The Liz Truss effect

The Merriam-Webster site has a ‘Words We’re Watching’ feature. And I lurve it. It’s a record of how our language and usage constantly renew.

So I went there to refresh my senile memory about the ‘Barbra Streisand Effect‘.

In summary, twenty years back, an aerial photographer was doing a survey of California coastal erosion. In the course of which he snapped the mansion of Ms Streisand. She sued him on the ground of breach of her privacy. The result was her secluded residence became extremely well-known.

Shavianism

I wasn’t convinced the expression had crossed the Atlantic. Bernard Shaw gets the credit for:

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Many had similar thoughts previously; and Shaw himself, in his commentary on Caesar and Cleopatra [I think for the 1906 New York production], went even further into the linguistic shrubbery:

We have men of exactly the same stock, and speaking the same language, growing up in Great Britain, in Ireland, and in America. The result is three of the most distinctly marked nationalities under the sun.

If Ms Streisand’s property rights are not well-enough appreciated in these climes, we need a localised metaphor, a parallel, an analogue.

Enter Ms Truss

Liz is now, it is said, well-ahead in the swim-suit round of the almost-complete Tory leadership bun-fight. She didn’t do so well in the parliamentary dressage, a second-place also-ran with 113 of the 355 MP votes — so, watch that space. Presumably her fellow Tory MPs were voting on their known experience, and her Commons ability, rather than the ‘Margaret Thatcher lookalike contest’ which Ms Truss had been staging for some time.

Frit?

Yesterday, Tuesday, the BBC were expecting to have a full-on interview (recorded on Monday) with Ms Truss. The interviewer would be Nick Robinson, capable of probing soft tissue, very much ‘to the point’, but not one of flesh-eating Great White Sharks. Late in the day, and three weeks after her rival candidate had survived a similar outing, Ms Truss was ‘too busy’ to be interviewed. A bit of digging showed she had no alterative engagements to ‘busy’ her.

A bit of nominal history

That surname, ‘Truss’, seems to derive from one of Guillame le Bâtard’s accomplices at Hastings. Pagan, le Sire de Troussebot, was rewarded with a chunk of what is now the East Riding of Yorkshire. Liz’s father was a Maths professor at Leeds, and she spent some time at Roundhay School (which she later unfairly dissed) so — at last that far — the fruit fell not too far from the family tree.

Since I’m playing word games here, and conscious of the enormous amusement Ted Heath gave the French by deputing Sir Con O’Neill as his negotiator, I’m wondering what the Germans will hear in ‘Truss’. In English it’s ambiguous — but to translate it would either be das Gerbälk if we are supporting a roof, or das Bruckband if it’s a surgical appliance. If we are ‘trussing up’ something, we’d need to fesseln — the same term for binding ‘hand-and-foot’, which thereby completes my BDSM reference for today, and for British politics in the immediate future.

Need for naval psychotherapy?

Britain built two floating behemoths at a cost of £6,212,000,000. Equipping them with aircraft and radar will easily take us to another decimal place.

Were one looking for another example of British failings, this would qualify:

But ‘broken down’? Rather like a clapped-out car on its last legs? Or a C-grade celeb weeping on stage?

Tory birds, and blokes, in their nest don’t agree

Barely awake, I picked it up on a tweet from John Rentoul.

Had one not recognised the names, one would not have realised the source was The [London] Times. Here it is:

TORY LEADERSHIP CONTEST

Little sign of Conservative Party healing itself after vicious leadership race

The Tory contest is nearly over but the fury is not. Steven Swinford, Henry Zeffman and Geraldine Scott report

The essential is reached only in the seventh paragraph:

The scale of the challenges Truss will face if she wins are manifold — an energy crisis, the prospect of a winter crisis in the NHS, the war in Ukraine — but the question of how she unites a bitterly divided party is fundamental.

I hope we all get the order of priorities, the fundamental — our useful reminder, had we needed it, that the Party comes before all other considerations.

