We Went Up a Hill

Yesterday the sun came out for a bit and so we went to look at one of the Loughcrew passage tombs, built around 3000 BC. We climbed to the top of Carnbane East, where this one stands. Beneath the mound of stones, there is a cross-shaped chamber. At dawn each year on 21st March and 21st September the sun's rays fall through the cairn's entrance, illuminating puzzling carvings on the stones in the wall opposite the entrance. 

The whole landscape around Carnbane East is very beautiful and it is not difficult to imagine a time when people roamed these hills, spending most of their energy simply keeping warm, dry and fed, but also somehow managing to create structures like this one. 

The weather and wild cloud added to the sense of wonder I felt:

 

Home Thoughts from Abroad

When I say “abroad” in the heading to this post, I mean Ireland in this instance. I suppose I’m always abroad, as a person born with two passports - (for the literal-minded reader, I should point out that I wasn't actually clutching the documents, one in each hand, as I emerged into this strange place called reality; at that stage I merely possessed the right to them) - especially lately, while the country I normally call home - Australia - has been rather hurtfully unwilling to allow the return to their own shores of members of its citizenry who were unpatriotic enough to be caught abroad when a virus turned up.

Thought No. 1: 

Given this thing called Irish Mist, which is rarely not absent when you go out of the door in Ireland, is there a solution available for those among us driven by advancing years to the wearing of spectacles all the time - something that might combat the problem of being unable to see after five minutes chugging along through said mist on a bicycle? Tiny versions of windscreen wipers, I’m thinking, easily fixed on and taken off the glasses, complete with an even tinier energy source.

Thought No. 2: 

Is the good natured friendliness encountered in rural Ireland matched by the inhabitants of any other European country? I’m not fool enough to imagine that it has any great depth to it, but, like manners, the apparent goodwill people who aren't actually acquainted show to each other in the countryside in Ireland definitely smooths the business of daily life.

Thought No. 3: 

Am I the only person in the world who never again wants to read or hear the pronouncements of -

(a) Neil Ferguson of Imperial College;

(b) Stanley Johnson of the Institute of Bluster and Bombast, who I used to think was only afflicted by one of the most serious cases of attention-seeking so far seen in the 21st century (and that is saying something, even though we are less than a quarter the way in) but I now fear may also harbour a fondness for the current regime in China, the causes of which I would not care to speculate on, libel laws being what they are;

(c) Rachel Johnson, who has inherited a case of attention-seeking from somewhere or someone and, the more she is rewarded, the more she reveals herself as an unoriginal bore.

(Please submit suggestions for figures to occupy the positions at (d) to (z) and beyond.

Thought No. 4: 

By now I should be moving on to the weighty issues I believe that I may have intended to rave on about when I began this post. However, I've just seen some pictures and have instantly forgotten anything serious. The pictures in question are those that have been chosen to be sent out on Christmas cards from members of the Royal Family. 

First there is Prince William's:

Does anyone else wish Prince William hadn’t chosen a Christmas card photograph in which he is shown wearing shorts with his legs wide open? I am not making some sort of lewd aspersion; I just looked at the picture and immediately felt the central focal point of that picture is dominated by leg and beige chino material and that is not a focal point I would choose. There are an awful lot of legs in fact in that picture. Only the Duchess of Cambridge appears to be legless, for which I don't blame her - I wouldn't be able to deal with the life she has married into in any other way.

Mind you, the Royal standard in Christmas card photographs has this year been plumbed by William’s father. Here's the one he has chosen; it makes the Cambridges look like design geniuses by comparison:

Prince Charles seems to have decided to give his card a message - and not the message of Christmas. Charles has decided that a mixed message of 'wear masks' and 'hey blokes, boss your wives about' is instead the sensible way to go this year.  If this is the kind of brilliant idea the ageing prince comes up with now, lord help the United Kingdom when he succeeds his mother, (and no, his sons are no better - and yes, there is only one solution).  Or, to put it another way, despite her slightly testy comment about green issues the other day, which was a lapse, Charles's mother is, on the whole, pretty sensitive to the importance of not being trendy or political, and for that reason I still say, "God save the Queen". 

Things I Miss About Belgium - an Occasional Series

The title of this post is slightly misleading, since I don't particularly miss the flea market in Brussels. However, this article about it is charming. On the day after we were burgled, while living in Brussels, I went down to the flea market, hoping my favourite painting might be being sold by the burglars down there. It wasn't, so far as I could see, but I did find myself beguiled and distracted by the place and started taking pictures to try to capture the scene. They may serve as companion illustrations for the article I've linked to. 

