The Naked Ape Gets Dressed

Brasil! Brasil!

2012-02-04T09:19:00.000-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN6rStufpIY&feature=related

Thinking of So Many of You and Your Brass Monkeys

2012-02-03T09:20:00.000-04:00

Maybe, I shall never wear this coat again. That is, unless my dream comes true and we get, as well as this place, a tea plantation in the hills of Sri Lanka (with their slight night chill) and a lodge in the Himalayan foothills (with their snow)...

Nicholas 'Jimmy Stewart' Cage

2012-02-01T11:50:00.000-04:00

Another one dragged through a hedge backwards:

Nicholas Cage. He might even share that suit with Clueless Clooney.

Yo! Clueless Clooney

2012-01-30T09:45:00.000-04:00

He thinks that he is a latter-day Cary Grant. In fact, Clueless Clooney is a latter-day Archie Leach:

As usual, left click to enlarge.

English Roses

2012-01-30T09:14:00.002-04:00

http://www.classicroses.co.uk/products/roses/alister-stella-gray/

Daphne Du Maurier's Continuing Popularity

2012-01-28T11:14:00.003-04:00

I just checked, on amazon.co.uk, the relative rankings of Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' (1938) and Tony Bliar's 'A Journey' (2010) (apparently, part of the reason for his very sudden multi-million pound empire):

Rebecca: 498th in all books.

A Journey: 3,398th in all books (hardback and over 9,000th place in paperback).

Interesting, from any number of points of view and it certainly goes to show that writing a dark and sinister novelette, set in Cornwall, is the way to go.

Rebecca's Cottage

2012-01-28T09:55:00.002-04:00

"Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again..." Rebecca. The first Mrs de Winter. The girl without a name. A story of over-shadowing of the present by the past; misunderstanding, jealousy and hate; murder and escape. Rebecca's seaside cottage, where she held her 'midnight picnics' is always portrayed in the film adaptations of the book as a bit of a hovel, and Manderley itself as some sprawling mansion house; whereas, in fact, Menabilly (the template for Manderley) is a relatively modest Cornish manor house and the template for Rebecca's cottage is quite a big house on the beach at Polridmouth Bay, just below Menabilly on the Gribben Head (also the setting for Daphne du Maurier's story The Birds).

Rebecca's Cottage
LEFT CLICK TO VIEW

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor Gardening

2012-01-26T10:40:00.000-04:00

Here's a picture, from Life magazine, of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor gardening in the gardens that they created at their house, La Tuilerie, at Gif-sur-Yvette:

Tony Bliar

2012-01-23T12:28:00.001-04:00

So where on earth do Bliar's millions come from? How could they possibly derive from just book sales and talking engagements? Maybe it's time for those investigative journalists who hacked into the dead Milly Dowler's telephone to turn the Bliars over and let's see what a nasty little mess we will find. After all, if sometime top politicos in other European countries have been behaving corruptly (for example, Berlusconi and Chirac), why shouldn't it happen in Britain? The fear is that Bliar took money and oil shares from Bush and his cronies to take the UK to war in the cause of the USA. Maybe Bliar should dispel the supicions by a public accounting of his assets.

Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III Four Door Continental

2012-01-20T10:26:00.002-04:00

I thought that I had lost this picture but, fortunately, I have not. It is the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III four door Continental, with special coachwork by H J Mulliner, originally designed for the 'Flying Spur' Bentley. Possibly one of the finest touring cars ever made and certainly one of the most stunning.

Another shot of the same model:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clicks_1000/4179318545/

You Know That You're Past It When

2012-01-20T06:18:00.003-04:00

... a forty something woman sympathetically offers you her seat on the 'bus. I am still wincing.

Today, as anyone in a Roman Catholic country will tell you, is the Feast Day of St Sebastian, heralded here, as these days always are, by fireworks shot into the face of the rising sun: bloody infuriating.

Wikipedia Goes Down

2012-01-18T08:16:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia goes down in protest at the prospect of the enactment of anti-piracy laws to protect original works. This is not surprising because, if Jimmy Wales and his team were prevented from pillaging the works of others, Wikipedia would not exist at all. Wikipedia is remarkable only for the fact that, despite the pillage, it remains a dangerous and unregulated mine of misinformation. In a world of over-regulation in many areas of purely personal life, it is a shame that such miserable and piratical efforts as Wikipedia, in the public domain, are not banned out-right. Wiki's argument seems to be that The People own the Internet and everything on it: this is tripe and, near as damn it, communism. No one has a right to copy or pass off the original works of others just because they can be reduced to digital technology. Go hang, Wikipedia.

Come to that, you cannot even spell 'encylopaedia'.

Ilha do Governador, Rio de Janeiro

2012-01-15T10:54:00.000-04:00

The trip to Rio was with some friends who had to go to the Ilha do Governador in theharbour (illustrated). About half of the island is given over to the international airport and the military and the rest is a beautiful harbourside conurbation of about 600,000 people. Every famous and fantastic view of Rio is to be had from here; including the Sugarloaf and the statue of Christ. The friends introduced us to some very nice people who took us on a little trip around the best sightseeing spots, which happened to be the sites of churches. As we left the second, to return to the Sleepy Hollow, the people to whom we had been introduced gave us a little rosary from the second church as a souvenir of our day and our meeting them. Our hostess (if I may call her that) had spent 50 years living in the USA and told us that, if such a gift were made there, the "Happy Holidays' Brigade" would get very upset, as religious allusions, even to the extent of wishing someone a "Happy Christmas" may well cause offence.

I am glad to say that we are able to understand the spirit in which the gift was given and apprciate it very much.

Cha Cha Cha

2012-01-12T16:57:00.000-04:00

Right! just push the funiture back against the wall as here is a Cha Cha Cha that is slow enough for my old bones but fast enough to get the heart racing. Now CONCENTRATE 3 - 4 and I'm off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmySe86puw8&feature=related

Off To Rio Tomorrow at Dawn

2012-01-12T16:43:00.000-04:00

...to see the morning star fade over the mountains and the sun rise in her sudden way - way, hey, hey!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WhHLq7TyBw&feature=related

Edmundo Ros

2012-01-12T16:29:00.000-04:00

Watching Ridley Scott's wonderful A Good Year (2006), starring Russell Crowe, Marion Cotillard, Albert Finney and a great supporting cast, I was reminded of Edmundo Ros and this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS0XuG_5UPU&feature=related

Not everyone's cup of tea but I like it.

Brown in Town

2012-01-11T06:47:00.000-04:00

Clearly, George V, Edward VII and, before them, the Prince Consort had, as keen sporting men, worn brown (and other colours of tweed), but it is extremely unlikely that they would have worn it when they were 'working' in town. That was an age of extreme formality and even the Cabinet and the Privy Council wore Court uniforms in the King's presence.

The predeliction for black/dark blue coats for town day and evening wear began in Brummell's time. As a result of his influence, the Prince Regent abandoned the French tailor, Louis Bazalgette, and gravitated to the likes of the more sombre Meyer. There is a famous Grego cartoon of Brummell ‘in deep convesation with the Duchess of Rutland’ in Almack’s ballroom, around 1815 and in this he is wearing a blue coat and black pantaloons; one male guest is in a brown coat but, gradually, during the following reigns, especially that of Victoria, black or blue coats became the normal town wear for the governing and professional classes at work and in the evening, declining (if that is the word) from frocks and morning coats and dress coats to short coats (strollers) and dinner jackets after WWI. Then plain blue and grey dittoes became prevalent for daytime, followed by bolder patterns and now, apparently, and in accordance with some destiny, the world is returning to brown.

A great deal is made of ‘no brown in town’ but we must not forget that black in the countryside is sometimes even more de rigueur than it is, these days, in town: formal hunt coats (apart from those in hunt colours) are black; so is the topper that may be worn with the hunt frock coat; so too the boots, with black patent tops.

It would be wrong to say that ‘brown in town’ for town men at work is a phenomenon confined to the inter-war years (however much revisionist history is a popular art), but the modern adventure, into colours beyond blue and grey, is arguably just a muted reversion (in a sense), to the tastes in colour of the ancien regime.

I think that, where the Gordon Geckos of this world seek the power suit, the British look for men who tow the line of social expectation and are ‘dressed like us’; not so much in search of neutrality of dress but in search of a tribal identity, symbolizing a totem, which, after over a thousand years of miscegenation, our genes have, in reality, denied us: so, if the outer man is dressed according to tribal custom (and never too carefully), he will be safe to deal with.

The British definitely suspect the wrong clothes (Edward VII and George V had the sharpest eyes for them), and there is a very fine line indeed between being ‘dressed to the nines’ and being ‘dressed up like a dog’s dinner’.

Brummell at Almack's by Grego

Raiding SS Titanic

2012-01-08T08:52:00.000-04:00

I suppose that any human remains in this sea grave have long since been consumed and dispersed by the ocean. Something similar could be said of many graves on land or at sea but we do not disturb them. As Shakespeare had inscribed on his tomb:

"Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To digg the dust encloased heare,

Blest be the man that spares thes stones,

And curst be he that moves my bones."

However, it seems that, where a cash profit is in view, mankind will still even stoop to grave robbery to turn a few coins. The New York auction of artefacts from the Titanic will include a lifejacket which it is claimed was actually worn by a victim, a menu and a folding deck chair. What sickening sort of people would trade in such things and what does it all say about 'western civilization'? No wonder, when asked what he thought about 'western civilization', Ghandi replied "I think that it would be a good idea."

The Field Feature

2012-01-07T11:01:00.000-04:00

My feature in The Field has gone on-line at the top of this page:

http://www.thefield.co.uk/features

Old Shoes

2012-01-07T09:09:00.001-04:00

Our feet change quite a bit as we age and bespoke shoes that originally fitted well and are our regulars gradually change with our feet. Jack Buchanan (called by The Times in his obituary 'The Last Of The Knuts'), had Lobb shoes for decades which, according to British DJ, David Jacobs, shone like mirrors. There's nothing so fine as old tweeds and old shoes; they are memorials to the fine times that we have had in them.

Of Cravats and Daytime Bow Ties

2012-01-07T08:22:00.000-04:00

Some people think that there is something faintly ridiculous about cravats [US:'Ascots'] and daytime bow ties; maybe, they think that they are dated or clownish. I would agree that they can strike a discordant note but that is often down to the way in which they are worn, rather than anything else. Here are a couple of examples of these items being worn well. First, the actor Leslie Philips in a cravat:

And Ian Fleming in a daytime bow tie:

However, there is no point in shrinking violets wearing these things: self-consciousness will blow them out of the water at twenty paces.

Lights Out

2012-01-04T06:41:00.003-04:00

Maybe our souls are just part of the shared spirit of creation and, maybe, we also know, deep down, that all living things share in it and that is why every shot bird or mammal and every landed fish touches us; even though God gave man dominion over all creatures and they provide us with food and clothing.

I also think that some inanimate objects can be possessed of what we recognize as a kind of soul: look at, say a 1931 eight litre Bentley (the last in the W O Bentley direct line and only one hundred made); or a Joseph Manton musket; or the revolutionary 1875 prototype boxlock shotgun (bearing a commemorative plate), patented by Anson & Deeley of Westley Richards in 1875; or a fragile first edition (1859) of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubiáyát of Omar Khayyám. Such things as these are also touched with a kind of spirit. It was even said of Rosa Lewis’s old Cavendish Hotel ; in a fond farewell to the old place, in October 1962, and before it went to join the Tabard and the Mermaid Inns, The New Statesman said that the site of the hotel at the junction of Jermyn Street and Duke Street had become a ‘mysterious space-time inn at a metaphysical junction ’.

