A Haddock Tomb

 I was cheered this morning to see a story about Historic England's listing of an 'exceptionally rare' group of 17th-century chest tombs in the churchyard of St Clement's, Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. This is 'my' period, of course, as readers of The Mother of Beauty will know (and just to say, it's the ideal stocking filler – still available on Amazon, or from me at nigeandrew@gmail.com). One of these Essex tombs is of Mary Haddock, mother of Admiral Richard Haddock, a prominent commander in the Anglo-Dutch wars, and very probably one of the inspirations for Hergé's great creation, Captain Haddock. Alongside her tomb is that of her father, a whaler, and a third tomb commemorates one Mary Ellis, believed to have lived 119 years and died 'a virgin of virtuous courage and very promising hope'. Her tomb, being that of a single, childless woman, 'stands as a remarkable challenge to 17th-century gender norms', according to Historic England. Really? I'm sure I've seen plenty of 17th-century monuments to single, childless women (of impeccable virtue, needless to say). 
Read the whole story here... 

'At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness...'

 When I was still in the world of work, toiling away in the engine rooms of NigeCorp, December (as long-time readers might recall) was always an especially busy and exhausting month, thanks to the demands of a looming Xmastide. I fondly thought that perhaps, when I retired, things would be quieter and I would have ample time to attend to the blog and other congenial activities. Needless to say, it has not panned out like that, and December remains almost as busy and exhausting as ever, albeit in different ways (and it does beat being chained to my editorial oar at NigeCorp). Anyway, all this is by way of saying that blog posting might be a bit spotty for a while, and I might even resort to the occasional raid on the archives: I certainly shall today, as the birthday of Humphry Davy (born 1778) gives me the perfect excuse to republish this account, from ten years ago, of the great Cornishman's amazing adventures with laughing gas...

'I see that Nitrous Oxide - 'laughing gas' - is in fashion again, just as it was back in the 1790s, though it was then enjoyed by a rather more select band of enthusiasts.
 At the Pneumatic Institute, the brainchild of Dr Thomas Beddoes (father of that strange poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes), in Bristol, the young scientific whiz kid Humphry Davy was throwing himself into the grand project of experimenting with Nitrous Oxide. The hope was that it would have near-miraculous therapeutic properties - and who knew what other uses - and Davy was keen to experiment on himself (as he had already done with Carbon Monoxide, with very nearly fatal results) to find out its effects.
 After inhaling four quarts, Davy noted 'highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and extremities. The objects around me became dazzling, and my hearing more acute... Sometimes I manifested my pleasure by stamping or laughing only; at other times, by dancing around the room and vociferating... This gas raised my pulse upwards of twenty strokes, made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.'
 No wonder he was keen to press on. 'Between April and June I constantly breathed the gas sometimes three or four times a day for a week... I have often felt very great pleasure when breathing it alone, in darkness and silence, occupied only by ideal existence.' What, he wondered, would be the effect of an overdose? After inhaling a full six quarts, he noted that 'the pleasurable sensation was at first local, and perceived in the lips and the cheeks. It gradually, however, diffused itself over the whole body, and in the middle of the experiment was for a moment so intense and pure as to absorb existence. At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness; it was, however, quickly restored, and I endeavoured to make a bystander acquainted with the pleasures I experienced by laughing and stamping. I had no vivid ideas.'
 Pressing on, he was soon making use of a portable gas chamber designed by James Watt, which enabled him to inhale eight quarts over a planned 75 minutes before being released from the chamber (with his pulse at 124, his temperature 106 and his face bright purple) and given a top-up of 20 quarts of pure gas. 'The sensations were superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably pleasurable,' he noted. 'Theories passed rapidly thro the mind, believed I may say intensely, at the same time that everything going on in the room was perceived. I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals, I was indignant at what they said of me and stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr Kinglake privately that nothing existed but thoughts.'
 After some more experiments testing the effects of combining alcohol with nitrous oxide - it seems it's good for hangovers - Davy ended this self-experimenting phase, happily unscathed and with his mind sharper than ever.
 The Pneumatic Institute was popular also with artists and writers, and Coleridge was among those sampling the laughing gas, noting 'an highly pleasurable sensation of warmth over my whole frame, resembling what I remember once to have experienced after returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room'. But he also felt, he wrote, 'more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced'.
 Robert Southey, who was to develop into a sedate and respectable Poet Laureate, was quite esctatic in his reactions to the gas, writing to his brother Tom: 'O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide. Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure, for which language has no name. Oh, Tom! I am going for more this evening! It makes one strong and happy! So gloriously happy!'
 Surely science was never such fun again.
 [For more on all this - among many other things - see Richard Holmes's marvellous The Age of Wonder.]

