Category: Random

Today I make my bid for fogeydom by recommending to you an organisation called the Landmark Trust. Now of course holidays at this time of year should be about finding a small Swiss town overrun by teenagers from Battersea and dislocating your knee early enough to put in some decent drinking time in between folorn trips to the Musee D’Aplinisme and to the Pharmacy for painkillers. However, if you are in need of something more … er … sedate I can recommend staying in a Landmark Trust property. These are buildings of historic interest, impeccably maintained, that pay for themselves by being rented out to tourists. Some friends of ours were back from Washington and took a week in Goddards, a Luteyns building in Surrey. Goddards is a beautiful Arts and Crafts building. I hesitate to call it a house, what is the word for a building with 12 bedrooms, a skittle hall and dining room that could seat 40?

P and I own and Arts and Crafts style house in Wimbledon which we are in the process of redeveloping (Ruinous Project) so I spent a good part of my time photographing door furniture.

This in turn kept me out of the way of the 5 children under 6 who ran round the place screaming so loud that their lungs all but flapped out of their mouths. I have never managed to work out why evolution would make children behave in a way which makes their parents want to drive away and leave them behind in a supermarket. During the evening they went suddenly quiet and when nervous parents went to investigate they found that the children had taken the 600 odd toys and pieces of toys that they had brought with them and arranged them in careful lines forming concentric rectangles on the drawing room floor. It was undoubtedly impressive but also somehow disturbing in a Midwich Cuckoos sort of way.

The night was spent in serious conversation fuelled by port. Portraits of the original owners bobbed in the flickering candlelight, their pale Edwardian features frowning disdainfully at the appalling shite that middle aged middle class people tend to talk when they’ve had 3 wines too many and fancy themselves a foreign policy expert. I woke the next morning vaguely conscious that I had had a few things to say on the subject of religion but I wasn’t sure whether it was embarrassment or the hangover that had me wincing until 4 pm. The only relief was the garden. Outside it was cold and bright. Across the croquet lawn I could hear the Wood Pigeons and for a moment it was somehow the perfect quintessence of an English morning.

If you stray into an airport bookshop you will find a display of books for businessmen whose blurbs would, if subject to a critical boiling, reduce to the words “harnessing your untapped potential”. That concept strikes a nerve in each of us. Which of us does not feel that if we had more time and space and money we could achieve so much more than we have to date? There’s that book we meant to write; the journey went meant to make. Our true selves are ground down and stultified by circumstance. We are “cabin’d, cribbed, confined”.

I had dinner with a friend: S. S fell in love in his last year at high school. He did so with the abstract intensity that only someone who went to a boys’ school could. His girlfriend was a screen upon which he projected a great romantic longing. He went off to one university to study History. She went to another to study Italian. Shortly into his second term he paid her a visit. Things were not as they had been. She seemed cold and distant and there was the problematic presence of a tall and charming American undergraduate in her room to be accounted for. After some discussion she revealed that she was very happy with her new man and that S himself was now history.

He returned to his own university and set about brooding. His studies suffered. He then came up with a plan. He would switch universities and win her back. So he began his second year at a somewhat less prestigious institution that his former girlfriend attended. As plans go this was an utter stinker. The first and most obvious difficulty with it was that as she was studying Italian she was spending her second year abroad. So as he arrived she left. He brooded some more. Eventually he knuckled down and got himself a 2:1. That is a very respectable degree result. Firsts (the only higher grade) are deliberately only rarely awarded.

After a while he took to brooding about his result. If only he hadn’t been such a fool. If he had concentrated on his study he might well have got himself a first and gone on to teach. He had untapped potential begging to be harnessed. He went instead to work in publishing and by dint of scraping and saving (and never buying a round – just kidding S), he put together a fighting fund that would support him through a course of post-graduate study. He took years to find the perfect course and when he was happy that he had the right course at the right university with the enough money to support him he quit his job and devoted himself to his studies. The more he worked on it the more he loved his academic area. He shunned society simply because his studies fulfilled him in a way beer and crisps could not compete with. Then, at the end, he got another second class honours.

That was sobering for all of us. What if that unwritten novel is a piece of garbage waiting to be dropped? What if that untaken journey ends up as 6 months in hospital with malaria and ameobic dysentery? What if, scarily, a belief in a real but frustrated talent is of greater value than a genuine shot at demonstrating our mediocrity?

Here is something that has long bothered me. The picture set out below is by Bosch. On any occasion on which I have read an accompanying descriptive text it has suggested that the picture portrays a pilgrim (signified by the spoon). He has passed a house of ill-repute (depicted in the background) and has turned his back on its temptations. He is haggard because pilgrimage is a struggle. The first time I read this interpretation it was a complete surprise to me because I had read the picture in a completely different way.

The “pilgrim” struck me as gazing shiftily over his shoulder. Why would he do that? The answer is that he has just stolen a piglet. You can see a trotter sticking out from his jacket. There are piglets out side the inn he has passed and a dog next to them barks to alert the house owners to the theft. Rather than a commentary on virtue I saw it as a dig at hypocrisy and the wrapping of bad deeds in religious fervour.