The great London tobacconists that I have been privileged to have known had atmospheres, auras, presences: Sullivan Powell in the Burlington Arcade, selling its majestic, great, tightly rolled, sweet, robust and untipped sub rosa Oriental Cigarettes, in their black and gold boxes of twenty five or a hundred, swathed in thick tissue paper; even unlit their aroma wooed the nostrils of the gods. Benson & Hedges were in Bond Street, with their elegant, oval Cairo Cigarettes, sold in turquoise boxes, and venerable Fribourg & Treyer (est. 1720) were near the top of Haymarket and in here, if you listened very carefully, you could still hear Beau Brummell’s retreating footsteps after placing his very last order of their Old Paris and Macouba snuffs.

Alas! All gone. Mercifully, at least, the frontage of 32 Haymarket is preserved and Wilsons of Sharrow took over the Fribourg & Treyer snuff receipts and still produce their snuffs.

Sullivan Powell’s whole range of cigarettes and Benson & Hedges’ Cairo Cigarettes were the sudden victims of over-regulation by the European Union banning all cigarettes with more than fifteen milligrammes of tar. The playwright John Osborne said in an incandescent letter to The Times:

“As a schoolboy I narrowly escaped from ‘European’ bombs on my doorstep. I can forgive this eagerness, but not the compounding of the insult by dashing the tobacco from my lips forty years on”.

Fribourg & Treyer, one of London’s oldest surviving businesses, and still successful as a tobacconist and snuff chandler, was taken over, in the early 1980s, by Imperial Tobacco, which moved them out and then shut them down.

Every time that I first missed these shops, I felt the same mingled disbelief, confusion and anger that I had felt when I first found Sulka gone from Bond Street. Disbelief and confusion because it is difficult to believe that such wonderful shops, that have been an important living part of the London landscape, can just disappear without so much as a murmur of protest or a tear of regret, and then anger that they have actually gone.

In the last year at least three more great tobacconists have shut down: first, Shervington’s (formerly John Brumfitt, who popularized Romeo y Julieta Havanas) in Holborn Bars; then S Weingott & Son (where Rumpole most certainly must have bought his small cigars), just outside the Temple, in Fleet Street and now G Smith & Sons in the Charing Cross Road. I imagine that, with the coming into force of the total ban on advertising and displaying tobacco products, most of the nation’s remaining small tobacconists (often also sweet shops and newsagents), will fall like ninepins; family businesses will be wiped out and their staff, in the midst of national bankruptcy postponed, will be put on the dole, to join the thousands already there by virtue of pub closures, in the wake of the public smoking ban, which was ostensibly introduced to protect employees from pub patrons’ smoke. Whoever dreamed up the policy for all this over-regulation lives, I warrant, either down a rabbit hole or behind a looking glass.

Those who govern the nation tell us that we live in a ‘Big Society’ of tolerance, inclusivity, classlessness and liberalism but, excuse me, I do not feel beneficially either ‘tolerated’ or ‘included’ when I am encouraged, with so much misplaced and forcible enthusiasm, to give up good tobacco, which John Osborne rightly described as “one of life’s few and reliable pleasures”. Moreover, I deeply resent it when this misplaced encouragement comes from ‘bullies’ who masquerade as ‘liberals’ in a society which is most notably ‘Big’ in being in economic free-fall and social decay. The legislative process has very swiftly moved from a position of tolerance (say, in decriminalizing homosexual practices) to the point at which we may now even marry our best male friend but, somehow, we may not lawfully join him in a cigar in the smoking room of a private club which was established to provide a place for men to sit around, and smoke, and drink and talk. The statute book reflects a very queer state of affairs indeed, resulting from twisted, tendentious reasoning, based on skewed or irrelevant evidence. A small, unventilated and smoke-filled bar might well present a health risk to a barman who works there all day, every day, for thirty years but show me a Carlton Club servant who has developed a smoking-related illness as a result of the smoking room activities of its members and note, as we pass, that at least one ‘New Labour’ member of parliament wished to excuse working men’s clubs from the smoking ban; presumably because they all agreed with John Osborne that smoking is indeed one of life’s few and reliable pleasures.

Very shortly, most remaining tobacco sales will have to be conducted through internet transactions and any remaining tobacconist shops will become blank-fronted stores reminiscent of Soho’s seedy old pornographers (before they felt able to set window displays suggestive of their wares) and all remaining tobacco shop customers will feel obliged to dart in and out of them in mufflers and macs, with hats pulled well down because, gradually, smoking tobacco is being branded a perversion; one of the many modern British taboos, dreamed up by tin-Hitlers and enforced by their jobsworths who have jumped out of the walls at us: wagging their fingers, rattling their clipboards and brandishing their regulations and cheap biros; telling us that they presume to tell us what is best for us .

What is actually best for us is to reclaim the lost land of true liberalism and true conservatism, which have been displaced by policies of commercialism and popularity-at-any-cost, developed as Thatcherism and taken to new highs (or lows) by the monstrous architects of so-called ‘New Labour’ and now the current leaders of the consensus-coalition-in-conflict. For me, reclaiming that lost land means revisiting the principles of J S Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ and understanding the basis of Disraeli’s Tory democracy, as well as understanding and accepting that we are not all created equal in this world at all. Such understanding and acceptance of the real diversity of society is the foundation stone for our mutual compassion towards this “poor, frail, fallen humankind”.

It is the rank intolerance which is behind all the banning, as well as the control- freakery, that really sticks in my craw. Who do these people think that they are? In his book “State of Fear”, Michael Crichton mentions a woman who founded a movement to ban di-hydrogen monoxide because “it can cause drowning”. A number of morons then supported her 'movement' to ban water, which very nicely suggests that those keen on banning things are not necessarily armed with any knowledge or powers of reasoning or even appreciation of all the consequences of what they are doing. It seems that they are just empowering themselves at the expense of others’ enjoyments. That sounds more like a perversion to me than does smoking tobacco.

If the fox-hunting ban bribe to the chattering classes, in return for backing Blair’s invasion of Iraq, had ever been effective as legislation, thousands of hounds would, presumably, have been destroyed (as they are not pet dogs) and all paid hunt staff would have been put out of work; all for the sake of banning one effective means of controlling a wantonly destructive pest which (most seem to agree) needs to be controlled in some way.

The fact that the tastes and values of the urban rabble and chattering classes are increasingly pandered to by ignorant and thoughtless bullies most certainly does not make modern Britain a tolerant, inclusive, classless or liberal society at all. It is time to take a real stand against all the flummery and to support organizations such as FOREST; the Countryside Alliance, and the British Association for Shooting and Conservation; otherwise, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will not be long before there are serious moves to outlaw the actual possession and use of tobacco and to ban shooting.

Why not take a leaf out of the book of the distillers and brewers? They, despite the devastation caused by alcohol abuse (ranging from alcohol-induced dementia and sudden death to vehicle accidents causing death and permanent injury to wholly innocent by-standers), seem to have done rather better (by lobbying) than just to avoid tighter controls on the purchase and consumption of alcohol and have even managed to abolish licensing hours altogether. Where were the tight-lipped puritans then?

Practical Resolutions

2012-01-02T10:14:00.003-04:00

My resistance against temptation is a breached wall; a crumbling bastion; a deserted trench.

Besides, I like smoking. However, readily available, truly great cigarettes (such as Sullivan Powell; B&H Cairo) have gone forever and nothing will bring them back. The cigarettes here are either so strong that they induce a coughing fit or so weak that you smoke twenty in a row and look at the empty packet, wondering what that was all about, and so last night I made a practical resolution: I shall keep to a pipe; cigars and snuff from now on (on New Year's Eve I did try a pinch of an American guest's snus, which did nothing at all for me and, frankly, I just don't see myself taking it up). The trick will be to avoid inhaling too much of the stronger smoke because anyone who has ever blown pipe of cigar smoke through a white hankerchief will tell you that inhaling it too much is not a great idea and simply defending smokers' rights is no reason to follow John Ford, Ava Gardner and Tallulah Bankhead to the need for an oxygen concentrator.

Swinging The Lead

2011-12-27T09:38:00.000-04:00

I am swinging the lead (as described in an earlier post) and just let you have this so far today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBXubx-y-4w&feature=related

In The Mood

2011-12-26T14:11:00.000-04:00

I don't know why but I just thought of this scene in The Glenn Miller Story (1953) starring James Stewart and June Allyson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pm-p2nZ0zo

Christmas Spirit

2011-12-26T11:50:00.000-04:00

I have to say that (apart from the golden period of childhood up to the age of about six), with its months of expectation, commercialism and frenetic scrummage, I have nearly always found the traditional British approach to Christmas something of a disappointment and a depressing anti-climax; especially when the summer holiday adverts on the TV start before the last mouthful of pudding has gone down. I have also come to detest the thought of cold weather; the rain here is relentless at the moment and the summer is a kind of rainy season but at least it's warm rain.

Summer on the beach always struck me as an odd phenomenon but now it just seems 'normal'; not that we actually go on the beach much; maybe because we are always, but for the road, within reach and sight of the beach. However, I guess emigrants question things that they used to take for granted and challenge the received wisdom of their upbringings in a way that most people never do. That has been liberating: you really don't have to eat certain, prescribed foods on Christmas Day and, moreover, some of them (such as frozen turkey) are, actually, rather horrid.

There is certainly less commercialism about the Christmas season in Brazil than in Europe; maybe because they celebrate certain other days in a similar way but we were invited to what was nearly a midnight feast, on Christmas Eve, at the house of a mother of a friend: an enormous table was heaped with what used to be called a 'cold collation' of Edwardian proportions: meats and fowls of various kinds with accompanying fruits and sauces, as well as cinnamon bread, bacalau (salted cod), and various accompanying side dishes (including chestnuts!). The friend's mother and her daughters must have catered that night for around forty people. This is a practice of hospitality in a private household on a scale which our great grandparents might have known but it is largely lost to Europe.

In the midst of all the feasting and the conversation, I sensed very clearly the proper Spirit of Christmas Present and remembered something too of my very youthful Christmases Past.

Note The Date

2011-12-25T12:51:00.002-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq57KHUdeDY&feature=rellist&playnext=1&list=PLA53EFF54146E3362

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T10:36:00.000-04:00

From the beach, The Naked Ape wishes all his Naked Friends A Very Merry Christmas! Tomorrow we are having BBQ lamb cutlets, tomatoes and baked spuds. Stuff turkey.

The Falklands

2011-12-21T06:22:00.002-04:00

Here we go again. But this time Argentina's preliminary to grabbing at the Falklands is not instigated by a Colonel-Dictator, it is instigated by the finding of oil. There does not seem to be any legitimate argument that the Falkland Islands are not British soil, and stained with British blood in defence of its own at that. Naturally, I find it disappointing that Brazil has seen fit to back the Argie claims (I didn't even think that Brazil and Argentina were on particularly good terms); however, whenever oil is discovered it seems to rob the best of the world's politicians of their senses. I just hope that Cammers and Little Willy can find a swift and sensible resolution to the shipping ban without giving an inch or spilling any more blood.