Sure enough, Sunak […] behaving like a “wounded stoat” is recyled. Quickly followed by another reminder:

But Sunak carries significant levels of support. Despite Truss’s apparently unassailable lead among Tory members, more than 120 Tory MPs still back the former chancellor. “The thing that people need to look at is why the hell isn’t the number of MPs supporting Liz higher,” one Tory MP who supports Sunak said. “There’s lots of MPs who endorsed Kemi [Badenoch] or Tom [Tugendhat] or Penny [Mordaunt] who haven’t backed Liz. What is their downside to coming out? Zero. But they haven’t. The thing that would worry me if I were [Truss’s camp] is that.”

That might indicate factionalism will worsen in a Truss administration.

Obviously, even now, the Trussites are calculating whom to include in the next Cabinet, and part of the deliberation will address the ‘pissing in/pissing out’ quotient.

In the first instance, post 5th September and the Great Declaration, all will superficially be sweetness and light. That will last until the first week of October, and the escape from the Birmingham Tory Conference. We are assured, elsewhere, that Boris Johnson intends a final hurrah! He will doubtless pledge commitment and loyalty, as all Tories must, but we should watch for any cruellest cuts of all. Be sure he is not the forgiving type.

Then it’s back to real business in the Commons. By then, in theory, Truss will have sorted the whole energy-price crisis, the Northern Ireland protocol, and the NHS/social care package. Yes: we truly believe all that is possible, even without super-powers and a cloak. We shall, but of course, witness the conquering heroine seeing off all opposition, both internal in the Party, and the re-energised Starmer across the dispatch boxes.

The authors of that Times article are dubious in the extreme, and here we find the conclusion John Rentoul re-posted:

One of Truss’s senior allies said she faced an impossible task, given the scale of the crises facing her government this winter. They said the party would move against her after the May local elections. “I think it’s beyond doable,” they said. “It’s gone too far. The people who are backing Sunak will not lose easily. Their own personal careers are more important than uniting the country.

“For Liz just governing is going to be impossible, never mind uniting the party. They will move against her. The winter is going to be awful. If she does badly in the May election they will get rid of her. They are collectively insane, the party is on the point of meltdown.”

Two Tory leadership elections in a year? Three Tory Prime Ministers in the same period? What will Brenda from Bristol say? Can we, and the portrait hangers for the Downing Street staircase wall manage so much business? 

The alternative is a panic-driven General Election (and I hear Labour murmurs of just that). It would be 1997 déjà-vu all over again.

Absit omen

There is another precedent, and — for any Tory — it’s far more appalling.

Until 1993 Brian Mulroney’s Canadian Conservative government had been riding high: two successive majority governments, a major trade deal with the US. Mulroney was brought down by a trifecta of troubles: the economy turned sour; internal problems (for Québec, read Northern Ireland) and a sales tax was as popular as bubonic plague.

The Canadian Conservatives looked and found a blonde Margaret Thatcher simulacrum, Kim Campbell. She was an instant failure with a habit of unlicensed and loose speech. Come the 25 October 1993 General Election, Campbell’s Conservatives managed to lose 154 of their 156 seats on a 27% swing against them.

 

Mustela erminea

One of Dear Old Dad’s regulars:

What’s the difference between a stoat and a weasel?

• A weasel is w-easily distinguished
• Because a stoat is s-totally different.

On the rare occasions I’ve seen either, the difference wasn’t immediately obvious.

We had just passed the A1(M) roundabout on the A59 from York to Harrogate, when the Lady in my Life explodes: “Look! A stoat!” Sure enough, there was a skinny, elongated creature leaping along the edge of the tarmac. I took her identification on trust.

That’s not the point here.

