Welcome To Hardy Country

It's an indicative confession that this man with a respectable first class degree in English has never before in his sixty years read any Thomas Hardy. This man, the Overgraduate aka Big Fat Pig (though getting slimmer - more of this below) has always struggled with the Victorian novel - loved David Copperfield but couldn't hack the rest of Dickens, fought through Middlemarch through a sense of obligation, etc.

Well anyway shame at this omission has caught up with me and I have pulled from the shelf a three novel collection of Hardy texts which I seem to have acquired for the princely sum of one of your English pounds. The nagging guilt must have acted upon me when I bought it, although I cannot for the life of me remember when that might have been. And now I've started on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, so I intend to finish. It's heavy going particularly as I came to this after the quick pleasure of re-reading Simon Raven's Fielding Gray. However I can see why Hardy has admirers and before we got to Tess's fall (I strongly suspect this will not be the lowest point of her trajectory) I was taken with one of the best descriptions of joyful drunkenness that I have encountered:

The fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait ... Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thought, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.

Now you have to admit that's rather beautiful.

So I mentioned, did I not, that the Pig is shrinking. He is playing a bit of golf (not too badly as it happens - not well but you know what I mean) and that is a help but more importantly the Pig is regularly gracing the mean streets of Four Oaks in his athletic gear. He is up to ninety minute runs and one hundred and fifty minute cycle rides. There is power to add. Hopefully.

 

Black Lives Matter

Of course they do - as do all hues of human life. However the current outcry in the United States (mimicked elsewhere for a variety of good and bad reasons) is rightly about the unseemly death of George Floyd. The facts seem to be these: Floyd, a large black man was reported to police for trying to pay for groceries with a counterfeit banknote; he carried no weapon; upon his arrest he was bound but resisted efforts to put him in the squad car, avowing claustrophobia; the police in attendance then restrained him in the prone position, one officer placing his knee on Floyd's neck; the force applied by the detaining officer was such that Floyd died; passers-by filmed the imbroglio; after an inexplicable delay the restraining officer has been charged with third degree murder, a charge which alleges what we might loosely define as killing by criminal callousness, falling short of an outright intent to kill. Protests have ensued and these have degenerated into rioting and looting.

The rioting is wrong and affords an easy way out for those apologists for the senseless police actions.

But I will, in case it has eluded you (I doubt it has), nothing, I repeat nothing, can mitigate the sheer brazen immorality of the photo-opportunity schemed by the Commander in Chief of the United States. I reproduce the resulting image below. Be afraid America, be afraid the rest of us. Evil stalks the earth.

This Is The Castle

Dad had an innocent affection for scouring secondhand book shops for unremarkable first editions. He would never have paid the going rate for important such editions. He also liked to pass some of those editions on to me as gifts. I have just finished reading one of them and I'm sorry I didn't get round to it sooner - not because of any great literary merit but because of the note in Dad's familiar handwriting which I found in it when I picked it up off my bookshelf. The note was neatly folded in two and on its outer leaf was the text, 'D, Read the book first and then read this note! Dad X'.

Well, I have at last done as directed and today I finished this curiosity of a novel. I have opened the note and Dad's reading of the bizarre ending is not quite the same as mine. I won't set it our here in case you want to try the book for yourself. It is the work of a successful but not critically acclaimed author and it is about a successful but not critically acclaimed author, so there is an element of navel-gazing going on - This is the Castle by Nicolas Freeling. Not by any stretch a great novel but a commendably workmanlike one and it contains an important gem of a passge about the author as manic depressive that hits the nail on the head:

Fear of having talent and fear of not having any - manic depressive, isn't it? - depends whether the swing of the moment is up or down.

I miss the sorts of conversation about books that Dad and I shared. Of course dementia had ended those conversations by the end but there are decades of golden memories. That note has been carefully re-folded and put back in the book - perhaps someday another reader will find it and enjoy the game of reading. I hope so. 

 

Regulation 6

I have been doing something that is open to anyone with an internet connection - I have read the Coronavirus Regulations that have, in the context of Dominic Cummings, got the commentariat and various legislators so exercised. If more of the fuckwit journos and politicos had bothered to do this then we might be enjoying (probably the wrong verb but sod it I'm on a roll) a rather better debate about that drive to Durham that the Boy Cummings saw fit to take. The only issue on which we have clarity is that there are a lot of people in our political and journalistic elite who utterly detest Cummings. Plain and simple they loathe the man, blame him for Brexit and Boris' mini-landslide. By the way we haven't heard the end of Brexit just yet - there are still people (take the sanctimonious windbag Ed Davey) getting themselves in trim for one last attempt to confound the will of the people. We can safely leave that for another day.