Of course, it is at times like this when one realizes with a quickening pulse; sun and scenery or not, and England with all thy faults, where one's loyalties lie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVcBqlVre6Q

Coats and Ties

2011-12-20T11:51:00.002-04:00

I like what Sinatra says about coats and ties and more establishments should cease pandering to the whims of the arrogant and the impolite, who demand to discard their coats and ties in restaurants and theatres and bring gym and rough countrywear into such settings. They should tell them to go elsewhere. The world needs more Frank Sinatras and fewer roughnecks. Something that I have noticed, however, is how well-dressed most footballers and managers are; even in the face of the nearly ubiquitous, post-modernist, stubble-bearded, estuary/slack-voiced slobbishness (most evident in the young Hollywood set); which so many fashionistos and 'style leaders' slyly abet for the sake of popularity and the [i]blunt, dough, wonga, spondoolicks[/i] that it brings them.

Frank Sinatra Has A Cold

2011-12-19T12:10:00.001-04:00

This is all worth a read:

http://br.bing.com/images/search?q=ava+gardner+in+london&view=detail&id=C796048EDC665E1BD8DABD60AA365314EFC17BB9&first=61&FORM=IDFRIR

House of Lords: Reform

2011-12-19T11:18:00.001-04:00

It is indeed high time that the House of Lords were reformed. While there were still many landed, hereditary peers allowed to sit, there was at least some territorial basis for the constitution of an unelected chamber. There should be an elected second chamber with 'senators'; life baronies would cease to have any purpose and they should all be completely abolished and the uppity little pushers and convicts (think Archer) who have them should be sent away for good. So there.

A Nice Souvenir

2011-12-19T09:48:00.000-04:00

Click to enlarge.

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-18T09:25:00.000-04:00

Whether one agreed with his actual opinions or not, the world needed Christopher Hitchens and needs more like him. Once we had the late Robin Day and the late Bernard Levin, Jeremy Paxman is in a similar mould: uncompromising investigators of the truth and fearless exposers of humbug, lies and hypocrisy. Interestingly, Brazil's premier broadsheet, O Globo, featured a half page obituary to Hitchens in yesterday's edition, demonstrating that his characteristics are broadly appreciated and admired.

Come on, Britannia, it's time to get back on the prow of that ship and face the world again. Men such as Hitchens give us hope that she will arise again.

St Ives's Near Escape

2011-12-17T09:43:00.001-04:00

I recently saw a reference to Joachim von Ribbentrop's liking for oysters Czarina on Admiral Cod and I googled v R. To my amazement, I saw that it has recently been discovered that he planned to assume ownership of Cornwall after the War and to reside in St Ives. He obviously had not been to the dearest of small cities.

However, he did not bank on these boys with their Lee Enfield rifles and their Webley & Scott revolvers:

Can't you please oblige us with a Brenn gun?

And this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V3SqxUomwk

The Girl From Ipanema

2011-12-17T09:03:00.000-04:00

They all mispronounce 'Ipanema' but this is probably my fav recording of this number:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1xj0mYtRHo&feature=endscreen&NR=1

What a natural entertainer NKC was.

And Her Mother Came Too

2011-12-17T08:25:00.000-04:00

Listen to this medley. Great Stuff. What a difference from modern 'entertainers'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd1UggUmqV8&feature=endscreen&NR=1

Leaving The EU

2011-12-16T11:50:00.002-04:00

There is now a real prospect that the UK might leave the EU and if the government has the guts for it, I should raise an unusual cheer for abandoning that total shambles of an 'organization'.

The Eccentric Club

2011-12-16T10:33:00.000-04:00

The Eccentric Club has been revived in a real way (Patron HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who attends functions) and there is everything that you need to know about it here: http://www.eccentricclub.co.uk/

Application for membership is open to all, subject to proposal and seconding and granting membership (domestic and overseas), is up to the club in the usual way. The first point of contact should be the club secretary, Imants von Wenden.

The club has a magazine and stages functions, including dinners at various venues in clubland, while the club finds its own West End premises.

I urge my readers to give consideration to joining the club which is more about valuing individualism than insanity and it also has a charitable objective.

Whales and Sea Eagles and Skuas

2011-12-15T07:10:00.001-04:00

The whales pass by here every year at around this time and they are circling in front of the house (maybe 200 yards away) and there is a sea eagle on the beach and the skuas are diving like arrows and skimming the breaking waves. Unfortunately, the sea air has corroded the camera and the mobile 'phone just isn't up to the job. I should really get disposable cameras for such times. I am patiently waiting the tail flip, which is spectacular.

In Praise of a Certain Kind of Idleness

2011-12-13T09:30:00.001-04:00

I have to admit that, whatever my choices have been, the blood of the puritan runs deep in my veins and his work ethic is etched on my soul, so I find it very hard to do absolutely nothing or just to relax; wholly failing to understand Ava Gardner's statement that doing nothing was as agreeable as floating in warm water. However, I have lost the chains and shackles of modern corporate serfdom (which represent irresistible pay packets to most people who wear them) and now that I am nearing the top of the escalator (so to speak), I remain as convinced when I first read it thirty years ago, that Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness should win a place on every youngster's bookshelves (or in their Kindles).

It is not a book commending mere idleness for its own sake, as the characteristically provocative title might suggest but commending more leisure and recreation in our increasingly mechanized (and now digitalized) age, in place of being at work or, more precisely just being seen to be at work, as this should be discouraged, when it is not productive.

The world seems to be moving in this direction with more and more people allowed to spend significant work time at home. I know of one fellow, who seems to be well thought of by his Quango employer, who works at home a lot: he gets the job done but also seems to spend significant periods in leisure pursuits, such as tending to his pipe collection, and Skyping friends, over coffee. "Bully for him!" say I. Mind you, with all the government cuts going on, I hope, for his sake, that no one ever notices that they are paying a part-timer a full-time salary.

The Sound of The Sea

2011-12-12T08:10:00.000-04:00

Well, Le Coin Perdu was not meant to be: sold to another, just as inquiries were being made! However, it may well be possible to find a garden plot over on the lagoon and travel there by boat. I have to say that I should miss sleeping and waking to the sound of the sea forty yards away and so it is at least a blessing not to have had to make the choice.

However, a friend is one of those who is busily trying to satisfy himself that his life, significantly spent in buildings with walls for a view and in underground trains, is The Good Life. Of course, he is able to spice up his accounts with tales of the Travellers' Club; Annabel's, old cherry brandy and shooting parties, involving small talk with some rather thick-sounding old buffers - and then I wonder about it all and consider that there is just no way in which I could possibly be persuaded to return to all that, after having been here for five years. It seems rather curious too because I know just how such people, knowing that there must be some advantage in living close to nature in a tropical place, forever fantasize about making a break for the border but can never quite bring themselves to give up what they think they have, in return for bliss in their own Coin Perdu.

One thing is for sure, nightingales or no nightingales, there is no sound of the sea in Berkeley Square.

Robert Cummings

2011-12-11T07:47:00.000-04:00

Here is Robert Cummings (1908-1990), Grace Kelly's 'other man' in the gripping 1954 Hitchcock thriller Dial M For Murder. Long before the Harrison Fords and Sean Conneries, Cummings was noted for his perpetual youthfulness. He was also reckoned to be Cary Grant before Archie Leach started playing Cary Grant to perfection.

Real Traps in a Virtual World

2011-12-09T16:10:00.000-04:00

Having been deprived on the internet at home, I have had to make use of an internet shop for the last couple of weeks. Here they are called 'WAN House', and comprise a darkened, air conditioned room to which holidaying Carioca children flock, apparently preferring rap muzak, Grand Theft Auto XII and internet interactiom with their absent friends than beach volleyball, swimming or even the gym.

It occurred to me that, in a sense, I should be grateful for time out because it has meant that I have rediscovered the mid-day sun, formerly such a magnet for mad dogs and Englishmen; although, maybe, it is ironic that I rediscovered it on walks to the local WAN House. Moreover, it is mentioned in Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure (if you have not read it, imagine P G Wodehouse in the jungle), that the Brazilian sun does not cause sunstroke and, whatever the reason, this does seem to be true.

It also occurred to me that computers and the internet have ensnared us in real traps, voluntary enetered, in a virtual world, from which we dare not escape, in case we are missing out on something. One of my father's friends, an elderly and well qualified atomic physicist, once said to my father that if he went offline he felt as though he had lost a limb. Yet he is someone who got through the first fifty or sixty years of his life satisfactorily enough with books, paper, pens, telephones and the post office and here we are clustered around the screen, desperate to research and to express ourselves in this virtual space. Just how virtual it is can be appreciated when all the date on your computer just sudenly disappears (don't worry all unpublished material has been saved by e-mail attachement). Overall, it seems to me that it is high time to review and revise my own approach to all this and to ensure that, in the future, the computer and the internet serve my needs, rather than take possession of so much of my time in contrived idleness, masquerading as industry.

Reverting to Nature

2011-12-08T07:31:00.000-04:00

I walked to the town along the seafront two days ago to retrieve the computer. I wore shoes for the first time in several months: sound London shoes that fit. Normally, I have been wearing 'Jesus sandals', in varying degrees of disintegration and, even though I am English (well seven eighths Cornish, with some smattering of Anglo-Irish and English blood), no socks. I have to say that, after a round trip of four miles, I felt crippled and, more specifically, my poor feet told me, in no uncertain terms, that they felt as though they had been smothered and then given a hammering with a sculptor's mallet. Accordingly, it appears that, all joking aside, we really are returning to a State of Nature and, after discarding our clothes, we will be giving up the house and looking for a des res in the Mata Atlantica any day now.

Back on-line

2011-12-07T12:12:00.000-04:00

The computer has been completely cleaned and repaired and we are back on-line. However, I am now so behind with Book IV that I shall have to knuckle-down to it; which means less blogging! Still I shall try to do some.

Interim News

2011-11-15T09:01:00.002-04:00

Computer is still at the worksho~; a few blogs are in m/s and Book III has been released early.

Windows Crash

2011-11-11T09:20:00.000-04:00

My computer´s Windows Vista system has crashed; hence the silence. As the computer and the Windows system are both British it is proving the devil´s own job to get this sorted out in Brasil. Any suggestions are most welcome...

The Agony; The Ecstacy. Another Eden. Le Coin Perdu

2011-11-07T09:38:00.001-04:00

Ocean-front plots are always smaller than those anywhere else. Accordingly, this plot has a very small garden and courtyard. We have always wanted to have a large garden; both productive and ornamental. Now we have found a perfect spot, on a cliff, sixty feet above the main lagoon, with a 180' vista of the lagoon, the strand, and the ocean as well as various landmarks. There are no street lights over there or near neighbours so the absence of 'light pollution' will mean that there will be spectacular night skies. Seven acres is enough to do what we want and the grounds (which have been neglected) are stocked with everything from clove and cinnamon trees to jack fuit; bananas; coconuts; citrus fruits. Dendrobium orchids and other symbiotic plants, including air plants, hang from the trees around the house; there is an enormous loggia smothered in bouganvillea, and there is a cliff path down to the property's own 120 metre lagoon beach.

The trouble is (imagine the dilemma), that we love the current house and the constant sound of the ocean but the other is probably too good an opportunity to miss...Watch this space and, meanwhile, here is a piccie of the lagoon beach; more to follow, assuming that L'Opération: Le Coin Perdu proceeds.

Hot-Bedding Kristin Scott-Thomas

2011-11-06T09:33:00.000-04:00

I realized the other day that I might well have hot-bedded Kristin Scott-Thomas but I don't remember anything about it. Well you don't remember much from the first five days of life. OK, OK - we were born in the same hospital within a few days of each other. Back then there was only one maternity hospital in Cornwall.