Friday and Saturday are the two days we buy a hard copy of The Times. Today Patrick Maguire, doing the Red Box column, had this:

One gets the sense that Sunak is no longer running for victory, but vindication come what may. Truss allies accuse him of scorching the earth. “Sunak is in a complete micro-world of his own, he’s thrashing around all over the place like a wounded stoat,” one tells The Times. “All he’s doing is attacking her. At some point someone has to grab him by the scruff of the neck and say what are you doing? Are you trying to destroy this party?

“By this stage everyone is normally trying to bring the party together, we’ve got less than two weeks to go. But these attacks are framing us as Tory scum. It’s personal and it’s bitter and it needs to stop.”

I see other papers have picked up, and repeated the same odd simile — not crediting The Times (which is the usual) and not naming the Truss ally (though certain names spring, stoat-like, to mind). The simile fails because it is usually the stoat as predator grabbing by the scruff of the neck.

The expression puzzled me. Why a stoat? Then I agreed with myself: the obvious alternative would be Dear Old Dad’s confusing weasel. It feels to me the Truss ally, half way through framing the expression, had a mental check. One of the accusations against Sunak is his resignation was ‘treason’ against Johnson, and a significant contribution to Fatso’s fall. 

If one is complaining, as the Truss ally explicitly is, about unfair, personal and bitter insults framing us as Tory scum, going for the weasel word is self-condemnatory.

Still, whoever it was, got the Tory scum bit bang-to-rights.

Another truth to be told: some of these feuding Tories are bound to end up in the Lords, in ermine. The ermine (as I remember) is dead stoat pelts.

What’s it all about, Lizzy?

What has gone wrong for the Tories?

Fewer than a thousand days ago (988 as I sit here) Boris Johnson was cock-of-the-dunghill, with the highest popular vote since Thatcher in 1979, and sitting on an unassailable 80-seat majority. Today the old cock is merely an unemployed feather duster.

Tory cultism gave us privatisation and Europhobia and empowered Nimbyism. There’s three to start with.

Privatisation

It began with the state appropriating property. Local authorities had developed local utilities over decades: at a stroke they were alienated by the state, and sold off at rock-bottom share-prices to sub the bourgeois voters. The rationale was that a private corporation would sweat the assets in a way a public one couldn’t and wouldn’t. Of itself, apart from the landgrabs, nothing too controversial there.

The privatised operations would have a firm hand of regulators behind them. And that was the catastrophic error: the regulators have been complacent and compliant. There is a revolving door between the offices of the privatised utilities and the offices of the regulators — almost impossible to avoid if expertise in the latter can only be recruited from the former.

Note what happened with the railways, apart from an influx of lawyers. The infrastructural knowledge, acquired by decades of in-house engineers, was shrugged off: cheaper to buy in ‘consultants’ and ‘experts’. Traditionally the chief safety official, responsible for investigating and remedying accidents, was a military man — probably originally with the Indian railways. Now it would be another bureaucrat. Consider the list of post-privatisation rail ‘accidents’. Ireland’s own version, writ small, was the Malahide viaduct: would that have happened were a lengthsman walking the track on a regular basis?

The next stage in the great privatisation fiddle was eliminating the small share-holder, and grossing the concerns into ever larger conglomerates. Which then became the loose change for international finance. Here in York, my buses are a sub-division of Deutsche Bahn, as are two of the train operators, my energy supply is nominally ‘Scottish Power’ (main owner based in Bilbao), Yorkshire Water is at root Citibank and HSBC.

Before we screetch ‘renationalise’, I’d suggest an alternative: again sweat the assets. Give the regulators power and means to make providers deliver. Look what has happened on the East Coast Main Line with Virgin Trains surrendering to a state-run LNER.

Europhobia

Thatcher was, in practice, a sound European. She was a main mover of the Single Market. Her gut was against referendums. She was dead before her cultists took over. Her name has been appropriated by such as those in my next paragraph.

The main proponents of Leave were right-wing Atlanticists, hedge-fundies, and their pawns in places such as Tufton Street and Policy Exchange.