As you can see the writer isn't quite right when she says there is no order. Some stallholders go to huge trouble to lay out their wares nicely:

It has to be admitted though that most don't:

But who knows what treasures you might find amidst the chaos:

And, as the article's author notes, there are always the poignant photographs of people who, presumably, no longer exist:

The Silence of the Trams

Many years ago, the ambassador of a nation whose vehicles drive on the opposite side of the road to those in Europe, looked left instead of right as he crossed Vienna's Ringstrasse and was, consequently, run over by a tram. As trams are almost silent, he had no idea that one was approaching. So that was the end of him.

One might, if one were inclined to assess risk in a certain way, argue that the sensible lesson to learn from this sad tale is that one should never travel to Vienna. Possibly one could go further and argue that one should never travel to anywhere that includes trams in its public transport system.

That would be the conclusion you might reach if your assessment of risk was of the kind that seems to be animating governments worldwide in their approach to the new coronavirus and its ever-increasing number of variants. 

My view is that that assessment is hysterical and far too extreme.  We have ruined existence for countless people with excessively harsh regulations, when we might have taken more moderate measures in the face of the real but limited danger the virus poses. 

I acknowledge, with shame, that I didn't always think like this. At first I was crazed with panic, convinced that we all needed to be forced into our homes to cower for months and months on end, obeying our elected representatives' edicts and feeling outraged by those who didn't toe the line.

But my views have evolved as I've learned more about what the danger is that we are actually facing, and I have now changed my mind. I am not at the point where I think the virus doesn't exist - I know it does: I have friends and relatives who have suffered from it, some still unable to taste or smell some weeks or months afterwards. People in my neighbourhood have died. Despite these things, I no longer think the level of dismantlement of normal society that we continue to endure is justifiable.

I'm glad in a way that I was so mistaken to begin with, because realising what a twit I was has led me to think about risk. And I've realised that assessment of risk is also important in looking at another issue that is exercising many people nowadays in almost precisely the same way that I was exercised in the early days of the new coronavirus's appearance. That issue is variously called "climate change" or "global warming".

Once again, just as I don't deny that the new virus is very nasty at its worst, I also don't deny that the climate is changing or that the globe is warming. However, I do question whether the many measures being proposed by authority are the correct reaction to the degree of risk we face. As with lockdowns, I also wonder whether the various new prohibitions on all sorts of day-to-day things will be useful or effective, or whether they might cause unforeseen, wide-spread damage instead. 

In thinking about how to approach these two issues - coronavirus and climate change/global warming - it strikes me that the risks they pose and the responses to them that we need to fashion actually run in parallel, (like tramlines, one might say, if keen to inject a vague sense of cohesion into a rambling blogpost). Climate change/global warming and the new coronavirus are each here to stay. In dealing with each of them, we have to first accept their presence, rather than fighting to eradicate them entirely, and then learn to adapt. 

The whole long drama of the virus and the response by various authorities to it has made me understand finally the blindingly obvious: things are constantly changing and life sweeps us onwards, full of endless risk. As to trams and the cities where they operate, my policy is to always look both left and right.

Old Jokes

 I read a couple of old Soviet jokes the other day & thought, “I do love old Soviet jokes”. Sadly, I’ve already forgotten one of them, but this was the other, courtesy of @akoz33:

“Brezhnev & Carter competed in a race & Soviet newspapers reported that Carter came in last but one, & Brezhnev came in second.”

But this morning when a friend sent me a joke about Gordon Brown & Peter Mandelson, I realised I was only partly right. This is the joke:

'Peter Mandelson & Gordon Brown were returning from the funeral of John Smith on Iona. They stopped at the Loch Fyne Fish Bar near Inveraray. The bar had a payphone & Mandelson asked Brown for 25p to put in the slot, as he had to phone a friend. Brown said "Here's 50p & you can phone them all."'

It turns out I like not merely old Soviet jokes, but the wider category labelled “Old jokes of all kinds”.