Packing a Cinematic Punch

2011-11-05T10:14:00.003-04:00

Maybe it's jsut because my mother took us to see it for the first time on the big screen when we were really very small, maybe it's because it is, on any view performed, directed and filmed with the sum of perfect accomplishment and, no matter how many times I see it, I don't think that any other scene, in any other film, packs the same punch as this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBAmLm_jYyY&feature=related

Impedimenta: Free The Spirit

2011-11-04T08:25:00.002-04:00

If you are going to live abroad, I strongly recommend that you consider the things to take and the things to off-load. We have still got a mountain of stuff stored in England and really wish that we had got rid of most of it. If you make the leap, you will soon realize that most possessions are just an encumbrance on - essentially freedom of movement: true impedimenta! Moving it all around (and paying for it), insuring it, housing it, securing it, worrying about it. Better by far to get rid of it!

Moreover, lingering memories of lugging and hauling and humping ruddy-great, mammoth-like suitcases (stuffed and straining to breaking point with useless rubbish), from the nervy scrummage surrounding airport carousels and pushing them around on groaning trolleys, with defective wheels, mean that I would never, ever, ever (I don't care what she says), ever again travel on an airplane with more than: a down pillow, a good book, a notepad and pencils, a box of sweets, a snuff box, a few large handkerchiefs, a hipflask, eau de cologne (each when permissible), a toothbrush, a razor, a comb and the smallest possible cabin bag to put it all in. There is some great merit, on short trips, in cutting it all down to: toothbrush, razor and comb.

Then you just pause as you stroll towards the exit, and watch the senseless, dyspeptic, frowning lemmings scuttling off down the rat-run towards the carousel. You smile a little smile - and get the hell outa there.

The Lovely Evelyn Laye, CBE

2011-11-01T17:19:00.002-04:00

Photograph by Bassano Studio, 1917.
Having mentioned Evelyn Laye (1900-1996), here she is singing 'I'll See You Again' from Noel Coward's 'Bitter Sweet':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pz-d-ws9q4

More about her later but, for now: Prince Albert (later George VI) first saw her on stage when she was nineteen and was so overwhelmed that he sent out for flowers in the London night and presented them to her backstage, stammering that he'd like to invite her out but that their families would not have allowed it. However, they remained friends for the rest of his life and it was Evelyn Laye who was responsible for the introduction of Lionel Loag (the speech therapist) and she also gave the King breathing and singing exercises. The Queen Mother seems to have known of his remote infatuation and humorously tolerated it, referring to her as 'your girlfriend'. When Evely Laye was nearing the end of her long life, the Queen Mother suggested to the then Prime Minister, John 'Dimbo' Major, that she be made a Dame of the British Empire but, useless lump that he was, he did nothing about it: he was probably caught up with banging the fragrant Edwina Curry.

Book III

2011-11-01T14:38:00.003-04:00

Remember remember the 30th of November:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Mens-Etiquette-Short-Sporting/dp/1844681149/ref=pd_sim_b_36

Jessie Matthews

2011-11-01T08:07:00.038-04:00

Jessie Matthews, OBE (1907-1981) has a City of Westminster Council green commemorative plaque on the Blue Posts pub in Berwick Street, Soho, London, W1, where she was born into poverty. It describes her as 'Musical Comedy Star of Stage and Screen' . I like that. It states the truth.Indeed in the 1930s she was undoubtedly Britains most popular and biggest star. Having begun by understudying Gertrude Lawrence in Charlot's Revues in the USA, she got her chance when Gertrude fell ill and the public loved her. She introduced to the world such famous numbers as Noel Coward's 'A Room With A View' and Cole Porter's 'Let's Do It'. From the show 'Evergreen' she got her signature tune 'Over My Shoulder'.

Post WWII, she was less popular but she became Mrs Dale in 'Mrs Dale's Diary' a BBC radio 'soap' opera, in which she enjoyed considerable success. However, it is sad to think that our grandparents thought of her as the biggest musical comedy star and my generation remembers her for playing the part of a middle-aged matron. She continued to undertake stage work.

Her second marriage to Sonnie Hale caused a dent in her popularity for a while as she took him away from the popular Evelyn Laye.

Anyway, here she is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4-lr_UlOOM&feature=grec_index

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzmek_wyQI4&feature=related

And - eat your heart out, Ginger Rogers! In the USA Jessie was called 'The Dancing Divinity' and she was judged by many good judges to have been a better dancer than Ginger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIxoKukHgrM

See those kicks:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EqGmJgVbtA&feature=related

And, finally, what became her signature tune, from Evergreen (1934):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjquAEjkrrs

Just Before We Set Off

2011-10-31T21:57:00.002-04:00

Just before Flash, her apprentice and I (all perfectly dressed, of course), set off on our annual, mid-Atlantic rendez-vous - here are Jack and Binnie: our chosen recording for the flight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fulGrFgMy-I

Above is Binnie, just before the take-off, so to speak.
Blessed Be!

Flash's Apprentice Familiar

2011-10-31T08:33:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year again and the broomstick has been buffed-up by a 'daily' hired specifically for the purpose and Flash and I will be setting off again in that moment that does not quite exist and returning before it has passed, for the Coven's annual Mid-Atlantic Meeting. However, this year, at her insistence, Flash has an Apprentice Familiar onboard. As yet unnamed, and all black (a big advantage for a Familiar), I'll try to get a picture later today when the nest is less guarded.

Gertie

2011-10-28T06:32:00.003-04:00

Although she was extremely stylish and could give the impression of a great beauty, Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952) was only just the right side of pretty and had nothing much more than a sweet voice. However, those who saw her on the stage said that she lit it up: a living example of 'It' in action. It doesn't really come across in the few films that she made and (The Band Wagon aside), a similar thing can be said of Jack Buchanan. They had a stage presence that was largely lost on celluloid. The affection in which she was held was so great that Noel Coward could not trust himself to attend her funeral.

Sheridan Morley, one of her biographers, shrewdly put her presence down to her compassion and, to my mind, in saying this, he half draws back the curtain on 'It'. I also think (and it has to come from sound recordings), that she had extraordinary senses of timing, irony and wry humour. The recordings show how she could bring her audience onto her side; see her point of view and like her. That George and Ira Gershwin wrote Someone To Watch Over Me for her also says something; not to mention all the Coward songs and plays, written for her to perform. Here she is singing it a year before she died.

Maybe I am just a sentimentalist - but I don't think that anyone could ever sing it better than she:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZDQKlYMcG0

My favourite story about her is that, after she was bankrupted over her wildly extravagant spending habits, she bought a house in England but then went to live in America. Her agent asked her whether this was sensible. Her response was to ask him to look into the cost of installing a swimming pool.

London Pride

2011-10-27T10:52:00.002-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-pYvloAADg&feature=related

More on The Gates.

2011-10-26T15:12:00.001-04:00

Metalurgica Max arrived early to repair the gates and did a stonking job, in surprisingly little time (a couple of hours). He is not cheap but it is so well done that I asked for a quote for him to renovate the other parts, which the aggressive, salt-laden winds have corroded. It is just over half as much again as it was five years ago but then there is probably more to do. A less sensible choice than Buckingham Palace-style iron railings to bound a property forty metres from high tide mark, with a notorious Spring sou'-westerly, I cannot imagine and more sensible neighbours have wooden fences or concrete 'railings'; still they were not our choice as they are a part of the house as it was built for the original owner.

Skilled craftsmen in Brazil are not as rare as they have become in the UK (and, probably other parts of the so-called 'first' world), where most modern buildings comprise mixtures of pre-fabs of some kind and kiln-dried green softwoods, stapled onto thick cardboard; all contributing to the dull sameness of modern 'design', and more or less guaranteed to crumble and fall apart once the mortgage has been paid.

Brazilian trades and crafts run in families and Metallurgica Max's sons will probably become metal-workers. What is astounding about these people (and most admirable), is that they arrive with an exiguous array of tools and hardly any materials and achieve, in short order, extremely satisfactory results; they also give you a quote and they stick to it, even if the job turns out to be trickier than, at first, assessed. There is no knowing shaking of the head and apprehensive sucking of teeth, accompanied by the cynical, British: "OOh! I don't like the look of that Guv!" to exaggerate the extent of the job and to inflate the price. Moreover, it is satisfying to have reached the stage of being able to communicate reasonably effectively in Portuguese, and I am sure that this means that they no longer quote me a 'Gringo price'.

I strongly dislike being addressed as 'Patrao'

roughly equivalent to 'Master', something more than 'Senhor' ( a business-like 'Sir') and smacks of flattery; it can, sometimes, presage a rip-off but not this time. Incidentally, if tradesmen or business people here declaim that you are 'familia' after you have struck a deal with them, you just know for certain that you have been well and truly screwed. Again, though, not this time.

Well done! Metalurgica Max!

I have a friend who has a farm in Dorset and he employs a farm manager who, in best Thomas Hardy tradition, addresses him in a thick 'Dosset' accent as 'Maasterr' - and my friend seems to revel in this. I just cannot understand it and the offering or the acceptance of such a degree of obsequiousness in our age makes my flesh creep; after all, some people with real titles let them lie idle.

Budd Shirtmaker Dragon Chairs

2011-10-24T14:47:00.002-04:00

I have just learned that the pair of dragon chairs are still in the shop (in the windows) and that their importance to the history of the shop is appreciated by the new owners.

The Harry Potter Factor

2011-10-24T09:58:00.000-04:00

Randall Couch: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/popescu/popcouch/

He recently wrote, on another site, of the internal 'regeneration' of the the charming old interior of Budd Shirtmakers in the Princes Arcade off Piccadilly and mentioned the Harry Potter factor. Budd were recently bought from the Webster family by the corporate group which owns (and, in fairness, saved), the tailor Huntsman in Savile Row.

As it used to be, the shop was a bit of jumble of fine things; the paintwork was old and the fixtures and fittings were of the dark wood that one would really expect from shirtmakers beloved by everyone from Terry-Thomas through to John Hurt; Edward Fox, and Hugh Bonneville as well as professionals, politicians and tycoons; in fact everyone with knowledge of this gem of a shop, managed by the venerable Mr Rowley, with veteran cutter Mr Butcher.

I rather regret the introduction of light wood fittings and order to the place, and the removal of anything (such as the dragon chair, in the picture), which might be reckoned, by the new owners, to intimidate the sort of people who, they miss to notice, will never become Budd customers anyway. They have indulged in an exercise to broaden the customer base: to attract all the monied celebrities and barrowboy traders who might have been put off by the old shop. But it's a short-sighted exercise because it entails the loss of the kind of magick that inspired the Harry Potter stories. Randall Couch properly observes that these stories, which hark back to the mysterious nature of the existence of all things, are immensely popular with the young and I am quite sure that the senior tutors at Hogwarts are all Budd customers.

So why do business purchasers have to tinker with a winning formula? Is it just because they have been on some dumb management course, learned a bit of jargon and have to set about applying the newly learned marketing techniques; quite missing the point that what they are actually doing is rubbing out a real attraction to new customers and things of affectionate remembrance for older customers? I can remember old Mr Webster sitting in that chair in the 1980s and I'm going to ask them to put it back.

A Gate Fell Off

2011-10-24T07:54:00.000-04:00

Eaten away by the maresia (salt-laden wind), a huge iron gate fell off its hinges on Saturday. I am waiting for Metalurgica Max to arrive and repair it. Looking at the railings as well, I realize that they need major repairs.

There is always something...