Sebald RIP

 This is the somewhat austere gravestone of W.G. Sebald, who died in this day in 2001. It stands in the churchyard of St Andrew's, Framlingham Earl, a round-towered Norfolk church. Sebald lived nearby, in the old rectory of Poringland, described as 'a long, unattractive village' a few miles south of Norwich. As well as being shocking and premature, his death also seemed wildly incongruous: Sebald, so much the quintessential pedestrian – The Rings of Saturn is, among much else, the chronicle of a great walk – died at the wheel of his car, having suffered a heart attack and swerved into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Mercifully, his daughter, who was in the car with him, survived. 
  I discovered Sebald late, nearly a decade after his death, but, once I had found him, I read everything of his I could get my hands on. I would place him among the handful of recent authors whose works – at least Austerlitz, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn –  I would save from the ruins. 

'A strange, ingenious compound of dulness and danger'

 When the evening torpor has fully set in and there is nothing to be done about it, I often find myself watching 24 Hours in A&E (on Ch4 or its affiliates). On the face of it, this is just another documentary series celebrating the heroic work of those on the front line of emergency medicine, but 24 Hours, I would sleepily contend, is different, and a much more satisfying watch – chiefly because it introduces us to the patients as people, following up on their stories and telling something, often surprising and revealing, of their backgrounds and struggles in life. Sure, it's emotionally manipulative and it shows the NHS in an all too flattering light, and of course it has little to do with the actual hellish experience of waiting your turn in an A&E department – but these human stories are genuinely heartening, and show that we humans are most of us not so bad after all, and some of us positively heroic. Or maybe I'm just going soft in the head. 
  Anyway, week after week, one of the main causes of the often life-threatening accidents that land people in A&E is the bicycle (others are ladders, stairs, motorbikes and alcohol, all of which should of course be banned by our caring government – first step: replace everybody's stairs with solar-powered lifts...). The bicycle was a machine of which Max Beerbhom took a dim view. In an essay, 'Fashion and Her Bicycle' (collected in More), he casts a cool eye on the fashion for bicycling, hoping that it is a passing craze. Fashion, he hopes, 'will remember it only as a horrid penance. Already she has dropped it from her conversation; Rudge, Humber, Singer – she cares no longer to discriminate between machines which are, one and all of them, the devil's own patent. Indeed, she thinks, bicycling was ever the most tedious topic of conversation. It was also the most tedious form of exercise, save walking, known to the human race. It was but a strange, ingenious compound of dulness and danger.' The bicycle, he notes, 'kills some of its riders, and bores the rest'. 
  Beerbohm recognises, however, that the bicycle will endure, even after it has fallen out of fashion. 'Some things were created by Fashion herself, and perished so soon as she was weary of them. Others, merely adopted by her, are more abiding. Golf, for example, as the most perfect expression of national stupidity, has an assured, unchequered future ... and bicycling, as a symptom of that locomotomania produced by usage of steam, will endure "till we go back to the old coaches".' How right he was. As for Fashion, Max wonders what will next attract her attention: 'There are many things for her selection. The concertina is a rather nice instrument. Stilts are not to be despised. Mohammedanism is said to be fascinating, and so are tip-cat and the tight-rope.'

'It is the old kingdom of man'

 One of my birthday presents was The Accidental Garden, a short book by Richard Mabey, who, at 83, is still the doyen of the ever growing tribe of English nature writers. The Accidental Garden begins with a quotation from R.S. Thomas – surely a good sign – in which the poet describes a garden as 'a gesture against the wild,/ The ungovernable sea of grass'. This, says Mabey, 'sounds pretty much like a summary of the whole human project on planet Earth. We still struggle to find a gesture in our relations with the natural world which is more like a handshake than a clenched fist.'
  The quotation is from this 14-line poem, 'The Garden' – 

It is a gesture against the wild,
The ungovernable sea of grass;
A place to remember love in,
To be lonely for a while;
To forget the voices of children
Calling from a locked room;
To substitute for the care
Of one querulous human
Hundreds of dumb needs.