The Tory Party found itself under threat from hedgies, and their poor, bloody infantry, the Faragists. Cameron, weak as dish-water, first bought his way by vague promises of a referendum; then was forced to see it through (fully and arrogantly expecting to win it). The kindest verdict on Cameron could be ‘nice, but dim’. He was outflanked by Farage’s populism, Boris Johnson’s opportunism, and Michael Gove’s machinations. All now consigned to the dustbin of history, we must hope. [I see Gove is just 55 today, so unlikely to retire to ‘gardening leave’.]

After the referendum, the best chance of finding firm ground was something like Theresa May’s half-way house, accepting the UK as part of the Single Market, and squabbling line-by-line over the rules. Johnson’s driving ambition saw that off. He then expelled from the Tory Party any and all who opposed his dominance — and with those Big Beasts went whole swathes of Tory talent. The good news there is it will hobble, perhaps even split the Tory Party for a decade or more ahead.

All for what? Sterling at $1.18, nil investment even at that bargain price, stupendous bureaucracy, total chaos in international relations, and a looming recession. Good luck with all that, Mizz Truss (especially if a tawdry Tory cheer at Norwich merits cocking snooks at President Macron).

Nimbyism

The Tory Party is not a national party. Estimates say its membership is below 150,000, average age around fifty-seven, and heavily non-urban. That remaining membership doesn’t like the Big State, doesn’t like wind-farms, doesn’t like solar power — and that is especially relevant at the moment.

The current issue of The New European gets Paul Mason on both Tory leadership candidates inveighing against solar energy:

Truss told party members in Darlington: “I’m somebody who wants to see farmers producing food, not filling in forms, not doing red tape, not filling fields with paraphernalia like solar farms. What we want is crops, and we want livestock.”​

Sunak meanwhile promised Telegraph readers that, under his leadership, Britain would “not lose swatches of our best farmland to solar farms”. He was committed to “making sure our fields are used for food production and not solar panels”.​

Err, umph: it occurs to me if there are no regulations, and if the farmer gets a better income from solar panels than running unsellable sheep, why shouldn’t the farmer go with the solar option? Or am I missing something?

I guess the target there wasn’t the farmer balancing books, but the traveller on the A1(M) or East Coast Main Line (ECML) horrified the passing landscape is no longer Enid Blyton’s.

Anyhoo, Mason adds:

solar farms — where arrays of photovoltaic cells convert the sun’s energy into electricity and channels into the National Grid — take up just 0.1% of the UK’s land and 0.08% of the land in use.​

And that, by planning guidance, wherever possible:

“previously developed land, brownfield land, contaminated land, industrial land, or agricultural land of classification 3b, 4 and 5 (avoiding the use of ‘Best and Most Versatile’ cropland wherever possible”).​

​

Mason pushes Truss’s argument even further. She:

has advanced … instead of solar, farmland should be used to grow maize for biofuels. there are already 93,000 hectares of land being used for this, which produce a grand total of half a Gigawatt. The same acreage of land covered with solar panels would produce 45GW — or half of our total needs to stop climate change.​

I’m not going to back those numbers: they seem a trifle glib to me. But far more so does the Truss approach.

Let me come at it from a different view: on my trips down the ECML I see the solar farms. Around Doncaster, I also pass trains carrying fuel for the Drax power station — and that really is a boondoggle. Highly-processed wood pellets arrive by ship; which are then conveyed to Drax by diesel-hauled trains, to be processed back into powder, and blown into the former coal-fired boilers. All this is, allegedly but disputably, ‘carbon-neutral’.

Two of these three headline items are introverted, faux-nostalgic gripes.

Non conforming books

Sassoonery (above) left me shuffling books. In the course of which some main thoughts crossed my mind:

1. do I actively dislike publishers who change format and even finished size at will?
2. what do I think about matched sets, anyway?
3. is there an organic process in the accumulation of an author’s work?