Who Wants To Live Forever?

2011-10-21T10:03:00.000-04:00

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon,

Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face

Lighting a little Hour or two - is gone.

From Edward FitzGerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Omar's tomb, in Iran, appears above).

There are many religions and philosophies which seek to persuade us, without any shred of scientifically valuable evidence that, in a sense, we are all destined to live forever. Some of them have many followers and others only a few. Some of us, they say, will go to heaven and others to hell. It normally depends on how well we tow the line and behave on earth.

Heaven can be a place where cherubim and seraphim sit on large, fluffy, cotton-wool clouds, melodiously playing stringed instruments. Those souls allowed in effectively have free tickets to listen to the harmonies for eternity; all beneath the benevolent gaze of a white-bearded Papa Noel figure, who is the Big Boss. In another version, heaven might be a series of graded, tranquil and fertile gardens, for the righteous, allocated according to just how righteous the righteous have been on earth. These are thronged with virgins, allocated at the happy ratio of upwards of seventy to one, in favour of every male soul. The female souls too may have their hearts' desires, which, presumably, need to include being one of around seventy consorts of every good male soul. Everyone,though,may listen to the babbling brooks and drink of the unfermented juice of the vine.

Hell, in many slightly different versions, is generally: too warm for comfort; the company is questionable and the length of stay indefinite.

There are variations on these themes; each more or less the invention of uneducated minds in primitive times but the themes and imagery and the beliefs that they engender have been followed down centuries by virtue of the pressure of compliance, enforced with threats of damnation of unbelievers. These threats are inconsiderately passed down the generations, as though the reason "I had to believe it and, therefore, so will you" were any reason at all, let alone reason enough, to enforce an unreasoned and unreasonable terror upon successive, generations of entire nations. This terror is powerful enough to have retained its grip, among some people, even into our technologically advanced age.

Some, such as the Roman Catholics, even went so far in the middle ages as to improve upon the original scheme for life-everlasting in the scriptures and invented purgatory (a more or less nasty middle-world), as a place for penitence, punishment and redemption postponed for the souls of those christened adults who had failed to purchase (like a financial futures' option), for hard cash, absolution for their sins from the church on earth. Some other churches, such as the happy-clappy 'evangelical' churches , are even now heavily into garnering financial incentive payments from the gullible. Limbo was also invented as a wonderful exception to the summary condemnation of the souls of unbaptized infants.

The evident decline in any religious belief in the western world is a necessary background to what I have to say. People who have lost (or never had) any belief in 'life after death' are almost certainly going to be inclined to cling to the worldly certainties that they do have. And they will cling to them, however uphill the road leads, because, after all, something is better than nothing.

"But is it?"

I should add, as a footnote, which might be of interest, even though it is not strictly relevant to what I have to say, that I do entertain a simple belief that all that we are, body and soul, is absorbed back into the generality of the physical and the spiritual in the universe, after we die. By 'the spiritual' in us, I mean our feelings and emotions; our hearts. Whether, after we die, we continue, in any sense, to exist as individual entities, I have no more real idea than anyone else who has not yet died - but I am quite sure that I am against the idea.

Trafalgar Day

2011-10-21T09:47:00.002-04:00

Today is Trafalgar Day and we gratefully commemorate the battle and remember the death of Admiral Lord Nelson. An observer onboard Lord Collingwood's HMS Royal Sovereign wrote of the moment that, victory assured, news was brought of Nelson's death: "Chaps that fought like the devil, sit down and cry like a wench."

Thousands lined the funeral route and one witness wrote: "The sound of all the men removing their hats as the coffin passed sounded like a wave breaking on the shore."

The twelve seamen from HMS Victory, who were the pall-bearers, covered Nelson's coffin with flags during the service but, as they did so, they spontaneously tore strips off the large George and put them in their coats over their hearts.

The Hall Walk

2011-10-20T10:40:00.000-04:00

I just found this nice film of The Hall Walk from the Dearest of Small Cities to Polruan. Watch out for the Swiss Cottage style house after the ferry crossing - it's Ferryside, where Daphne du Maurier wrote her first book The Loving Spirit and from where she was married, going by boat up Pont Pill to Lanteglos Church, which are both shown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FGhq15RTnE

Amazing Amy

2011-10-20T00:33:00.001-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo5--q2GPNo&feature=related

This Reminds Me Of Old Silver, Who Distantly Remembered Circus Tricks

2011-10-20T00:08:00.000-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLoYFvbR0XY

How Tall Was Rudolph Valentino?

2011-10-19T11:02:00.001-04:00

Written accounts vary as to Rudolph Valentino's height: I have seen it put at between five feet eight to five feet ten and there is a photograph of Valentino standing next to the boxer Jack Dempsey, which makes Valentino look like a midget - but Dempsey was only six feet one. However, camera distance and angle can make a big difference to proportion and perspective.

So how tall was Valentino and is it possible now to find out? Well I sent out a couple of inquiries. The first was to Anda Rowland, the gov'nor of his London tailors Anderson & Sheppard; Anda Rowland immediately replied and promised to look into their records and did so the next day. The second was to Campbell's funeral parlour in New York. They laid Valentino to rest, and have not yet replied. When they do, I'll put up the result.

The Anderson & Sheppard ledgers show that Valentino was measured by them on 21st November 1925 and, from the following measurements (note the contemporary comment on the shoulders), the current head cutters in that firm estimate that Valentino was 'approximately six feet tall':

Chest: 38"
Very sloping shoulders
Overcoat length 62"
Jacket length 31"
Outside leg 42"
Inside leg 32"
High waisted rise 10"
Waist 32"

This all comes from one of the best firms of tailors in the world and it goes without saying that one accepts the figures; after all they made perfectly fitting clothes from them. Moreover, they certainly well-disguised the sloping shoulders, just as Hawes & Curtis did for Robert Donat, who suffered from the same condition.

It seems generally to be accepted that Greta Garbo was five feet seven tall. Here is a picture of her with John Barrymore in a film still:

It is certainly true that film studios sometimes played hooky with actors' heights (with built-up shoes and even boxes to stand on) but let's take it that this picture shows them at their real heights. I have seen John Barrymore's height described as five feet ten to five feet eleven but never less and that seems consistent with this shot.

Here is John Barrymore receiving an acting award from Rudolph Valentino and Valentino looks a little taller (although that might be accounted for by camera distance and angle):

But all this makes it fairly plain that Valentino was much nearer six feet than he was to five feet eight. All that I can think is that the jealous, adverse publicity (which probably contributed to his early death), continued afterwards.

But (to twist a quotation from F E Smith): even if we are now none the wiser, at least we are far better informed!

Here is a youtube clip of Rudolph Valentino literally introducing the Argentinian tango to the world, in Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse (1921); he is dancing with Beatrice Dominguez (who tragically died before the film was released) - please be patient as the (rather absurd) first male dancer in the clip is not Valentino:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKQ06jtaYvk&feature=fvsr

They also said that Valentino had a 'squeaky' voice and would never have made the transition to the 'talkies' - another myth that is put paid to in this clip of him singing two songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SDIjrC70Sw&feature=related

It is clear that he had a pleasing baritone - and no more 'accent' than Omar Sharif.

One final, revealing fact is that my twenty-one year old daughter had to be told who Fred Astaire was - but when I asked her whether she knew who Rudolph Valentino was, she replied

"Of course!"

Evanescence and Regret

2011-10-18T07:57:00.002-04:00

When I was young and starting out in the world, I knew an old Hindu and, in reply to my youthful expressions of striving through life and not surrendering, he just used to smile and say: "Life is about resignation, my friend; resignation!" As I have grown older I have come around to his point of view. Whether there is a "Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will" or not, we are bound to time-out at some stage. The knowledge that this is so is borne in on us from an early age. We become aware that loved ones: people and pets; the rich and famous - all die - and that we too will die.

This fundamental fact actually adds savour to to the enjoyment of the time that we have and sharpens

our senses to the beauty of the passing moment: evidenced in everything from our appreciation of the budding, flowering and dying of a summer garden rose, to the sun rising and setting each day, or the waxing and waning of the moon; the ebb and flow of the tide; the passing sound of a bell, or the fading away of a long-remembered scent.

We may revisit, actually or in memory, the places and the doorways through which we walked long ago and from where others watched us go but they bear no perceptible traces of these happenings, they just framed our lives; our movements; our thoughts; our dreams; our yearnings; our arrivals; our departures. Others come and paint over the paint on the wood and perform their own events in these places and when we return and stare up at them we realize, most unexpectedly, that what we miss most, what hits hardest and most cruelly, is not all the 'little deaths at parting' but all the time that we have wasted since we left: and no time is more wasted than that wasted in regret.

The picture is of the great three-sided clock on Platform I at Paddington Station; which is one of the few buildings that, over recent years, has been immensely improved and well conserved by the spate of civic 'regeneration'.

More on Addicts and Addictions: Merely The Beginning

2011-10-16T12:29:00.001-04:00

Toping Dylan Thomas

The literary agent who sold rights in my first book took a quick look at a summary for this book (sic) and said that he didn't see a commercial book. This is understandable. After all, I have not (like Russell Brand) called it a "Booky Wook" or (like 'Shed' Simove with his "What Men Think About Apart From Sex") left all its pages blank. However, given that the agent saw a commercial book in my first book and that book has delighted a few thousand happy purchasers (worldwide) since it was published in October 2008, I hope that he is always wrong. If he is always right, then this will join my burgeoning list of books that delight the few. Either way, someone is going to be right and someone is going to be wrong but someone is also going to be pleased and I shall be relieved. I shall be relieved of an obligation that I feel to set the record straighter than it is abouts addicts and addictions.

This is not intended to be an apology for the wastrel addicts and alcoholics (who, I am sure, are legion) or for those who lead them astray (all of whom deserve a good kicking); neither is it meant to be any kind of encouragement to leading a life of excess and wastefulness.

But I have noticed that the world is full of smug 'recovering' alcoholics and addicts, lecturing us with fingers wagging, from their self-appointed moral pedestals, of the dangers of using alcohol, tobacco, drugs and the devastation caused by addiction: devastation to self-respect, career, family and friends. They leave out of account as moral anomalies or, maybe, unspoken exceptions that they think prove their precious rule, all those achievers, with addictions, who never wanted to 'recover'. I expect that S T Coleidge would be there with his opium and, if he had not been there with his opium, we would never have had The Ryme of The Anciemt Mariner or Kubla Khan. Dylan Thomas would certainly be there, sliding under the table with Richard Burton, on their fire water and, if they hadn't had their fire water, Dylan would never have written Under Milk Wood for us and Richard would not have so well performed it, even if, without the firewater and the chain-smoked fags, they had both lived to be ninety.

I suspect that Amy Winehouse wouldn't have written her best lyrics or sung at her best without her addictions; just as the great poet, A C Swinburne, who took the world by storm with Atalanta in Calydon:

"Maiden and mistress of the months and stars

Now folded in the flowerless fields of Heaven...."

never wrote anything of note after the Godly and well-meaning (but dull), Theodore Watts-Dunton 'saved' him from brandy and doled him out a bottle of beer a day, for the rest of his sorry days. Augustus John was plainly addicted to women and gave the world a raft of powerful paintings of the creatures that he loved.

