for over 3000 volunteers. The ground floor contains an exhibition - 'Understanding Hinduism' - which provides an insight into the Hindu faith. A later post will set out some of the elements of that exhibition.

From the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Exhibition Booklet

Glorious Gardens in the National Gardens Scheme

No 6, Compton Road, Winchester

I have written before about our glorious gardens, and posted photos of some of the best that I know of, like Adwell, but there is great joy also in more modest gardens. Our National Gardens Scheme allows one to visit these all over the country, often only on one specific day in the year when an otherwise private garden is made available to view, with the proceeds of the small entrance fee going to charity. Click the heading for the photos of two such gardens in Winchester, open only over one weekend in early July.

Adwell Fair

Adwell House and St Mary's Church

Adwell Fair was held to raise money for the Footsteps Foundation, which provides intensive physiotherapy for children with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, other neuro-motor and undiagnosed genetic disorders. The gardens at Adwell have long been the joy of the family that has lived there for many generations, and although the weather was very changeable, the changing light and skies provided a fine dramatic backdrop to the walled gardens, river walks, woodland, lakes and beautiful trees.  Click the heading for a selection of photos. 

Early June Morning

The Orangery garden early on a June Morning

I still can't find a way of capturing the immediate and present beauty of a June morning as one comes out of the house for the first time into warm sunlight and the soft buzzing of bees.

Freya Stark's wonderful lines are before me; they are placed on the first page of this journal to remind us that even a writer as gifted as she can't capture the now. This photo - a snapshot with an iPhone - only hints at our immediate experience

'No medium has yet been devised for the translation of life into language, nor can any words recall the dazzling fluidity of days. Single yet fixed in sequence, they fall like the shaft of a cataract into time and through it'.

Favourite Places - St James' Park

I have posted photos of St James' Park before. It's arguably the prettiest park in London and the fine buildings around it allow some unmatched vistas, like this one of the extraordinary architecture of the Horseguards' Building offset by the towers of the Foreign Office overtopped in turn by the London Eye.

Favourite Places - Chilcomb, Winchester

Chilcomb, Winchester

I have been spending a lot of time in Winchester lately. It's such a beautiful city, and as someone said yesterday on Twitter, the walk from the Square through the Cathedral Close out to the College and Kingsgate St and then on though the water meadows (where Keats composed his 'Ode To Autumn') to St Cross must be one of the finest in the country.  But Winchester is also blessed as it lies in glorious Hampshire countryside and is watered by the clear chalk streams of the Itchen. The little village of Chilcomb is closest to the city. It's also the site of an Army firing range and so is curiously peaceful.

Click the heading for more photos  and here for a report on the Drapers' Almshouse outing to Winchester in 2009

The Drapers' Almshouses

Add caption

The Drapers' Livery Company maintain some 180 almshouses on three sites around London, continuing a tradition initiated by bequests from wealthy members of the company in previous centuries. The almshouses at Edmanson's Close, Tottenham are a fine example of Victorian philanthropy, and are co-incidentally only short distance from my great-grandfather's house at Downhills (He was also a liveryman. The house was torn down in 1901).

Downhills, Tottenham, once the home of John Lawford

The almshouses, though seemingly old fashioned by modern standards, provide perfect sheltered accommodation for some 80 elderly residents in extraordinarily tranquil setting, surrounded by grass and trees although in the middle of a busy suburb. Click the heading for some photos of the almshouses and their garden.

Chelsea Flower Show 2011

The Chelsea Flower Show this year was held at the end of the sunniest and driest spring anyone could remember and the exhibitors struggled to keep their plants from flowering too early. Nevertheless the show gardens were superb and the artisan gardens - like the one shown above - as enticing as ever.  My favourite designer, Ishihara Kazuyuki, almost withdrew following the Japanese earthquake but decided to come with a more conventional design.

Click the heading for a selection of photos from the show.

Chelsea Flower Show 2010
Chelsea Flower Show 2008
Chelsea Flower Show 2007

Favourite Poetry - Tall Nettles - Edward Thomas

Tall Nettles
TALL nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. This corner of the farmyard I like most: As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower. Edward Thomas

Favourite Flowers - Banksian Rose

I rarely post photos of flowers - apart from the bluebells in my favourite wood in Wiltshire - as they are so difficult to photograph well, but the Banksian rose in the garden is looking so fine this year that I have made a special effort to capture it.