I’ll take those in sequence.

The first is because Heinemann put out Donna Leon’s Give Unto Others (Brunetti 31) in an annoying slightly larger size to its eighteen predecessors. So they no longer neatly line up, and this last beds horizontally so Leon nestles in necrophiliac closeness with the late Philip Kerr. Of course I could take out a couple of shelves, widen the spacing by one clip, and then accept the lack of evenness. But I’m too bloody idle.

The second is observing that the only wholly matched set I have is seventeen volumes of the Oxford History of England. And, strictly, they are the property of the Lady in My Life.

Hold on, I hear you say: there are only fifteen in the series. Not so, respond I: she has both the original Collingwood and Myres, Roman Britain, and the divided volumes of Salway on Roman Britain and Myres on The English Settlements. I’ve just noted the prices on those on the OUP site. Wowzah! New, that’s a thousand quid a shelf.

Once upon a time I might have coveted the Oxford Illustrated Dickens — but that was my infantile envy of one who had collected them. In fact, the only one of the series up there behind my head is Bleak House — along with Hard Times, the text I seem most often to have taught, and so I have several versions, including the Norton Critical editions.

My awful warnings about uniform series include:

• those charity shops flogging out Walter Scott, but missing volume 12 or whatever;
• the guy who spent a life-time and a fortune getting every Wisden since 1864.

Now here’s the third, and — to me — most interesting of those notions. How an author’s oeuvre accumulates on my shelves follows a pattern:

• the earliest will be well-thumbed paperbacks. By the nature of the beasts, these will have lost their coherence, and be on the verge of losing pages, and even sections. Likely as not, they’ll be in the original Penguin format (something like 11cm by 18cm) and be priced in pre-decimal currency. Old friends, indeed, fitting neatly into a commuter’s jacket pocket. Some acquired from the three-penny and six-penny troughs outside Greene’s in Clare Street.
• then comes the transition: I’m hooked, and even flush. I start buying the hard-backs on publication. That’s why Donna Leon, and John le Carré, and Ian Rankin and others have uniformity thrust upon them.
• the last stage of this process is almost second childishness and mere oblivion. It’s back to paperbacks. What happened there? Did I fail to keep up with the publication schedule? Did boredom set in? Did my tastes move on? All imponderables; but keep me wondering as I move on to the next shelf.

The worst self-inflicted wound of all is to wander into Waterstones and find, on the ‘buy two, pay one and a half’ counters, a paperback where the hard-back, unread, is shelved at home.

Germanic rigour

The lighting on the Brandenburg Gate has already been switched off; so I assume similar restrictions elsewhere will follow.

May I approve?

The BBC website gives a list of other measures:

Starting from September, public buildings apart from institutions like hospitals, are to be heated to a maximum of 19C and the heating may be turned of completely in entrances, corridors and foyers.

Public monuments and buildings will also not be lit up for aesthetic reasons and businesses could be banned from keeping their shops illuminated at night.

Private swimming pool heating could also be banned. And the country will give coal and oil cargo priority over passenger travel on railways meaning passengers will have to wait.

Any chance a UK minister might do something about the light pollution of the City of London?

Goes my M25 look too obvious on that?

Not that any other city is less visible from Mars. Can all those buildings need full illumination, day and night?

Better to start doing something now than wait until a Russian apparatchik turns off Europe’s gas supply in the middle of a major freeze — because, as sure as eggs are eggs, that’s a strategic option.

It’s all very well the unemployed, outgoing Prime Minister boosting his air-miles with PR efforts and day-trips. He could try something novel, something truly not-Boris: he could show solidarity with the really threatened EU economies, and set an example to the rest of us (who will be assiduously switching off, turning down, and wearing an extra sweater, not casting any clouts until next May is out). One thing we can be sure, Mizzy Truss, cosseting any electoral bounce, won’t have the guts. Then it will be too damn late.