It is the old kingdom of man.
Answering to their names,
Out of the soil the buds come,
The silent detonations
Of power wielded without sin.

Emily Dickinson, who was born on this day in 1830, was a keen and expert gardener, and a passionate garden lover: 'I was reared in the garden, you know', she wrote in a letter to her cousin Louisa Norcross. With her mother and her sister Lavinia, she worked wonders in the garden and conservatory of the Amherst Homestead. Here, to make a pair with Thomas's, is one of Emily's garden poems, 'In the Garden' –

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

Now there's an image – the splashless leap of butterflies – as potent as the silent detonations of Thomas's buds. 

'Who knows if Jove who counts our Score will toss us in a morning more?'

 It's not often that I have occasion to mark an anniversary from the era we traditionalists still call 'BC' –but today is the birthday, in 65BC, of Horace, the Latin poet who was more widely read, 'imitated' and translated in England than any other (with the possible exception of Virgil). In the seventeenth and, especially, eighteenth century, he virtually became one of the English poets, and in the 19th century Gladstone was one of many who habitually read and translated him, in his case while also serving as Prime Minister – those days are long gone, that's for sure... Pope wrote a fine set of eleven Imitations of Horace, and one of Marvell's greatest poems was Horace-inspired – the endlessly subtle, touching and ironic 'An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'. 
  As for Samuel Johnson, he read and translated Horace – especially the Odes – all his life, from his schooldays to near the end. It was in his final months that he wrote this translation of Ode 7 from Book 4, with its strong theme of mortality and the transience of things – 

The snow dissolv'd no more is seen,
The fields, and woods, behold, are green,
The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again,

The sprightly Nymph and naked Grace
The mazy dance together trace.
The changing year's successive plan,
Proclaims mortality to Man.

Rough Winter's blasts to Spring give way,
Spring yields to Summer's sovereign ray,
Then Summer sinks in Autumn's reign,
And Winter chills the world again.

Her losses soon the Moon supplies,
But wretched Man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is nought but Ashes and a Shade.

Who knows if Jove who counts our Score
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share
At least you rescue from your heir.

Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,
When Minos once has fix'd your doom,
Or Eloquence, or splendid birth,
Or Virtue shall replace on earth.

Hippolytus unjustly slain
Diana calls to life in vain,
Nor can the might of Theseus rend
The chains of hell that hold his friend.

A.E. Housman regarded this ode of Horace's as 'the most beautiful poem in ancient literature', and he produced a beautiful translation of it himself –

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

In the 20th century, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a devoted reader of Horace – in the original Latin, of course – and his knowledge of the Odes formed an extraordinary and wholly unexpected bond with General Kreipe, the German officer Paddy and his partisan comrades had just kidnapped on Crete in 1944. They took him to an overnight hideout in a cave on Mount Ida, and when in the morning Kreipe saw the landscape around, he muttered the opening lines of Horace's Ode XI.I: 

'Vides ut alta stet nive candidum,
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus…'

Leigh Fermor finished the stanza for him:

'Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto.'

Being Paddy, he also knew by heart all five of the following stanzas, and recited them to the astonished Kreipe. As Leigh Fermor notes in his memoir:

'For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace.'

Another

 Well, it's another birthday for me and old Tom Waits – and a bit of a milestone, being the 75th. Three quarters of a century on this earth! As so often at this time of year, I've been somewhat prostrated – some kind of cold/flu/whatever – but have rallied in time to greet the day, and the wind and rain of Storm Darragh, though mercifully we're on the fringes of it here. I wonder what Tom's up to...
  Yesterday, as I lay on my bed of pain – actually, my sofa of no pain – I heard much of Sean Rafferty's final edition of In Tune on Radio 3. It was one big musical party, with guests galore, all bursting with genuine affection for Sean, the most genial and urbane of music presenters, and the best interviewer of musicians Radio 3 ever had. Needless to say, Radio 3's management didn't value what they had and the latest incoming Controller promptly announced his intention of moving him to other duties from April next year. Sean, understandably, decided not to hang around awaiting the coup de grace. I hope very much we haven't heard the last of him. In Tune will never be the same again, and Rafferty will be sorely missed.