Those who would like to see some really good photographs of flowers - usually in their natural garden settings - should look at Nigel Burkitt's photos on Flickr.

Wandle Road Royal Wedding Party

The residents of Wandle Road, including some who had moved away but retained close friends in the street, held a party to celebrate the Royal Wedding on 29th April, beginning immediately after the Palace balcony scenes and going on late into the night. The road was closed and cleared of parked cars and tables set up along the middle of the street with stalls on the pavement and in driveways, with food being laid out and barbecued in the playground of Finton House. Many of the houses were hung with flags  and the street decorated with bunting. There was face painting and pavement drawing, table tennis and welly throwing and a tug of war (won by the girls!). The local fire engine paid us a visit and allowed the children to investigate its mysteries and a well stocked tombola was complemented by a raffle of decent prizes, such as commissioned paintings, a dinner for six cooked at one's home and many gifts donated by local businesses, with the proceeds going to the SMA Trust for research into spinal muscular atrophy.

At the end of the day, after prizegiving and superb rock guitar performance by Mark Fiddes and the Wandling Minstrels, our resident opera singer, Friederike Krum, sang a selection of songs from the steps of her house, ending with the most moving of all hymns, 'I Vow To Thee My Country', before the release of a mass of red, white and blue balloons into the sunset. And although some party-loving souls later relit the barbecues and returned to the street for supper, most treated that ceremony as the perfect finale of a most memorable street party.

Click the heading for some photos from the event.

The History of Battersea and Wandsworth Common

Wandsworth Common 

Until 1850, only about 300 people lived in the area known as South Battersea. The land had originally belonged to the St John family as Lords of the Manor of Battersea. Henry St John became the first Viscount Bolingbroke after purchasing the title in 1712 and the family are commemorated by a number of streets bearing their name. The land was then purchased by Earl Spencer in the 18th Century and their name also lives in in many road and pub names as well as in Spencer Park, where Earl Spencer built a substantial house.

A banker, Robert Dent, bought a significant portion of the Spencer's land at the end of the 18th Century and began an ambitious building programme including several large estates and five grand houses facing the Common on 'Five Houses Lane' - now Bolingbroke Grove. Only one of the houses - the former Bolingbroke Hospital - remains today. One of the five houses was lived in by a successful wine merchant, Matthew Charlie. His granddaughter, Marianne, married a Spanish count and became Countess of Morella. Morella Road is named after her. Dent himself lived in the largest and most impressive of the five houses, Old Park. The horseshoe shaped Dents Road took his name in 1881, though one half was later named Gorst Road after Sir John Gorst, a lawyer and Conservative MP, who lived there.

The opening of the Clapham Junction Railway Station in 1863 made the City accessible and the area became a target for developers. Broomwood House and its substantial grounds gave rise to Broomwood, Montholme, Gayville, Devereux and Hiller Roads. The house, which William Wilberforce lived in for several years, was demolished in 1904.

For more than sixty years 24 Morella Road was home to Ida and Louise Cook, two opera-mad spinsters, who helped to rescue dozens of Jews from Hitler's Germany. Their mission was financed by Ida's career as Mills & Boon's most prolific author, writing 130 novels over 50 years. The sisters were posthumously honoured for their bravery in a ceremony at Downing St in 2009.

Some of this history can be found at the reopened Wandsworth Museum. Click here for some photos

[With thanks for Sullivan Thomas]

Russia: The Wild East

Martin Sixsmith's  Russia: the Wild East - explores the history of this great land and for the first time for me explains why Russia's political attitudes and responses seem often threatening and even hostile to habits of thought that we take for granted, being almost inscrutable to those brought up in Western European (and American) society. Even Winston Churchill called Russia 'A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma'.

The most recent episode deals with their terrible 240 years of slavery under the yoke of the unbelievably cruel and barbaric Tartars (led by a descendant of Ghengis Khan) who laid waste to their beautiful capital, then Kiev, while butchering and burning their way across the country in what was a dark age version of 'total war'. Russia lived under the Tartars' autocratic rule for nearly three centuries during the crucial era in which Europe discovered of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Russia not only missed out on those great and civilizing influences, but additionally became attached to the arbitrary and autocratic exercise of power and the subjugation of the judicial process to dictatorial whim - as still pertains today. As Sixsmith says "She would never fully catch up with its intellectual, cultural and social values. Instead, a profound admiration for the Mongol model of an autocratic, militarised state began to enter the Russian psyche.This legacy was so deeply assimilated that its influence has marked the way the country is governed right down to the present day."