Somehow I expect the Germans, against all odds, to come through the inevitable recession in better shape than the Brits.

Sassoonery

An hour spent shuffling shelves is rarely time wasted — though I guarantee it will involve much time diverted thereafter.

On Monday I despatched the Pert Young Piece back to her perch in North bleedin’ Lunnun. I made sure she took with her a few of the books piling up round these parts. If I don’t do it now, sequentially, there’s going to one heck of a problem after my final trip to the crematorium.

So I ended up with a couple of gaps to fidget with; and set to sorting.

One slight volume came up: one of those red cloth-bound Fabers from long ago: Siegfried’s Journey.

Mine is only a ‘second impression’ from April 1946, and (the fly-sheet tells me) was originally the possession of Josephine Conway Morris, The Lodge, North End Avenue, Hampstead, NW3. Just a short stroll, then, from The Old Bull and Bush.

Ms Morris had, thoughfully, left a newspaper cutting in her book:

Ephemera like that are a main joy of seond-hand books.  So I sprawled on the couch, left the book-sorting to another afternoon, and settled to Sassoon.

Once upon a time I was a Sassoon fan. I think we were made to read Fox Hunting Man at school. Inevitably I’d have followed that with Infantry Officer. Much later I completed the trilogy with Sherston’s Progress.

That last probably was by the time I was interested in the doings of the British Army in Ireland in the back end of the First War. All I took from it was the general lethargy, the ennuie, of soldiering — ‘Sherston’ spends his time riding to hounds, when he can:

No distance, I felt, would be too great to go if only I could get hold of a decent hireling. Nobody in the barracks could tell me where to look for one. The genial majors permanent at the Depot were fond of a bit of shooting and fishing, but they had no ambition to be surmounting stone walls and big green banks with double ditches. Before long, however, I had discovered a talkative dealer out at Croome, and I returned from my first day’s hunting feeling that I’d had more than my money’s worth. The whole thing had been most exhilarating. Everyone rode as if there wasn’t a worry in the world except hounds worrying foxes. Never had I galloped over such richly verdant fields or seen such depth of blue in distant hills. It was difficult to believe that such a thing as ‘trouble’ existed in Ireland, or that our majors were talking in apprehensive undertones about being sent out with mobile columns – the mere idea of our mellow majors going out with mobile columns seemed slightly ludicrous.

Sherston isn’t long at Limerick, before he is posted to Palestine. This third book takes him back to the Western Front, an own-goal head-wound which ends his active service, and so to the Armistice Day celebrations in London.

If I had been looking for a feeling of Ireland around 1917-18, I didn’t find it in this Progress. It feels more like a Punch cartoon: jovial souls drinking, and blathering.

Quite when I got to Sherston’s Progress defeats me.  I seem to have mislaid my original separate copies of the trilogy, and all I see here is the Penguin anthology.

This Siegfied’s Journey, then, is a bit of an optional add-on. As I read on, it became increasingly more of a chore. Sassoon has, for me, an irritating habit of introducing a character and — only after a page or so of whataboutery — telling us the

distinguished Colonel … who had done wonderful things in the Hejaz campaign

is TE Lawrence.

Another annoyance is how Sassoon swerves from a visit to Red Clydeside:

That the ‘ Reds ’ of the City Corporation had reason to be indignant was grimly impressed on me when I was conducted through the worst of the slum areas. I had thought of slums as wretched and ramshackle, but had imagined them mitigated by some sort of Dickensian homeliness. These courts and alleys were cliff-like and cavernous, chilling me to the bone. The few unfortunates who scowled at us from doorways looked outlawed and brutalized. Here the thought of comfort never came, and there was a dank smell of destitution. Cold as the stones we trod was the bleak inhumanity of those terrible tenements. Appalled, and more than willing to ask why such things should be, I felt thankful to get back into the thriving city streets. I had no wish to enter the Cowcaddens again. Does that rent-producing monument of misery and social injustice still exist, I wonder? Or has the work of people like [David] Kirkwood for Labour Housing conditions been effective in condemning the Cowcaddens as unfit for human habitation?