Winston Churchill would, without any doubt at all, now be classified as seriously addicted to alcohol and tobacco (even though our nancified age somehow (mysteriously) managed to vote him 'The Greatest Briton'); yet Charles Kennedy MP, a sometime recent leader of the Liberal Democrats was forced out of his position because some paparazzo snatched a couple of snapshots of him looking 'tired and emotional', after a hard day's night, and the scandal-gluttonous public lapped it up, sucking in their lips, tut-tutting and wagging their fingers too. I would have had more respect for Kennedy if, instead of resigning and promising to reform his moral character, as though he had signed up for Sally Anne, he had sought out the paparazzo responsible and given him a good hiding.

Then a 'recovering' alcoholic got on his soap box and told us all, through a broadsheet newspaper, that he had battled alcoholism, beaten it and (of course) emerged a better person and so, therefore, should you, Charles Kennedy. But just a moment, how dare you say that? Who do you think you are?

If you had said that to Winston Churchill he would have told you, as he told King Ibn Sa'ud, of Saudi Arabia, that using alcohol and tobacco were absolutely 'sacred rites' to him or, as he told Bessy Braddock MP when she accused him of being drunk: "And you're ugly, but in the morning I'll be sober". And he would have insisted on his rights to drink and smoke. Of course, despite all that, some inconstant little jerk in the British Medical Association would tell us that Winston Churchill was an alcoholic. Incidentally, it never ceases to amaze me that these medical people have the utter gall to get up infront of us and lecture us about excess: some of the most problematic drinkers and smokers that I have ever known have been medical doctors - I suppose that they just fall back on that old saw: "Don't do as I do, do as I say"; which is just as well, as I recall one who, in the last fifteen years, would regularly render herself unable to stand after a couple of bottles of Pinot Grigio and, on being poured into a cab, would proclaim that she would be driving her large saloon from her home railway station to her house. As far as I know, she is still in business and holds a quasi-judicial post as well.

If forced to accept the scientific 'definition' of alcoholism, Winston Churchill would have insisted that he was a functioning alcoholic - and look at his achievements, across the field from: politics to painting, to literature, to flying and hunting; building walls, lakes and gardens; as well as letting the world have some of the most inspirational oratory in the history of mankind, along the way. He would also have said that "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me". It seems quite plain to me that those great, rolling passages in his wartime speeches, with their mounting grandeur and indomitanble spirit, in the very eye of the storm, would never have come out of him without the: comfort food (steak and kidney puddings), the Pol Roger champagne, the Hine brandy and the Romeo y Julieta cigars.

Without his addictions, Churchill would have been less. He more or less said so and there is no reason to doubt it and Without Churchill, as he was, the world might well have been crushed sooner by the jackboots that now storm the stage of public and professional life, populate the media and, sofly, softly, persuade us to believe ourselves to be less worthy than we ought to be.

There's Always A Way; Or: Through The Foxholes

2011-10-15T11:43:00.000-04:00

Most practical problems can be solved by finding foxholes (as I always think of it), by lateral thinking; which is an immensely valuable thinking habit to cultivate. For example, I was recently stumped in my attempts to get hold of some decent cologne and some English snuff (Brazilian snuff is excellent but I just fancied some from Fribourg & Treyer) because of transportation / importation problems.

Now I have found answers to both of these problems: strangely, here in the Sleepy Hollow, there just happens to be a shop which sells a very good range of artisan-produced eau de cologne, which is up there in quality with Roger et Gallet - so quite good enough - and not terribly expensive, as the packaging is of the 'without-the-frills' kind: suits me. So that's one problem solved.

I have also discovered an outfit that, hastle-free, exports snuff all over the world: www.snuffstore.co.uk but, for me, it is even better that a friend has insisted on standing me: a small consignment of F&T 'Macouba'; 'Bureau' (recently re-introduced and I can't wait to try it); 'Prince's Special', and 'Old Paris' as well as some Wilsons-of-Sharrow 'Rose of Sharrow' (probably for mixing). He is buying it today and going to send it himself; so I shall keep a very keen weather-eye for delivery vans.

However, reviewing this post, I think that my solutions have more to do with persistence than lateral thinking: another thing worth cultivating...

Peter Ustinov and Modern Humbug

2011-10-15T09:32:00.002-04:00

I just had cause to remember Peter Ustinov (1921-2004), award-winning actor, writer, director. His many screen roles included those in Quo Vadis (1951); Spartacus (1960), as a well as several appearances as Hercule Poirot.

Ustinov was a genius - look at the range of all that he did; even directing serious operas. I discovered recently that his father had started out as German diplomat; became a British spy against the Nazis, and changed his nationality before the War. One of those who stood up. That's a real problem with our age: not enough people will stand up and say "Just a minute"... and carefully review and pull to pieces some of the dreadful intended legislation that is passed in default of argument, let alone real opposition.

As people like Ustinov fall off the twig (no Betjeman to save buildings - look what he did for the Midland Hotel at St Pancras - saved it - as Norman Birkett saved part of Lakeland, now named after him, with a last, wonderful speech), there is a poverty of debate and a roller-coaster of puritanical humbuggery, instead of the old fashioned kind of humbuggery, which at least had the grace to be shame-faced.

Style Icon XLII: Herbert Marshall

2011-10-14T09:23:00.000-04:00

Everybody has heard of Gary Cooper; few remember such members of the early 'Hollywood Raj' as Herbert Marshall (1890-1966); despite appearances in many films, including several classics; often co-starring with Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Bette Davis: Trouble In Paradise (1932); The Little Foxes (1941); The Razor's Edge (1946). He even had an affair with Hedy Lamarr. Suave, sophisticated and debonair, how different he seems from the likes of Michael Caine and Jude Law and that Office Fellow - all Cockneys and Eshtuawy dwellers. What a shame that the image of the British male has been so devalued in the American mind.

The picture is a still of Marshall and Marlene in Trouble in Paradise.

Sheridan Keeping House

2011-10-14T08:52:00.000-04:00

The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the poet Lord Byron were adept at 'keeping house' from their creditors and their bailiffs. This meant staying indoors and out of the way. Beau Brummell and Scrope Davies took the alternative route of escape and became 'Gentlemen Gone To The Continent'. Of course, Byron also fled debt and scandal several times.

Inside the house at 14 Savile Row (illustrated), which Hardy Amies renovated after WWII to accommodate his business, there is a casement from which it is said that Sheridan used to peep out at the importunate band of his creditors and their henchmen, thronging below. The house bears a plaque to his memory.

Caps Off!

2011-10-13T13:24:00.002-04:00

I just saw a reference to R G Collingwood on the 'Permanent Style' blogspot and it provoked thought.

R G Collingwood was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University between 1935 and 1941 and wrote a number of books; most famously, The Idea of History; on the premise that history is real knowledge, as much as natural science, because from history we may deduce man's inclinations and capabilities. On dress, he said:

"Dress is a kind of language; but when it is rigidly uniform the only emotions which it can express are emotions common to those who wear it. The habit of wearing it focuses the attention of the wearer on emotions of the kind, and at once generates and expresses a permanent 'set' or habit of consciously feeling in the corresponding way.

Dropping a uniform carries with it a curious breach in the emotional habit. The consciousness of sharing uniform dress with a circle of others is thus a consciousness of emotional solidarity with them; and this, on its negative side, takes a form of emotional hostility towards persons outside the circle. To illustrate this from the history of parties and classes is superfluous."

Collingwood says, in fact, that his statement is an axiom. I agree. The abandonment of uniform styles of dress accounts for much confusion and conflict in modern society. I am also instantly reminded of Soames Forsyte having his topper knocked off by a rabble in the street, just after the First World War, and then swapping it for a Homburg - as disguise, out of the necessity of self-preservation!

Surely, though, emotional hostility exists in all classes and groups, towards others who are actually inimical to them and their interests and a 'uniform' is simply one way in which we express our allegiances and, in fact, avoid actual conflict; at least in those cases where the members of the conflicting parties are civilized?

The picture is of R G Collingwood in the typical garb of an Oxford academic of his time.

Book III Publication Date

2011-10-12T12:34:00.000-04:00

I call it Book III in my 'trilogy' :)) History of Men's Etiquette: A Short Guide To The Sporting Life (please concentrate on the sub-title) has been announced for 30th November 2011: http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/History-of-Mens-Etiquette/p/3275/

One thing is for sure: the covers have consistently improved and now the art department bods have confined themselves to images that I have provided.

Beau Brummell's Bank Account

2011-10-12T11:15:00.002-04:00

Drummond's Bank, at 49 Charing Cross, was subsumed in the Royal Bank of Scotland, on January 24th 1924 but the branch is still called Drummond's Branch and, rather like another RBS branch, Child & Co, at 1 Fleet Street, still has a cachet. Drummond's oldest surviving customer is Meyer & Mortimer, tailors now in Sackville Street. M&M's founder, Jonathan Meyer, of Conduit Street, had been one of Beau Brummell's favourite tailors.

The Drummond's banking records include the period 1800-1815 (when Brummell was in his prime) and his records are there but they are, alas, just on microfiche; the paper ledger records were sacrificed to the War Effort (although what on earth use they were for that, Goodness only knows). Brummell's account was not very active in the twelve months before his flight (on 16th May 1816), so it's all there and, one day I shall give myself a window of a fortnight and transcribe the microfiches. I have a specific enquiry in hand at the moment, in relation to the records and, if I get a result, I shall post it in the blog.

The records after 1815 have been preserved only for every tenth year. However, the surprising thing is that his account remained active through 1825, and down to at least 1835. Maybe, the account was the medium through which his friends responded to his begging letters, in which he complained of having been reduced to 'bran bread' and other deprivations. Again, one day, I shall give myself the time to go through it all and find such things as the night when (and the amount for which), Brummell broke George Harley Drummond, a partner in the bank, over a game of whist in White's Club (the first and, presumably, only time, that G H Drummond played a high stakes' game).

Maybe it is a little surprising that Brummell's recent biographer, Ian Kelly, did not explore these records. Indeed, as I show in History of Men's Accessories, the records of snuff chandler Fribourg & Treyer give a very good idea about Brummell's snuff habits and also his addresses at various stages and are important social documents. However, I cannot say that I am disappointed because, just as Ian Kelly was taking the ferry to Calais to start his researches, I had started my own. Alas! for me that he got into print before I had got very far at all and it all sits in a drawer, sine die. There are, though, outstanding points and many intrigues, I am sure, await discovery and discovering them one fine day will be something to look forward to.

The picture is of goldsmith Andrew Drummond, founder of Drummond's Bank in 1712.

Prompted by Nothing Really: The Poor Old Romanovs

2011-10-11T10:07:00.000-04:00

The Royal Navy was all ready, with Geo V's agreement, to go and blast some bits off a few Bolshies and save the Czar and his family but, because of the instability caused by the First World War; the rise of the union movements, and the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland, Georgie got cold feet and left the Romanovs to their fate. Some speculate that his then late elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, would have saved the Romanovs. I think that Georgie was a bit of a squirt for leaving them and that they could have been quite easily and quietly assimilated as quasi-landed gentry in the English shires - as others have been: Louis Napoleon and Prince Tula of [then] Siam - remember too that even Napoleon, as he awaited his fate in Plymouth Sound, pacing up and down on decks of HMS Bellerophon, wanted to be exiled in the Green and Pleasant Land, before he was bundled off to send his snuff orders to Fribourg & Treyer, at [i]Ye Sign of the Rasp and Crown[/i], Haymarket, from St Helena.

However, not all the Romanovs were wiped out because, in April 1919, HMS Marlborough did evacuate the Dowager Empress (Queen Alexandra's sister) and various members (including other senior members), of the family and Court and some of them did settle down in rural obscurity in various countries in exile, and their descendants live on.