Click here for a recent review from the Guardian

Click here for some of Ahkatomova's poems which deal with the fear and cruelty of the now slightly more familiar Stalin terror.

This excellent history reminds me of the even finer America: Empire of Liberty by David Reynolds

Favourite Photographers

Jean Shrimpton at the Dolls' House Museum by Terry O'Neill

I was lucky enough to see two photographic exhibitions in London this week, one of Terry O'Neill's work, and the other of Wim Wenders called Places, Strange and Quiet. Both were fascinating - the Wenders for his vast and atmospheric landscape shots and O'Neill for his wonderful black & white portraits. His photographs had the most immediate impact, as they were all of people well-known to my generation - mostly actors, as well as my favourite model, Jean Shrimpton. Audrey Hepburn, Peter O'Toole, Paul Newman, Frank Sianatra, the Beatles and the Stones taken informally, Marianne Faithful, Brigitte Bardot, Monica Vitti, Sean Connery, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood - all the old favourites, beautifully captured.

Click here for my photos from the Terry O'Neill exhibition and here for the Wim Wenders.

Hampshire in Spring

Favourite Sculpture

Wanting, Liking, Doing by Luke Dickinson, originally uploaded by onform. Click the heading for his website


See also photos from Barbara Hepworth's Museum here

The Great Churches of the City of London

Most people probably think of the City of London as a grey place of enormous office buildings. Not so; at least it's only partly true. The City is also very beautiful, and its wealth ensures that it stays that way. It's scrupulously clean and well-ordered, partly because so few tourists go there, and if one doesn't care for modern office buildings, one can marvel at the 35 glorious churches. They are mostly by Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor who rebuilt them after the Great Fire of London destroyed no less than 86 of them. These churches and their often hidden churchyards are the gems of the City, beautifully maintained through their association with one or more of the wealthy Livery Companies. Yesterday I visited St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, one of the oldest, and was astonished at its near perfect survival since the C13th - in recent centuries through support with the Butchers' Livery company and others. My Livery Company, the Drapers' has had the advowson (right to appoint the priest) of St Michael's Cornhill, since 1503. And on another glorious spring day, I visited St Paul's and was astonished at its scale and magnificence. Click the heading for some photos of St Bartholomew the Great and here for photos of St Paul's.

Favourite Poems - Sowing - Edward Thomas

One of the visitors to this Journal has suggested this spring-time poem by Edward Thomas.

IT was a perfect day

For sowing; just
As sweet and dry was the ground
As tobacco-dust.

I tasted deep the hour
Between the far
Owl's chuckling first soft cry
And the first star.

A long stretched hour it was;
Nothing undone
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown.

And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.


Edward Thomas - Sowing

Lord Mayor's Lunch for the Soldiers' Charity at the Guildhall

The Lord Mayor gave the now annual lunch at the Guildhall to raise money for the Soldiers' Charity (ABF) on a glorious spring day. The lunch was attended by the Duke of Kent as well as General Sir Nicholas Parker, the head of the army. Over £100,000 was raised by silent auction. Click the heading for some photos from the event.

United Guilds' Service at St Paul's

The City Livery Companies come together once a year to commemorate their origins as religious as well as commercial fraternities at a service at St Paul's Cathedral known as the United Guilds' Service. The ceremony itself dates from the Second World War as described in an earlier post, and brings together the Masters, Prime Wardens, Bailiffs and members of the now 108 Livery Companies together with a representative of the Queen (this year the Princess Royal), the Church, represented by the Bishop of London, and the City Corporation in the shape of the Lord Mayor and his Sheriffs. The Dean of St Paul's leads the service and the sermon is given by a distinguished clergyman, this year the Dean of Westminster. On no other occasion do the Monarchy, the Church, and the commercial and charitable sides of the City come together in such a splendid display of pageantry. Click the heading for some photos of St Paul's, though not of the service itself.

Favourite Places - St James' Park

Spring in St James' Park. Click the heading for more photos

Hymn to Dear Japan

Please click the heading for this moving ode written in the late 1970's by singer / songwriter Masashi Sada. The English subtitles will reveal how poignant his words are.

