Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

I have been meaning to ask what you thought of Rolf's portrait of the Queen. Having watched the programme and seen it evolve, I know that he struggled, but he had more trouble with the dress than the woman. I quite like it and admire his nerve. It's conventional, she has a Cartlandish look and I wish he'd asked her to sit on her hands; but she's there alright, the familiar face of a woman who knows how to hide her real thoughts. The warmth of expression that he has caught is ambushed by the well-observed guardedness of her eyes.

I'll bet you have never done a Finnish meme. Marja-Leena Rathje has passed this one on and is getting some intriguing answers from the arts community. I must list five weird habits of mine and challenge other bloggers to do likewise and let me know.

1. I adore poking at things: like pushing in the four corners of packets of butter and damp Oasis blocks, popping bubble-wrap, sticking my finger into the surface of a smooth bowl of jelly. I admit that once I poked a beautiful soft-iced chocolate cake & covered the hole up again.

2. Worried by symptoms or awaiting a medical diagnosis, I carefully arrange my thoughts to expect the worst possible outcome, otherwise I am absolutely sure that fate will smack me round the head for being unaware or optimistic.

3. I can't throw away (and thus murder) fading flowers and plants until they are completely dead. So there are always egg-cups with broken, browning flower-heads on my window-sill and buckets of yellowing foliage in the shed. Pricking out seedlings is agony, abandoning the weaklings.

4. I hate going to bed until exhausted. When I do get there I like to keep one foot waggling permanently outside the duvet.

5. I light candles all day, every day, even sunny ones. I like to see the living flame in the house.

There's to be a tabletop sale in the village hall this month; we have a load of junk that needs moving on, so we'll hire a fiver's worth of table. With this in view G has been up in the loft turning out his old photographic equipment - dark-room stuff, timers, enlarger - unused for years. I gathered a box of ornaments, unwanted presents, frames, costume jewellery and household stuff. After a bit he came down with a dusty carton full of slides, rough proofs and a packet of old photographs. I made tea and we sat at the kitchen table going through them. "Well I'm blowed, just look at this one," he said, "It's Beattie and Bert." And then he told me their story.


A TOUCHING TALE

G's Mum, Dot, had plenty of cause to hate war. Early in WW1 her intended, a sailor, died when his ship went down with all hands. Later her new husband was gassed in the last weeks of the war and died of it a year later leaving her with an infant. That son, a navigator, was shot down & killed over Belgium in WW2.

Alone with a child, in 1919 Dot had to go out to work to survive and took a job ironing for a large laundry in South London. One day Beattie, a scared, very shy girl, started work there with no idea of how to handle the task. She had been totally deaf since birth, she could lip-read but rather inadequately and the supervisors asked Dot to train her, banking on her kindness & patience to break the barrier.

So Beattie found her greatest friend and ally. After a year the duo were the top ironers in the place, given the best, most delicate linens to press. (Later I used to love to watch Dot perfectly iron and fold a shirt on a flat table in three minutes. G can do it too.)

Dot re-married, she left the laundry and G was born. Beattie, living quietly with parents, visited often and became his godmother. One day, by some miraculous fate she found her match. A 'smart man with a kind face' gave her his seat on a bus and asked her to go for a walk in the country. Just how he did this is a mystery, since Bert was both deaf and dumb. What were the odds against such a meeting? They worked it out, anyway, and were married soon after. That's them above - just back home from the church, looking perfect together.

G says that they were very happy, as a kid he often used to go round for a 'meat tea' on Sundays and he recalls that they were such fun and always gave him sixpence. I wondered, "How did you manage, if they both couldn't hear and he couldn't speak?" "I don't really remember, it seems to me that Mum and I could somehow communicate perfectly well with them."

After a time, Beattie & Bert moved away from London and as happens, even in great friendships, letters dwindled to an annual Christmas card, visits stopped and they lost touch. It would be nice to think that they had children and lived long. I love this photograph, I have propped it on my shelf so that I may speculate on the rest of their story.

Talking of Darcy, most people find that some aspect of clothing is especially attractive. Fetishy, I suppose. In his famous Firth manifestation the character wore my particular fancy, a white shirt. All varieties have appeal - this being the absolute ultimate. But I love the Van Heusen effect- dark suit, boiled shirt - you know the style, the one you never see around nowadays. At least, not in rural Norfolk.

Time was when G used to come in from work and take off his charcoal grey suit jacket to reveal an immaculate, fitted stretch of warm, clean-smelling cotton. Then there are the pirates, Hamlets and classic princes of the ballet who wear loose full-sleeved jobs that look especially fine against sun-browned skin. A dress shirt's pretty good too, Robert Taylor's in Camille for example.


I'm not sure I know where the prediliction comes from, perhaps from pictures of my grandfather the horseman, who used to wear a white shirt with a riding stock & pin. He looked mighty impressive to me as a kid. One of the most beautiful white shirt images is of Bernstein conducting with a backlight on his white hair and the the soft material folding into the motion of his arms. Oh dear, excuse me, I must go for a cold shower.

You're Mariane Dashwood from Sense &
Sensibility! You are the romantic
youngster, also found in Jane Austen's work as
Catherine of Northanger Abbey and
possibly Georgiana Darcy of Pride and
Prejudice. You wander through life like Red
Riding Hood in the forest, picking wildflowers
and humming a happy song... and you can't see
the wolf right in front of you! Ruled by heart
and not by head, you are best advised to to
learn a little caution, before you are forced
into a better acquaintance with the ways of the
world.

Which Jane Austen Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
(Via Darcy over at Stephenesque)

At Saturday Morning Pictures they used to show a daft comedy serial where a turbanned Eastern bloke had the catchphrase "I go... but... I come back." Exactement. I come back - fronting my return with the good old principle of never explain, never apologise, which is politic but unusually impolite for me. Thank you for your kind messages which I have only just read today. I just hope that you haven't all gone away forever.

What a lot of Mozart there is about. Not that one can ever have too much. Of all the celebratory programmes for his 250th, I think Lindsay Duncan reading Jane Glover's clever book, Mozart's Women, pleased me most. Her account of the frantic last week of his life - as he struggled to finish the Requiem, music pouring from him even in extremis - was very touchingly drawn. Elsewhere, Colin Davis observed that Wolfgang had little fear of death; "Mozart knows that life can change after lunch."

I have fur and feline access again. New neighbours up by the the road have five cats - two siamese. (Plus a couple of boxers, a Jack Russell, two rats and three children.) The pussies are to have a huge fenced enclosure and will not wander free - to avoid inevitable death on that road. This seems a cruel limitation, but they appear totally happy. Local birds will be spared a holocaust. I will enjoy the contact, for I've missed my own cats terribly, the three fab tabbies. The long-deceased Bristow & Tim are above. I didn't replace them, for if you encourage a bird population to feed, it is wicked to keep cats to kill them.

There's something good to look forward to tomorrow night, a new Poliakoff play. Like Stoppard he always provides something complex to chew on. Venture capitalists this time. He is really too much in love with beauty and emotive background music, but he is born to write drama. He gets under your skin. Strangely, the small screen suits and contains him. I was remembering the other day how compelling the old Ken Russell music documentaries were, Elgar and Debussy particularly; a season of those would be very desirable viewing if the BBC have kept the Monitor archives. But perhaps they would have dated? I am so often disappointed on revisiting books and films that I once thought clever or screamingly funny.

Well, I'm off now to start reading the last few weeks' input on my blogroll list, I have missed knowing what's going on in the worlds I visit there. It will be fun catching up.