Rules for a Traditionalist Contemplating Contemporary Life: 4

 There is only one context in which the words "reach out" are acceptable; it is this:

Velasquez in Dublin

In the summer, we spent ten days in Ireland, starting and ending with Dublin, where I went to the National Gallery of Ireland. I knew they had the extraordinary painting by Caravaggio, called The Taking of Christ. I saw it once at the National Gallery in London years ago and, along with his painting of the crown of thorns being forced onto Christ's head, which is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, it is my favourite of the paintings I've seen by Caravaggio. 

I told myself not to take any pictures, because it is pointless, but in the end I did take some, trying to somehow capture and take away something of the way the picture portrays Christ and Judas Iscariot at the moment of betrayal:

What I hadn't expected was how wonderful the rest of the collection is at the Dublin gallery. I will share some more of the pictures in future posts, but the painting that particularly struck me was this one, which is called Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. It was painted in 1617-18 and the gallery claims it is Velasquez's earliest known work. 

What I love most about this picture is its perspective. Its subject is the supper at Emmaus, but you only realise that after looking at it closely. Thus, you find yourself in the same position as the young maid who is the central figure - suddenly aware that something is present that you weren't aware of at first glance . 

Here she is, in the midst of kitchen work, suddenly sensing something strange and startling nearby:

In the foreground, meticulously recorded in all their beautiful day-to-day reality, the things of the kitchen:

and behind them, sketched in without any attempt at sharp realism, the miraculous appearance of the resurrected Christ:

and the sweet, startled girl, like all of us, trying to make sense of it:

 

Blistering Barnacles

Whether he had any connection to Hergé's character of the same name - (Tintin's greatest friend, after Snowy) - no-one is certain, but there was, it turns out, a real Captain Haddock. Thundering typhoons.

PS By chance this morning there was a rare sighting on Twitter of Hergé’s Haddock - 

Someone posted the pictures to represent what they imagined Mary Shelley’s reaction would be to today’s claim by the New York Times that HG Wells and Jules Verne invented science fiction.

Rules for a Traditionalist Contemplating Contemporary Life: No. 3

Once upon a time we used to be told about movers and shakers. I didn't mind too much being told about them. There was something jolly and a bit silly about the image that was conjured up by the phrase, in my mind at least - 1960s chain link belts, bell bottoms and this very silly song:

Was there ever a sillier one?

"Movers and shakers" was aspirational. Any of us - or most of us anyway - can move, and, if called upon, perhaps with some embarrassment, we can even shake. Therefore, anyone who chose to could join the moving and shaking ranks, at any moment.

But movers and shakers have been replaced now, and we have A-listers in their stead. Ugh. 

I've no idea how you become an A-lister. I don't know who puts the list together in the first place either. The people who write the back parts of newspapers, I'd imagine, since it is they who report on A-listers' prancing and preening. Stuck for something to fill their pages, hacks draw up lists of A-listers' favourite restaurants and holiday spots and foods and present them to us with fanfare. "Where A-Listers Like to Relax", "What A-Listers Are Wearing This Christmas", et cetera, et cetera. Never what their favourite lavatory paper is, mind you, because presumably A-listers don't need use lavatory paper. 

Bring back movers and shakers! They were much more fun. Here are some movers and shakers from what is called "back in the day". The two on the left certainly seem to be having much more fun than any A-listers these days (and I think the picture undermines the idea that the much-reported demise of the suit and tie is doing men any favours):

Pleasant Surprise

This afternoon, when I opened a recent copy of the London Review of Books, I was surprised and delighted to find a new poem by Hugo Williams. I have his collection called From the Dialysis Ward and I'd imagined, from a reading of it, that he was on death's door some years ago and by now must be dead.

But he isn't; he's still here, writing rather enchanting poems like this one (perhaps my favourite line is 'in an atmosphere of ice cream'):

Season of Tyres and Tiger-print

The weather in Budapest has made an abrupt change to autumnal - rain, cold, morning fog. My beloved local hardware shop has updated its windows to greet the new season:

T

It saddens me that the reflection in the glass of the building opposite means that it is hard to make out the shower curtain featuring a portrait of a tiger that the windowdresser has teamed with a tigerprint-handled broom in picture No. 4. 

The creativity that is poured into these displays reminds me of that which finds its annual outlet via the entries in novelty cake competition sections at Australian country shows. Here, for example are cakes inspired by Australia's participation in World War One from the Canberra Show a few years back:

The one depicting soldiers in a trench is definitely my favourite, as its maker, more than any of the other entrants, refused to allow any thoughts about whether or not what was being made might be appetising enter into play.