Anyway back to those Regulations. Here are the relevant facts and pertinent questions - trust me, I'm a lawyer:

• The Regulation states baldly, 'During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.'
• The Regulation then has thirteen sub-clauses which list examples of what will constitute a reasonable excuse.
• Those thirteen sub-clauses are not intended as an exhaustive list - there can clearly be other unspecified examples of reasonable behaviour. It is into this unspecified category that Cummings asserts his behaviours fit. That assertion is his right. It is the right of anyone else caught up in this wretched pandemic (so that means all of us) to attempt to exploit what lazy journalese calls this 'loophole'.
• So the two proper questions it seems to me are these: (i) was that initial 260 mile jaunt to Durham reasonable in the context of Cumming's precise situation vis-a-vis childcare? (ii) (and this I think is the more difficult one for Cummings) was that shorter excursion to Barnard Castle also reasonable in all the circumstances?

That's it - simple. If you think that these questions merit the public expense of judicial determination then you differ from me. That is your right. As to the crap about public opinion well, I'm sorry, that's irrelevant garbage as is the call for some sort of government enquiry - what a waste of resource. As to whether Cummings should resign (or be sacked) because he has breached some invisible 'spirit' (more lazy journalese) of the law, well that is a purely political question which we can safely leave to the political class as they roll around the whole bloody mess of them in the gutter.

One final biblical thought - those who live by the sword, die by the sword.    

One Last Bit Of Quotable Stuff

Now you know well enough that this a misleading title, because there will always be stuff that I feel I have to share with you, for my own good, even if not for yours. But I shall relent for a few days in case I am risking overload - only after first sharing with you another bit of C.H. Sisson (I know, I know, my admiration for this Bagehotphobe is perhaps bad for my academic soul) culled from The Case of Walter Bagehot:

Economics used to be called Political Econmy, and has lost the adjective in the search for scientific status. But political it remains, like the behavioural sciences at large, which are sciences only in a large, old fashioned sense, whatever may be the claims of their academic exponenents, scrambling for the most profitable description in order to get a full share of the money flowing into universities.

Now that was written in 1972 but if I'd said that now I'd be pretty chuffed with myself. Provocative yes, but illuminated by more than a glimmer of truth. 

Quotable Stuff

In my eclectic reading over the past week there has been a surfeit of stuff that had me thinking, yes he's got a point there, possibly wrong but there's an arguable point to it.

First up is my favourite member of the commentariat, Rod Liddle, Milwall fan and provocateur. In this week's Spectator on the topic of the lockdown (of which he is broadly a supporter):

The notion that we might end up kindlier, greener, gentler as a consequence of our brush with this ineffectual Armageddon was always horribly misplaced. The only lasting impact will be that reform of the cumbersome and often fantastically inept National Health Service will be off the cards in perpetuity and instead we will probably still be forced to kneel down before it every Thursday evening to give praise, clutching a used face mask in lieu of a rosary.

Next, my favourite denigrator of all things Bagehot whose lucid vitriol when it comes to my old mate Walter has even me thinking again. This, from his one hundred and forty page rant against Bagehot The Case of Walter Bagehot, is C.H. Sisson:

The central object of Bagehot's writing - and it is a destructive one - was to give exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre, and to remove whatever social and intellectual impediments stood in the way of it. Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness, have to give way to the provisional and divisive incitements of gain. In the end one is left contemplating numbers over a great void. 

Finally from Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen, the arrestingly crafted summary of Guy Crouchback's private desolation occasioned by the entry of Russia into the war:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved.

I am not, of course, at all sure where I am going with all of this but I take mild comfort in the fact I am in my inefficient way still trying to get somewhere.  

The Land Of My Fathers

Bits and pieces of Under Milk Wood are still eddying through my mind.

At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd- the cocklers, are sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.

My battered old edition includes a brief preface by Daniel Jones which ends with an interesting point:

In case Under Milk Wood falls into the hands of a Welsh philologist, it must be made clear that the langusage used is Anglo-Welsh. Dylan Thomas spoke no Welsh, and the reader must imitate his inconsistency if he wishes to hear the words as they were pronounced by the poet himself.

This is then the land of my (father's) father, proudly Welsh but non Welsh-speaking. This has been this Englishman's gain.