Turn the page: Sassoon is now having his Oxford rooms curtained on the advice of Lady Ottoline Morrell, out cycling on Boar’s Hill with John Masefield, and keeping company with Osbert Sitwell and Ronald Firbank.

Three conclusions, then:

• Sassoon is a right old literary snob;
• this is catch-penny dilettantism;
• the great unmentionable (he is writing in 1945, after all) is Sassoon and most of his acquaintance are as camp as a row of pink tents.

Lancasterian

@marshallcartoon has just tweeted this:

He comments:

Love this wonderful old book illustration possibly because the staircase and chandelier are just like the ones in my house. It’s from an old Finnish book picked up at a car boot. Can’t work out the name of the cartoonist, looks like ‘Bymoer’?

One look at the image and I thought ‘Osbert Lancaster’.

Just before the Second Unpleasantness (the first edition was October 1938) John Murray published Pillar to Post, or The Pocket-Lamp of Architecture.

Here is Osbert sketching, more sparsely, the epoch of that Finnish book:

And here (page 58) is his commentary:

As soon as the Boer War had been brought to satisfactory conclusion and the seventh Edward was safely seated on his throne, the country entered upon a brief but glittering Indian summer of prosperity and glory; and in order adequately to express the Imperial grandeurs of this epoch it was generally felt that some new and grandiose style of architecture was called for. It was soon decided that the style most suitable for the task of turning the capital of the British Empire into a bigger and better Potsdam was a modified form of Baroque.

Soon many of the principal street of London were rendered ominous by the erection of numerous buildings of terryfying proportions and elephantine decoration. Beneath circular windows the size of the Round Pond (copied from Hampton Court, for it was thought proper to introduce a patriotic note here and there) vast swags of brobdingnagian fruit sprawled across the façade, threatening all beneath with instant annililation should their security have been overestimated by the architect. In attitudes of acute discomfort nymphs and tribal deities of excessive female physique and alarming size balanced precariously on broken pediments, threatening the passer-by with a shower of stone fruit from the carvernous intertiors of their inevitable cornucopia.

Alongside this neo-Baroque style in architecture there developed a characteristic Edwardian rococo in interior decoration which is not only decidedly less offensive but even achieved a certain tinselly but appropriate, if specious, charm, of which few examples have, alas, survived.

What can one add? Well:

• any chance such purple-prose and heavy punctuation would survive a modern editor?
• perhaps the Luftwaffe was one of the more successful town-planning machines of the mid-twentieth century.

One of the few survivors of Lancaster’s neo-Baroque (both inside and out) is the Australian High Commission in London:

 

 

Swanning around

Being who and what I am, that means starting near Gort:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

Years since, my daughter shared a count of that view with me: we made no more than high twenties.

On another occasion, the Lady in my Life and I were sharing a calm summer’s afternoon at the George in Fordingbridge. As if by the command of the Tourist Board, an unnumbered, uncounted flock of swans and brown cygnets came under the bridge.

Yes: that looks familiar, if greatly improved and doubtless gentrified. We’d have been on that terrace, to the left (i.e west) of the Great Bridge (it’s been there since the thirteenth century, though much modified).

On swans, I have some main thoughts:

• I am profoundly wary of them, particularly when they waddle towards me, hissing (that’s been with me since a childhood warning from my mother). On the whole, unlike ducks (particularly beware those at the Trout at Wolvercote) swans are not demanding: they’ll cruise past ignoring all and sundry.
• Passing over, as a ‘wedge’ (note use of technical name), they are determined, often elegant, but also damned noisy.
• Watching a swan attempting to go from water to air is an education in expended (and often unsuccessful) effort. Landing can be a laugh: there’s a fraught moment on touchdown before a proper dignity is restored.