Once Upon a Time in Anatoliya

I recommend the film Once Upon a Time in Anatoliya, which I saw yesterday evening. It has been described as 'life -changing' by one reviewer. That may or may not be the case. To paraphrase the report made by the Cambridge philosopher G E Moore about the young Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus ('I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree') the film is, if not a work of genius, well above the usual standard. I hope I do not spoil anyone's future enjoyment by saying that about an hour into the film I thought to myself 'This reminds me of Chekhov' - and, sure enough, when the credits rolled, the great man's name came up as having inspired the screenplay. It is a film worthy of comparison with the very greatest, because, while being apparently about a particular incident in a particular place, by the end you realise it is about the human condition. A propos:a re-mastered version of Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion was advertised as being on its way to a cinema near you. I had to consult Wikipedia to find the Moore quote, and found myself drawn into the entry for Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell (who I had wrongly remembered as having assessed Wittgenstein's Tractatus for a degree - Wittgenstein had been invited to teach at the university, but had not graduated therefore needed to be awarded a qualification). Wittgenstein worked as a gardener on several occasions during his lifetime, and as a hospital orderly, delivering pills from the dispensary to patients whom he would advise 'do not take them'. He also designed, built and flew his own aeroplane, and designed a house (down to the door handles which alone took a year - luckily the client was his forbearing sister). This in turn reminds me that I did take Decline and Fall to read on the train yesterday, and laughed immoderately all the way down. In it, there is an Austrian architect called Otto Silenus who designs a modernist house for one of the main characters, Margot Best-Chetwynde. All the characters in the book are based on people in Evelyn Waugh's circle, or recognisable versions of real people, so I suppose Waugh might have had Wittgenstein in mind. What a day.

Bedfellows

Today is the birthday of philosopher Rene Descartes, born in La Haye en Touraine, France (1596), called the father of modern philosophy, but he considered himself a mathematician and scientist. He became interested in philosophy when he heard that the church persecuted Galileo for his scientific theories. Descartes realized some of his own theories were also controversial, so he wrote a book called Discourse on Method (1637), about the necessity of doubt in scientific inquiry. He also wrote about beginning to doubt everything about his life, even the fact of his own existence. But in the process of doing so, he realized that he couldn't doubt the existence of his own thoughts, and he produced his most famous line: "Cogito ergo sum" - I think, therefore I am." Some years ago, I adapted this pithy phrase for my mother, who almost single-handedly supported the post-WWII retail boom: "Depenso ergo sum" - I shop, therefore I am.

Today is also the birthday of the poet Andrew Marvell, born in Winestead, England (1621). His most famous poem is "To His Coy Mistress," a favourite with undergraduates in my time, written to convince a woman to sleep with him: "Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime," .... "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near."

The Archbishop of Canterbury has commented this morning (Sat March 31) on the finding that less than half of all British children know the words of the Lord's Prayer. He points out that, quite aside from being deprived of a vehicle specifically recommended by Our Lord, those children are also unable to recognise the many allusions in our whole literature and culture to such core equipment. On my bookshelves this morning for instance, I noticed Andrew O'Hagan's novel Our Fathers (surely an allusion to the first line of the prayer). Even the title of this year's British entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 'Love Will Make You Free' echoes the New Testament lines John 8: 32 'And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'.

Condign

Condign is a useful English word, meaning apt, appropriate, as in 'condign punishment' = fitting the crime. It is rumoured from Moscow that, following the arrest of the Pussy Girls for singing an anti-Putin anthem at the altar of the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the congregations of two Moscow churches SS Cosma and Damian (Fr Alexander Borisov) and the Dormition(Fr V Lapshin) signed a petition asking the authorities to show clemency.The authorities, according to rumour, reacted with fury and have threatened to 'take over' both churches. Both incumbents, Borisov and Lapshin, were friends of Alexander Men whose free and frank priorities led to his death in 1990 at the hands, it is also rumoured, of those same authorities. I have suggested elsewhere that condign punishment for the Pussy Girls might be to serve in their church choir for a year. Then I remembered the scene in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, where the protagonist Paul Pennyfeather, a prep school master, finding himself towards the end of the novel in prison, communicates a message during the singing of the hymn 'Oh God Our Help in Ages Past':
All over the chapel the men filled their chests for a burst of conversation.
'Oh God our help in ages past' sang Paul
'Where's Prendergast today?'
'What aint you eard? 'e's been done in'
'And our eternal home.'

I laughed so much looking for this passage that I have decided to take the book on the train south today (for a funeral on Monday).

Lastly, I am delighted to report that my erstwhile mountain of books on the floor has melted to a mere couple of sorted piles. While shelving, I have found the strength to chuck quite a few. Some have gone to find new homes through the kind offices of Katherine Clemmens' Moffat Book Exchange, others have gone to Moffat CAN. In my haste to get the books onto shelves, I lowered my sights from attempting alphabetical positioning. This has resulted in a pleasing effect, whereby books in the same genre jostle as if at a disorderly and unlikely cocktail party. Looking just now along the rows for Decline and Fall, I noticed Rose Macaulay next to Gogol and Virginia Woolf next to Dostoievsky.