The Scourge of Piracy

I must turn from the mostly peaceful thoughts and scenes depicted in this Journal to a comment on a dreadful man-made scourge that is making the lives of international seafarers in my former profession an increasingly dangerous and fear-filled one.

A new website, Save Our Seaferers, set up by the world's key international shipping bodies, states


Over 800 seafarers are being held hostage by armed gangs of Somali pirates, in appalling conditions, subject to physical and psychological abuse, for up to 8 months. Their ships have been hijacked at sea and they are being held for ransoms of millions of dollars. The human cost to seafarers and their families is enormous.

The website has been set up to help us persuade governments to act more forcefully than they are presently doing against piracy. Wherever you live, you can sign an attached letter which will then be sent your own government.

The problem is actually worse than the website describes, as although initially the pirates rarely killed their seafarer hostages, they are now beginning to torture and kill seafarers in order to hold off counter-attacks and to extract higher and faster ransom payments (Lloyd's List article on 7th Feb 2011)

The only way to stop large-scale piracy is to do what was done in the C19th - declare piracy an international scourge and allow the world's legitimate forces to attack them if they are found at sea. In practice the UN should declare a no-sail area a stated distance off the coast of Somalia and destroy all non-IMO-registered craft found outside it - as well as all hijacked ships being used as motherships by pirates. This would allow fishing and local trade to continue but deny the pirates access to international waters.  

Favourite Places - Bluebell Wood in Wiltshire

Bluebell Wood at East Kennett in May

I've only reposted this to cheer us up in these cold, damp and dark February days

Shop Design

It no doubts attests to a shallow nature, but I love the design of shops, shop windows and their advertisments and take photos of many of the best ones. Click the heading for a selection.

Takeda No Komoriuta

The Lullaby of Takeda

This is probaby Japan's most famous lullaby; the gentle song of a child longing for home. But the underlying story is heartbreaking; in the olden days children were sold by their poor parents into often harsh domestic service and couldn't return home until they were twenty years old, by which time their parents were usually gone. It's a story that crosses Asia.

See also an English Nursery song

Favourite Videos: Dark Side Of The Lens

https://vimeo.com/astrayfilms/darksideofthelens

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo.


One of the best videos on photography I have ever seen.

Hampshire Views - Stocks Farm and Old Winchester Hill

These somewhat blurred images* are of Stocks cottages under Old Winchester Hill, part of Stocks Farm where I was brought up. The land here has been farmed for countless generations and doubtless even sustained the inhabitants of the Iron Age Fort at the top of the hill. From their vantage point, they (and we today) could see the southern coast of England from Chichester Harbour and the Portsdown Hills, to Southampton Water, the Isle of Wight and the New Forest in the west. Below the hill in the valley to the south is Stocks Farm which we came to in 1950 and sold on my father's death in 2002. Stocks Farm expanded to incorporate neighbouring Harvestgate Farm in 1970 and Little Stocks Farm in Meonstoke, the nearest village, in 1980, but the land remained as it has for centuries, with good well-draining chalk-based soil in the valley and lighter land suitable for grain but also for sheep, on the hills. It's an exceptionally beautiful part of Hampshire, secluded and unspoiled. In addition to being used in this television programme, it also appears briefly in a video on Hampshire (at minute 2.11), but is also the subject of countless of my photos, some of which you can see linked from the heading.

Stocks and Harvestgate Farms and the coast beyond from Old Winchester Hill

Stocks Farm Cottages with the Isle of Wight in the distance from Old Winchester Hill (in September)



*These photos are taken from the television - a repeat showing of Midsomer Murders on ITV1. The scenery was supposed to represent Southern Ireland....

Slideshows and the Little Prince

The Powerpoint slideshows that arrive frequently from friends usually contain a series of stunning images backed by a soulful soundtrack, but I'm afraid find them empty unless they are part of someone's story. 

Our screens are increasingly being overrun with photoshopped photographs, but they only touch the heart if the friend took them or if they explain why the images are important to them.

I am reminded always of the Story of the Fox and the truths he so poignantly explains to the Little Prince

Read it again here to understand why we feel as we do about this, and so many things in this age.