Above is a photograph of HMS Marlborough, signed by some of those whom she saved.

The Proposed Renaming of Birmingham City Gun Quarter. Cry: "Shame!"

2011-10-11T08:44:00.002-04:00

They might be back-peddling slightly now but some smart-alec local councillors have decided, upon the petition of fifty 'concerned residents', that the old Birmingham 'Gun Quarter' (or, what is left of it after the developers, recently got their mits on it), should be re-named, to dissociate the area from 'drug-related gun crime'. The first thing that occurs to me is that it's a real pity that the notoriously corrupt and now (thankfully defunct) Restormel Borough Council 'lost'the petition of thousands of St Austellians, who protested about the demolition of the old Odeon Cinema. Because, if fifty Politically Correct Brummie protesters are really enough to snuff out a portion of our nation's history, how much more valid, to conserve a significant part of local history, would have been a petition comprising thousands of objections to its destruction? But, hey! That is 'modern Britain' for you!

The fifty Brummie protesters are, apparently, concerned that the name the 'Gun Quarter' suggests some kind of official support or recognition of the drug-related gun crime in the city. The fact that there is on-going, notorious, drug-related gun crime suggests to me that more time and resources should be aimed at stamping it out.

Meanwhile, as its councillors squander time and resources on such absurd nonsense as renaming old established local areas to appease fifty 'right-on' residents, Birmingham council has a massive deficit that would have the late Joseph Chamberlain spinning in his grave. So proficient and popular was this adopted son of Brum that, after a term as Mayor Of Birmingham, he stood unopposed in the general Election of 1876 and was returned as one of the city's MPs, which he remained for the rest of his lfe. So influential was he in late 19th and early 20th century politics that Winston Churchill said of him "He made the weather". He had made his fortune out of screw manufactory, one of the many metal works associated with Brum, because of the large local deposits of iron ore; which accounts for the rise of the city during the industrial revolution which, in turn, put Britain at the top of the class in innovation, design and production (there's a memory that is a real blast from the past). Gun production was all a part of this; to such an extent that, a famous local firm, called William Powell & Sons, was instrumental in securing Birmingham its own Proof House in 1813, since when there has always been a Powell on the Board of Guardians.

It can certainly be said, without fear of exaggeration, that the Birmingham gunmakers made the weapons that made and guarded the Empire. Later when Liberty herself was endangered, they were still there doing the job and firms such as A A Brown made machine tools for Spitfire fighters . And that's all on top of turning out tens of thousands of sporting guns; some of which are right up there with the Best of the Best worldwide.

Surely, the unproductive and disorganized squads of modern British politicians might at least look back on our nation's industrial past with pride? - especially since truly British industry produces less and less every year; even Bristol Cars nearly bit the dust and are now foreign-owned - and especially since the diminished Birmingham gun trade is at least still there.

In any event: while the government of modern Britain is spreading 'great western democracy' over parts of the earth that have no use for it, and street rioters run amok, unchecked for days on end; while it has been over-regulating the law-abiding in everything from radiator settings to smoking in public, just as all the major banks went bust; similarly, it was debating fox-hunting, while there are still mentally defective people sleeping in doorways, and the old and sick are sometimes left to die in filthy hospital corridors. Where do those in national and local government find the time for all the twaddle?

Cry "Shame" on Birmingham City Council.

Today's picture is of the Birmingham Gun-barrel Proof House.

Double-gunning

2011-10-09T13:50:00.003-04:00

The second gun of a true matched pair of shotguns bears numbers that are immediately consecutive with the first gun and the guns should be the same in terms of overall configuration. A 'composed pair' is any other brace of guns that are used as a practical pair and they might have slight differences. Double-gunning requires special considerations, including, importantly, safety considerations.

The following useful points come from
the BASC Guide to Shooting Game (Swan Hill Press, 2007), by Michael Yardley:

1)The loader stands to the right rear of the shooter (assuming a gun firing off the right shoulder).
2) The fired gun is handed back with the right hand (the loader taking it with his left a few inches forward of the action body), over the right shoulder.
3) The fresh gun is taken by the shooter with the left hand, palm facing upwards to receive the gun. The shooter's eyes, meantime, keep looking forward towards the birds.
4) The safety catch must be on when the gun is passed back to the loader; the shooter's trigger finger must be off the trigger and the hand firmly wrapped around the grip behind the bow of the trigger guard.
5) Gun muzzles are held safely up as they pass from hand to hand.
6) When he is opening the returned gun, the loader must make sure that the muzzles are pointed safely, too. When he loads and closes the gun, the muzzles should be directed towards the ground (noting the potential danger to his own and other shooters). There is never a need for the loader to have his fingers near the trigger or touching the trigger guard.
7) The shooter should pass his gun back when
a single shot has been fired if no other shot is immediately anticipated, with safety reapplied.

The picture is of a true matched pair of vintage Boss guns.

Bankrupt Tin-Hitlers

2011-10-09T11:04:00.001-04:00

Ah! Memories, memories! Some years ago I had to speak to one of those manual-reading humanoid-robots in a banking call centre and it just could not take my point (although exactly what it was I forget - but I was definitely in the right). This was all a long time before the British banks went bankrupt (what pleasure there is to be found in making that observation). I recall that the robot had a thick accent - but whether it was strong, North of England "Eee-up"; Narthern Oirish, or Popadum-Asian, I don't recall. I just know that it did not help. And, I, the customer, felt short-changed by some stroppy, patronizing and obstructive smart-alec, who was probably borderline illiterate.

So, I said to the robot: "You're a t**d".

There was a stunned silence at the other end; there being, plainly, no 'manual' response to this one. Then the robot spluttered (and I mean spluttered); well, actually it was between a splutter and a squeak:

"What did you say?"

So I refreshed his memory: "You're a t**d" I said and, pausing just long enough to hear the second round of stunned silence, I hung up, leaving him short on the old 'job satisfaction' front. Of course, by this stage, I had concluded two things. First, that, without a lot of fuss and effort (a letter of complaint and, maybe, even a reference to the toothless Ombudsman), I was not going to get a satisfactory resolution and, secondly, that it was time to change my bank.

I strongly recommend this course of action when nasty little officials go too far. It doesn't achieve any practical result but, by jingo and by jove, it makes you feel much better.

The Road More Travelled

2011-10-07T10:09:00.003-04:00

As a poor student I can remember pressing my cold nose against the windows of shops such as W S Foster and Floris in Jermyn Street and now I understand that they have some of my books for sale. And that's not all: Floris tell me that Brummell's ghost pops in from time to time and he was seen actually reading one of them at the counter. Apparently, he was smiling as he was reading but the devil of it is that I shall never know whether he was smiling in approbation or derision; still Brummell's ghost was reading my book in Floris: that's a long way down the road from just having a cold nose pressed, Little Match Girl-like, against a plate glass window of another of the world's most beautiful shops.

Speaking of things olfactory: gentle readers might keep their eyes open for a feature in The Field magazine entitled How Not To Smell Like a Dank Dog by someone from around here. I think that it's in the next edition. Thanks to John Bodenham of Floris, it even includes some nice pictures from their archive.

Some Still Like It Hot at Mr Lobb of St James's Street

2011-10-06T10:12:00.007-04:00

After all the fame and the fortunate years, starring in Coward musicals, the musical stage actress, Ivy St Helier, fell on hard times and, according to Brian Dobbs' fine book, about John Lobb: "The Last Shall Be First" [Elm Tree Books, 1972], she visited Mr Lobb in St James's Street for a new pair of shoes. But, before I get to what happened then, I pause just to mention that the book's title is Lobb's motto and is derived, in a very Victorian way, from a few references in the New Testament. In fact it is a double pun because not only does the shoe last come first in the shoe-making process but John Lobb, as an upstart, intended from the very beginning, to be at the head of his trade: 'the first'; whether or not they make the very best bespoke shoes (actually, I'd say that Foster-Henry Maxwell make better), the whole world has heard of 'John Lobb shoes' as very fine shoes: hence the double pun.

Anyway back to my abandoned sheep, grazing nonchalantly on the hillside, and Ivy St Helier. On entering the shop, she encountered a Lobb employee who asked how he could help and Ivy St Helier said that she wanted to order a new pair of shoes but that she could afford only £so-and-so. The employee then went up the stairs to Eric Lobb's office, off the gallery, and explained that there was a lady downstairs who wanted new shoes but could not afford the full price. Eric Lobb told the employee to tell her that the shop was not an eastern bazar and there could be no haggling. The shopman went back down and relayed the message but Ivy St Helier persisted and the shopman returned to Eric Lobb who asked the shopman for her name. The shopman then found out that she was called Ivy St Helier and told Eric Lobb, who remembered seeing her playing Manon in Cowards' original, 1929 production of Bitter-Sweet and so he smiled and told the shopman to go down and say to her Hey-ho! If Love Were All, from the title of one of her songs from the show.

So the shopman trundled back down the stairs and delivered the line, before rushing back up to Eric Lobb, panting: "You've done it now, sir, you'll have to come down - she's burst into tears."

Eric Lobb then went down to the shop and greeted Ivy St Helier, telling her how much he had enjoyed her performances and what an honour it was to have her back in the shop, and then he told her to choose any shoe style she liked to be made with his compliments.

It is not then only because of its fine structure that John Lobb's deserves Esquire magazine's description as "possibly the most beautiful shop in the world".

As Ivy St Helier was leaving, she turned and said that today 'cool' is the thing but that, when she was young, they had "liked it hot."

Here is a short clip of a recording of the song sung by Ivy St Helier:

http://us.dada.net/music/ivysthelierwithorchestra/if-love-were-all-(1999-digital-remaster)_1381770m.html

The Right To Get Fat

2011-10-05T09:55:00.001-04:00

There are finger-wagging Tin-Hitlers out there, lecturing us about the dangers of alcohol, smoking, coffee, sugar and now they're onto the hobby-horse of fatty foods. One trouble with the scientists on whom they rely, and whose opinions are central to a lot of government thinking on these subjects, is that they seem to blow with the wind: one week, a couple of glasses of red wine a day are good for you and, more or less the very next week, ever having drunk any alcohol at all leaves you with a heightened risk of developing cancer. One week, coffee is a clot-busting miracle drug and the next it is the stuff of which heart attacks are made - and so it goes on. And on. And on. And on.

Apparently, the Danish have dreamed up a super-tax aimed at fat people. The idea is to tax them on fatty foods; not to raise revenue as such, but to lessen expenditure, because it is aimed at deterring people from needing medical treatment as a result of indulging in fatty foods (the only up-side is that Ronald MacDonald might hit the skids).

The ban on smoking nearly everywhere has almost certainly left the governments without a great big wedge of revenue from tobacco taxes. Hence the state-funded health services are going to suffer. They can no longer financially cope with treating fat people, who need stronger beds and more food than thin people. So they have come up with the perfectly brilliant idea of taxing them and if not out of existence at least taxing them down to size. The eugenicists of the early twentieth century would have been right behind all this political nonsense, because it is also, in part, about creating 'perfect' human specimens and controlling what they consume and even how they think.

There's a book kicking around about how the world would have been had Hitler and the Axis forces won WWII. Their genocidal tendencies aside, I really do wonder whether Hitler and Mussolini would actually have laid so many personal freedoms so low, as the modern 'great western democracies' have done. There was even a recent news item that children had been taken away from their parents and put into local authority 'care' because their parents were over-feeding them!