A hero of our time

A Scotsman ploughs a lonely furrow, commenting on English usage in faraway Moscow, safe from the slings and arrows of the politically correct consensus - do visit his blog for gusts of non-pc fresh air http://elerussians.blogspot.co.uk. A recent post mentions the current 'jerrycans' furore and Moffat, birthplace of Hugh Dowding architect of the Battle of Britain victory of 'the few'. I live in Moffat now, but was born in north Kent, a hop and skip away from Biggin Hill, under the skies where the B of B raged and where the dreaded V2 rockets later droned overhead until their engines cut out and they dropped silently with their deadly cargo onto their victims. Our house was built in 1939 on the edge of farmland, in a former orchard. One day my mother looked out of the kitchen window and saw a light aircraft landing in the garden. The pilot got out and asked my mother 'Which way to Biggin Hill?' In a re-run of the 1969 Harry Salzman Battle of Britain film on TV the other day, two young pilots were sent up into battle with only 7 and 12 hours training respectively. On the subject of TV, in an otherwise good documentary last night on BBCTV4 Art Nouveau - Sex and Sensibility, the presenter Stephen Smith pronounced 'Cymric' 'simrik' - clearly not connecting the word with Plaid Cymry which is pronounced to rhyme with Cumbria because both refer to our indigenous culture, the 'fellow countrymen' or 'cymbrogi'. In the language spoken by all those aborigines, the letter 'y' is pronounced 'u' - so it is Bob Dull'un, Dull'un Thomas and so on. Tut Tut. Or should that by 'Tyt Tyt'. Before we leave the subject of Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts etc or in Russian 'Moderne' we all have a treat in store in October when we will celebrate the publication of our Moffat Book Events chairman Andrew Wheatcroft's new book on The End of Empire. Goulash and Tokay all round (it's the Austro-Hungarian empire we're talking about)!

The Rake's Progress

I had two tickets for Scottish Opera's The Rake's Progress in Glasgow yesterday. By Thursday last week, it had become clear to Elly and me that we weren't going to make it, so when we got back to Moffat, on our knees with exhaustion, I gave them to some one else who was going and suggested she go up to someone in the queue at the box office and give them away. I saw The Rake designed by David Hockney at Glyndebourne in 1975. Ten years earlier, one of my school friends based not far from Glyndebourne and its eccentric founder, who would travel to London on business wearing tennis shoes, spent an idyllic summer as a programme seller at Glyndebourne, and having a precocious affair with a local playboy. In those days, the auditorium was small and tickets were very difficult to get, but we were lucky to have a neighbour in London whose aunt was the librarian at Glyndebourne and got them that way. The librarian was married to someone called Spike Hughes, a jazz musician and author of the successful 'The Art of Coarse...' (fishing, gardening, cricket etc) series of humorous guides to various pursuits. The neighbour co-founded the game- changing Chinese restaurant Mr Chow and ran what he called his 'dingy nightclub' in Jermyn St. All this could be the subject of a novel, I suppose, in which I would play the part of a dazed onlooker akin to that of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. Except that, in so many ways, life itself is so much more exciting and strange than most novels. The dentist has just rung to cancel my checkup appointment in Lanark today! Hooray!

A Woman's Life

I was explaining to my younger daughter Elly, after a visit to my mother (aged 95) on Friday, that my sister (I promise that's the last female relation in this sentence) had attended a domestic science academy after leaving school. This was because of the quality of lunch. We were 8: my mother and sister, myself and my daughter, my cousin Mary and her youngest daughter Sarah, the outgoing carer and the incoming carer. Before lunch, Nancy put her head round the door before she set off down the drive to the lodge where she and her airline pilot husband live. In fact, now that I count heads, the only men present were Olly (aged 11 months) and Nancy's husband who could be spied in the far distance, with a wheelbarrow in his shirtsleeves disappearing into a clump of trees.At first I did not recognise him. 'Is that your gardener, Mum?' 'No. That would be Jonathan planting out his potatoes'. My sister was sent (not too strong a word for it), aged 17, to an establishment run by two women, Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, called Winkfield after passing a respectable number of school exams, to learn how to arrange flowers and make delicious light lunches, pending marriage (it was presumed and expected by my father) to a man who would make some effortless kind of living ' in the City' or on running the family estate. Explaining this to Elly, it sounded like the Middle Ages. 'How dreadful' she said. Of course, my sister gradually escaped from these expectations, making herself into an internationally-recognised artist in her own right, as well as an expert in Duchamp and all things Dada. It is Gloria (A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle ) Steinem's birthday today, and 40 years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique that became an overnight best-seller, advocating what became known as 'feminism'. The moral of this story is not that learning how to prepare a delicious lunch is a waste of time - I wish I had. The moral is that the only constant to prepare our children for is change. To enjoy life, you must expect it and meet it cheerfully. After all, you never know when you might have eight to lunch.

Henry James's funeral

I used to be on the list of guides to Chelsea Old Church, which entailed reporting for duty for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon with another local resident and sitting chatting while a steady trickle of visitors came in and looked round the various monuments therein. One quiet Sunday afternoon, my friend Sheila and I were gassing away, vaguely aware that a young couple were looking round the church. They were French, and explained that they had come to see the plaque commemorating the novelist Henry James, who became a British subject just before his death during World War One. After they left, we were stunned to see that they had each left £20 in the collecting salver by the porch. Sheila and I decided to use the money to provide a leaflet about the great man, which I wrote and she designed. Sheila was - is - a considerable artist with a studio in Chelsea. During World War Two she was drafted, as an art student, into the British army's map-making service based in remote rural West Wales, and just before I left the house that had been my home for 38 years in December 2009, her work, with other contemporaries', was honoured with an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. This story of unexpected generosity has a twist in its tail. While researching the text for the leaflet, I became intrigued by the guest list at Henry James's funeral at the Old Church, which will be the subject of a paper I will be giving at an international conference in London at the end of June.