Favourite Poetry - Akhmatova

I first came across Akhmatova when reading The Life of Isaiah Berlin by Michael Ignatieff, and was interested in his veneration of her both for her poetry and for keeping alive 'the soul of Russia' through the darkest days of the revolution and the years of Stalin's terror. He wrote: 'The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure...not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history.' 
She is also a favourite poet of my daughter Kei, who can appreciate her poetry as it should be read, in Russian.
Requiem

No, not under a foreign sky,
no not cradled by foreign wings –
Then, I was with my people, I,
with my people, there, sorrowing.

Epilogue

I learned to know how faces fall apart,
how fear, beneath the eye-lids, seeks,
how strict the cutting blade, the art
that suffering etches in the cheeks.
How the black, the ash-blond hair,
in an instant turned to silver,
learned how submissive lips fared,
learned terror’s dry racking laughter.
Not only for myself I pray,
but for all who stood there, all,
in bitter cold, or burning July day,
beneath that red, blind prison wall

Dedication

Before this sorrow mountains bow,
the vast river’s ceased to flow,

the ever-strong prison bolts
hold the ‘convict crews’ now,
abandoned to deathly longing.
For someone the sun glows red,
for someone the wind blows fresh –
but we know none of that, instead
we only hear the soldier’s tread,
keys scraping against our flesh.
Rising as though for early mass,
through the city of beasts we sped,
there met, breathless as the dead,
sun low, a mistier Neva. Far ahead,
hope singing still, as we passed.
Sentence given…tears pour out,
she thought she knew all separation,
in pain, blood driven from the heart,
as if she’s hurled to earth, apart,
yet walks…staggers…is in motion…
Where now my chance-met friends
of those two years satanic flight?
What Siberian storms do they resist,
and in what frosted lunar orb exist?
To them it is I send my farewell cry.

I'm now keen to read Valeri Grossman's Life and Fate, which covers the same ground, in prose form, and is thought to the equal of War and Peace.

Treasure Islands and the Avoidance of Tax

I have been reading this fascinating book with increasing distaste for the concept that one should spend much time and money minimising one's exposure to tax. I have always felt sorry for those who thought that they had to organise their affairs - and even domicile - so as to pay less tax - such as the father of a friend who has to live half his life outside the country, with the result that his family only see him periodically; to those who have moved to Jersey and seem uniformly miserable. And we would no doubt be much wealthier today had my step-grandfather not taken the conscious decision not to shield his wealth from death duties on the grounds that all taxes were properly due to society and the country in which one lived. Should such noble sentiments return (particularly in corporations) we would no doubt be able to reduce the taxes that we do actually pay and care better for our society.

Favourite Poetry - Reluctance

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season? 

Robert Frost

The Drapers' New Year Service

Some of St Michael's Choir at lunch at the Drapers' Hall


The City New Year Service is traditionally held at St Michaels', Cornhill in January and lunch is offered afterwards by the Drapers Livery Company, who have been patrons of St Michael's for 500 years, at their Hall nearby (recently in use as the setting for some of the scenes in The King's Speech). St Michael's vicar, the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, is a traditionalist Anglican of deep learning and of often amusing and outspoken views, who holds services based on the Book of Common Prayer and King James' Bible.

The City New Year's Service follows a traditional pattern of prayers and hymns - including Jerusalem and I Vow To The My Country - and some beautiful anthems from the choir, which, led by Jonathan Rennert, is  one of the finest in London. Unlike the choir of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, the female sopranos are taught to sing like trebles, as Rennert believes that most church music was written for boy trebles. As a result, there's a wonderful purity to their voices.

This year the Master Draper, Maj-Gen Adrian Lyons, invited a fellow soldier, Maj-Gen Tim Cross, to give the address. In a superb talk, he pointed to the decline in human values in British society (which he called a 'cut-flower society', a brief and flashy show without roots and leaving no lasting seed) and called for leaders to emerge to reinstate them.  His address can be read here.

The Scottish Borders

The Countryside above Selkirk. Click for a larger view

The funeral of one of my parents' dearest friends took me to the Scottish Borders for the first time just before New Year where I found a fascinating and beautiful landscape still mostly covered with snow. I also discovered the astonishing ruined abbeys of Dryburgh, Jedburgh, Kelso and Melrose and had time to visit the first two, and leaned much of the history of the area from those ancient buildings.  Click the heading for more photos