And the really shocking thing is that no one much seems to notice; let alone care. Maybe it is time to take note of a few words of wisdom from Tacitus: 'summum ius summa iniuria': [more laws, more injustice].

That's a warning that should be heeded before it's too late. And it nearly is too late.

Today's picture is of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle being fed a face-full of fatty acids by Mabel Normand.

Dotty Parker: "Excuse my dust"

2011-10-04T08:55:00.003-04:00

The great wit Dorothy Parker gave herself two epitaphs: "Excuse my dust" and "This one's on me".

There's an interesting little tale about Dorothy Parker's dust. She was cremated on 9th June 1967 in Hartsdale but her friend Lilian Hellman (maybe because she was upset that Dotty had left her estate to Dr Martin Luther King and not to her), left the ashes at the crematorium and for six years they sat there on a shelf. The crematorium then sent the ashes to Dotty's lawyer's offices, where they remained in a filing cabinet for fifteen years. Someone then remembered them again and they were given to the charity which (on the death of King), became her principal beneficiary and they interred them, on 20th October 1988, in a dedicated memorial garden, under a plaque which actually mentions "Excuse my dust".

My favourite Dotty story concerns a neighbour who visited her just after her second husband died of a drug overdose. The neighbour asked whether there was anything she could do and Dorothy Parker replied "Get me a new husband". The neighbour told Dorothy Parker that this was the most shocking thing that she had ever heard and Dorothy Parker then said:

"Well, then, run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye - but tell them to hold the mayonnaise."

Reference Books Online and Bells on Sunday

2011-10-03T12:04:00.000-04:00

Just to spread the word that membership of a public library in England (maybe other parts of the UK too) entitles the member to online access to a whole range of excellent works of reference, including the full Oxford English Dictionary; just visit your local library website and search. Have your card number to hand because this enables you to log-on to read the books.

One of the thing that I miss about Blighty is peals of church bells; often twice a week, a practice session and then the Sunday peals, as well as wedding bells and the passing bell. However, BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a peal or two each Sunday in a little programme called Bells on Sunday and I have just had my weekly fix, by virtue of the listen again facility, which also brings us The Archers' omnibus. St Clement Danes' church in Strand, London ('oranges and lemons'):

In Milady's Boudoir

2011-10-02T10:55:00.001-04:00

As I acknowledge in History of Men's Fashion (not a title that I ever wanted), the sub-title What The Well Dressed Man Is Wearing derives from P G Wodehouse's Right-ho! Jeeves, in which Bertie Wooster is prevailed upon by his Aunt Dahlia to write an article for her failing magazine Milady's Boudoir. What I did not know until today is that this is a humorous jibe at the magazine The Lady which, in fact, had declined a Wodehouse story.

The fact that I chose this as a sub-title might have been a clue to the fact that the book was written in a spirit of fun but, instead, legion 'i-gents' (i.e. those concerned with exchanging views over the internet on the minutiae of men's dress and early twentieth century etiquette [that word makes me shudder]), have been at pains to criticize the substance as though it were not written tongue firmly in cheek. This is not to say that I did not strive for reasonable accuracy and a promised second edition will iron out the creases (so to speak) but I sometimes wonder what happened to the British sense of humour.

Today's picture is of the current proprietress of The Lady, Mrs Julia Budworth. The magazine has been in family ownership since it was founded by Thomas Gibson-Bowles in the late nineteenth century (along with the original Vanity Fair magazine). Apparently, Boris Johnson's sister Rachel has been taken onboard to introduce "hip in place of hip-replacement" in a revamping of this magazine ("Butler wanted"), so often found in dentists' and doctors' waiting rooms.

'Debo' Mitford is JB's cousin and appears on the copy of the magazine that she is holding.

And Another Thing

2011-09-30T10:10:00.000-04:00

I looked into the question of the prohibitions on bringing eau de cologne and snuff into Brazil. It seems that the Royal Mail are wrong in the advice that they purported to give me: there appears to be no prohibition on cologne and the nearest to a prohibition on snuff is 'cigarettes or similar' - which snuff isn't, so far as I can see.

Maybe the Royal Mail 'just can't be bothered'.

Perpetual Summer; No More Grouching; More Groucho

2011-09-30T09:52:00.000-04:00

Even though we cannot herald the return of a summer that never leaves us (well, nearly, never leaves us), we can respond to the slightly lengthening days by grouching less about the decline and fall of the world from which we fled, arms waving and with a silent scream to "Save our souls alive!"

I have written quite a bit about my own nostalgia for the past and I don't mean the past that never was, some Golden Age of Ye Olde England; a Merchant Ivory set, with actors in dodgy costumes, filmed through fogged lenses. I always mean the past that I actually remember: the people, places, events; customs and ceremonies and local and national celebration of a reasonably cohesive society; all its sights, sounds, smells and tastes: from cattle markets (straw, dung and sugary tea) to the opera (scent, satin and marvellous sound). I mean the thousand small civilities of everyday: centred around - "Good morning"; "Good Afternoon"; "Good Evening", and "Good Night"; "I'm so sorry" - "Not at all!"; in place of "Who are you?" and "What do you want?" to "What's going on here then?"; "I'm sorry, we're closing"; "Mind your backs!" - and "I can't be bothered".

The current burghers of my home town lost my sympathy when they demolished Oscar Deutsch's 1936 Odeon cinema - a dream palace of a place, built by a local firm, for several generations to enjoy (snuggled down with a bar of Cadbury's, in the red velvet and the dark), and replaced it with a building that will be replaced again in 25 years' time. In fact, so symbolic for me was that gleeful demolition (an ugly little gnome of a man, on a JCB digger, moronically grinning as he laid into its fabric), that the whole society lost my vote and so I left.

I know that this sounds extreme but, after all, there is no war as such; no "facing fearful odds"; no standing firm on a bridge as the barbarians rush forward; just several tens of millions of money-grubbing ignoramuses against a few tens of thousands of us; wearing away at all that we hold dear. That's the reality. They are bound to win in the end.

So today I made a resolution: what's done is done and if grouching there is to be, there will be far less of it. There should be far more Groucho and far less grouching; from now on.

Michael Bywater on The Destruction of Jermyn Street

2011-09-29T10:58:00.005-04:00

Please do try to find time to read this

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/features/a-farewell-to-britains-most-stylish-street-1918791.html

I tried to attach his blog to my sidebar but it appears as 'Home'. However, it is there.

The Film of The Lost City

2011-09-28T23:25:00.001-04:00

OK, OK, there's Inés Sastre and Inés Sastre is always good - but it's a great film by the way. But, if you're in doubt - watch it for Inés Sastre anyway...Any time; any place; anywhere...

Creeping Stalinist Control; 1984 And All That

2011-09-28T08:51:00.001-04:00

There is decent eau de cologne for sale in Rio de Janeiro - by Roger et Gallet and others too, but not by Floris. In any event, imported goods here cost a fortune in retail shops and you'd need a mortgage form for, say, an orange label bottle of The Widow. There is also snuff available here and, given that Brazil was one of the countries which originally gave the world snuff, it is well made and one is nicely scented with the oil of the Imburana tree. However, this week, I had a yearning for old familiar things and I wanted a bottle of Floris Special 127 cologne and tins of Fribourg & Treyer snuffs (specifically: Old Paris; Macouba and the recently revived Regency favourite - Bureau). So I set inquiries in train and the result has filled me with anger and mild despair.

Floris and Wilsons of Sharrow (who make Fribourg & Treyer snuffs) both tell me that they have given up fighting the tangle of regulation that restricts the export of things such as snuff and products containing alcohol outside the EU and the answer to me is "no can do". I am not even sure yet whether, if I can persuade family or friends to enter the fray, they will be able actually to get the goods to me, without confiscation, arrest, trial, fine or imprisonment or, if they were to succeed, that I would not be dragged off to gaol for some species of attempted smuggling.

As the world gets economically smaller (as well as falling into repeated economic doldrums) and the multi-national corporations gobble up all the small businesses in the world and snuff them out as competitors, and just as the world's 'civilized' populations increasingly become an ignorant, ragged, rabble, I am told that our governments have so little to do that they need to follow their own scent for stalinist control and regulate such things as the individual's choices in scent and snuff, even in miniscule quantities.

The very grasp of ordinary Liberty and all notion of appreciation of the maxim de minimis non curat lex seem to be drowned in some painfully articulated and unthinking scream to crush as much ordinary, simple freedom and harmless pleasure as possible at every opportunity.

Well, it makes me sick. It makes me sick that I am to be regulated by some badge-wearing, oikish twerp, wielding a clip board and a cheap biro and be finger-wagged and 'tut-tutted' and told "No, George, don't do that, George! George! don't do that!"

Well, come hell or high water, and by hook or by crook, I am going to get my cologne and I am going to get my snuff - even if 'Big Brother' is not just a fatuous 'telly' programme for all the couch-potato, thoughtless morons that the governments of this world are so busily encouraging to avoid being found out.

PS If anyone knows how to cut through this bureaucratic nonsense, please do tell!

Gertrude Lawrence

2011-09-27T22:16:00.000-04:00

A good 1951 recording of Someone To Watch Over Me; written by George and Ira Gerschwin, for Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952), in Oh, Kay! (1926), sung here, by Gertrude Lawrence, a year before she died of liver cancer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZDQKlYMcG0

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments

2011-09-27T12:45:00.000-04:00

A friend has directed my attention to this work by Adam Smith. It is available as a free download on the www and I am going to improve myself with it!

Swaine Adeney Brigg

2011-09-27T09:09:00.000-04:00

I recently heard that Swaine Adeney Brigg, a combination of firms dating back a couple of hundred years, as case, whip and (later) umbrella makers; holders of royal warrants, and the makers in the book as well as in the film of James Bond's bag of tricks in From Russia With Love, has just been restructured in administration, and will continue as before. They will always have a place in my heart because one of their salesmen, over in their former (bigger) shop, in Piccadilly, once sold me an umbrella with the straight delivery of the line:

"Rain sounds so much better on silk, sir."

Long may you continue to flourish, SAB and - your sister company Herbert Johnson too.

To Red-Heads Everywhere

2011-09-26T23:53:00.004-04:00

One of my favourite YouTube clips - and a double whammy really: the lovely (auburn-headed) Irene Dunne, singing Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, as no one else could ever sing it, and Fred and Ginger at their very best, dancing to it too, and nearly eighty years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkQU-VQkhGw

Countdown

2011-09-26T10:18:00.000-04:00

Fifty two days to publication of Book III...

http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Nicholas-Storey/a/995/

Yes, yes, I know: they all have inappropriate main titles but the sub-titles give the game away.

Countdown

2011-09-26T10:15:00.001-04:00

Fifty two days to publication of Book III...

Douglas Fairbanks Junior's Wardrobe

2011-09-25T19:31:00.003-04:00

Will, on a his site: suitable wardrobe (see sidebar), today referred to the fact that Douglas Fairbanks Junior's wardrobe was recently auctioned off and that it was the last, great, complete, formal, man's wardrobe ever formed. This is, almost certainly, true. Cary Grant's stuff was largely given away to friends, by his young widow and his daughter - and fair enough.

But that was some time ago, and the world might have benefitted from DGJ's wardrobe: extensive and complete, being given to, say, the Met. Museum, as a record - or, at least, representative pieces might have been given. I cannot believe that Fairbanks' heirs could really have needed the cash.

It's all a demned shockin' shame.

To reprise Terry-Thomas: "You're an absolute shower!"