HOLIDAY GOSSIP

In August we all try to get away, certainly Boris did (but he was going anyway), probably Biden did too (but who would notice any difference?) and Putin may do us all a favour and do himself away by diving in his macho-fashion, head-first into a deadly radioactive pool at Zaporizhzhia (Yes, Vlad, jump!). Anyhow I feel no guilt being in Greece and finishing a week’s excursion to the enchanted Aegean island of Samos, and am joined at my hotel by a rich variety of sun-seeking Europeans.

                                                        Putin - Nobody’s Pin-Up

Travel has always broadened the mind and flattened the wallet but this year it has been unusually accident-prone. My delightful eldest son sought a celebratory rendezvous with his 80-year-old Dad but was frustrated by a heat-wave, then a flood, then by re-catching Covid and finally by an errant roofer who contrived to put his foot through his 4^th floor roof only to break his fall luckily on a high rafter with his crotch (Ouch!), Of course, at that point the London heavens opened, requiring a massive clear-up, and the attendance of the Fire Brigade. As somebody once said: Stuff Happens!

As for my European fellow-guests here, they are mainly well-behaved German-speakers, Swedes and Poles. I admit to being rather a conservative fellow and do not admire the tattoos on bellies, necks and backs of at least half the females. I can also see how far the obesity pandemic has gone. Once I had thought it was confined to the junk-food guzzling hordes of America, but no, certainly the female Aurochs is alive and well in Europe too, where colossal fatsos abound. I am far from svelte myself, but I am completely outclassed by these lumbering grotesques.

                                                                      The Aurochs

 The Tory leadership and hence prime ministerial contest in the UK has ground on too long but it looks like Liz Truss will win the prize. If she delivers what she promises (a big “if”), she is a good choice, being a no-nonsense Yorkshire woman with a Thatcherite streak. I understand the new government will challenge the entrenched orthodoxies of Whitehall, and not before time. What happened to the Bank of England, whose mission is to control inflation, but who failed to warn us of the inflationary tsunami engulfing us? Once the Governor’s eyebrows were eloquent; now Governor Bailey is all thumbs. Was Lockdown worth the damage it caused to the economy? Boris, and alas, Gove, both swallowed whole all the bad vibes from the now-knighted Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty and Jonathan Van Tam. Sweden did not lockdown and suffered proportionately less damage. So, did we impoverish ourselves unnecessarily? What was the intellectual process?

The NHS has not performed well in the pandemic and it needs to be re-modelled. The outcome from many illnesses is far worse in the UK than in comparable European or first-world economies. The private sector must be incentivised to invest. Our secondary school system produces many pupils unfit for work in the modern world; this is an emergency – we cannot wait for a solution to “evolve”.

We do not have an embarrassment of talent in UK politics - I would regret Gove’s disappearance and hope Sunak will be given a useful post. I am heartened by the likely return of John Redwood (he has brains) and the mooted retention of Jacob Rees-Mogg, doggedly holding on to the best values of about 1910. No Tory worth his salt should fail to put the clock back! There are excellent people coming through – Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat, Ben Wallace spring to mind and may rise to new challenges.

I have no doubt we face a difficult winter but let that not spoil our high summer. We should face the future with a sprightly confidence, face down our enemies and assure ourselves that the lessons of the past will be well learnt and that all our families and friends will enjoy a glorious and prosperous future.

 

SMD

28.08.22

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2022

IN PRAISE OF LIBRARIES

The great Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero surely got it right:

 If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

 I am currently ensconced in my home-library in Athens, surrounded by my most cherished books, which speak to me, some in a vociferously learned fashion, others in a light chatter of good-humoured fun. I love them all for the life-enhancing enchantment they generate.

                                        

                                                                   Heroic Cicero

I shall concentrate on libraries, as gardening was never my strong suit. I greatly admire a well-kept and appropriately-planted garden. Our home garden is too small but our delightful next-door neighbours, possessors of skilled green fingers, have an exquisitely beautiful English garden, an oasis of calm tranquillity, the venue of many an unforgettable barbecue. In truth gardens confer enormous pleasure.

My experience of libraries first dates from school. My Mearns prep-school had been donated volumes of the Times History of the Great War, lavishly illustrated. Other donations included Mein Kampf, less suitable for young minds and thankfully rambling and unreadable. There were strong sections of highly readable John Buchan and Edgar Allan Poe and much Arthur Ransome, which was not to my taste. We read the Famous Five books until they disintegrated. My Edinburgh public school library was more serious in tone and I devoured the volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and other histories.

 My mother read and was a member of a book club, whose monthly fiction offering was often something by A J Cronin or such-like. Her passion was Freud, Jung and Adler, and she loved to psycho-analyse family and friends, so she built up a library of her own. My father read less but he was presented at Christmas with beautifully bound almanacs, reference books and guides from commercial partners, all adding to the home library. I would be sent down to the Aberdeen main Boots store which had a very active lending library. The fare there was quite light – thrillers and show-biz biographies abounded – but there was much to amuse.

I was briefly a language student of French in Paris in 1961 and I pay homage to the British Council library there in the Quartier Latin. I was exiting a religious phase, but I recall enjoying Donne’s eloquent Sermons and even embarked on Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. The call went unheeded and instead I read Sophocles’ incomparable Plays.

At Oxford University, I did most of my academic reading at the austere New Bodleian, but for some history and politics the sources were found at the glorious Radcliffe Camera, masterpiece of Scots, nay, Aberdonian architect, James Gibbs. Gibbs is also remembered for his St Martins in the Fields in London’s Trafalgar Square, so much imitated in America, especially in Protestant New England.

                                Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera, Oxford

Britain never did build the ecclesiastically dominated libraries seen widely in Baroque and Rococo Europe yet they were often intellectually mean and monkish places attached to reactionary monasteries. Britain knew that libraries were nothing if they were not beacons of enlightenment and the search for truth, and built accordingly, beside universities and civic centres, in an inclusive spirit.

My library is quite modest but to me it is full of goodies. Ancient history features Thucydides, Plutarch, Suetonius, Gibbon et al while Byzantium has a good showing with John Julius Norwich, Runciman and Ostrogorsky. Political biographies abound with fine volumes on Wellington, Disraeli, Asquith, Macmillan and Churchill and a fatally dated Van Loon’s Lives. Rather too much is from the bland and often uncritical Roy Jenkins. Memoirs, always to be approached with caution, include de Gaulle’s, Thatcher’s, Nigel Lawson’s and Harold Wilson’s (not to forget pariah Oswald Mosley’s) rewriting history to fortify their personal myth.

I love reading diaries and the Journals of James Boswell, the debauched Scotsman on the make, early inspired me. Apart from Boswell (and the only poncy thing about observant Pepys is his name) and maybe Alan Clark, it clearly helps to be gay to be a great diarist. They perhaps bear grudges more readily and have a feline characteristic like arch-snob James Lees-Milne, Chips Channon, Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward and Alan Bennett, but they give huge pleasure.

                     Lees-Milne in state

Of course, I have plenty classic novels, Dickens, Trollope and Dostoyevsky to the fore. Dotted about are unclassifiables like Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s travel volumes, anthologies or Betjeman on poetry or architecture. I do like controversialists, so H.L Mencken has a place of honour beside Christopher Hitchens, Tom Wolff, A. A. Gill and even our Boris.

I like to laugh and as I sit poolside next week, I will choose between the plot complexities and mad-cap schemes of P G Wodehouse or the wild imaginative leaps of Arthur Marshall. I will titter uncontrollably to the mystification of my Balkan fellow-tourists, frozen in my essential frivolity.

 

SMD

21.08.22

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2022