Oxford and too much choice

We’ve had a trip to Oxford, which is somewhere we hadn’t been for about forty years. Last time we weren’t impressed, because it was completely choked with traffic, and we much preferred Cambridge. Now, of course, the traffic is under control, though we each nearly got mown down by a bike. It brings home to you how much you normally rely on your hearing when crossing streets.

Some of the rather horrible insectivorous plants
the botanical gardens seemed to specialise in.

Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We had one lovely autumn day and at least it didn’t rain the next day. We visited the Ashmolean, Christ Church picture gallery, the Natural History Museum, and the Pitt Rivers, so I had four opportunities to choose my one object to take home.

Christ Church picture gallery was the most difficult. The picture that really gripped me was Annibale Carracci, “The Butchers.” I liked the way all the characters are concerned with what they are doing, so it’s like a snap shot. I liked the faces, intent and busy, not posing at all. But in spite of the realism, you could read meanings into it, for example the sheep at the forefront awaiting slaughter – was that a reference to Christ? So even after we’d moved on I kept returning for another look. BUT – if I’m going to take it home, am I going to enjoy living with a picture of butchered carcasses?  I don’t think I’ve properly worked out the rules of this game.  Have a look at the link and see what you think. It’s a pretty big painting, so the carcasses are not far off life size, too.

www.chch.ox.ac.uk/gallery/the-collection/paintings/carracci-butchers-shop

Anyway, in the end I decided that I was going to have to choose something else, because you wouldn’t want the Carracci in your lounge. It reminded me of the story of how Frith, of the Frith collection in New York, chose his paintings. They had to be things he liked to live with.  It sounds kind of anti-intellectual, art as interior decoration, but he has a point. You might like a Lucian Freud nude in your picture gallery, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to look up from your dinner and see it. So in the end I chose a Tintoretto portrait of a young man, but although liveable with, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the Carracci. So not a great decision.

Blackwell's - book heavn

The Divinity schools. Duke Humfrey's library is even better, but I haven't a
good enough camera.

In the Ashmolean, it was easier, although I was torn between a Turkish plate, decorated with carnations, and a set of Indian bird pictures, very accurately done as a natural history rather than as art. I went for the birds, although really nobody much has a house big enough to display the set.

And in the Pitt Rivers, I fell for the Inuit clothing, which was just amazing. I hadn’t realised that a new set was made every year – it wasn’t tanned, because if it was tanned it froze completely solid in the winter temperatures and was unwearable, but that meant it rotted in the summer. The work that went into it!

I really liked the Pitt Rivers; you could spend hours and hours in there, and make hundreds of visits, though there was quite a lot of gruesome stuff, which Phil really didn’t appreciate.  I think I’ve got a childish enjoyment of the gruesome – the cases on head flattening and scarification held me gripped. Surely, scarification occasionally caused septicaemia? I read that Montgomery’s wife died of septicaemia following a mosquito bite, pre antibiotics of course, so surely cutting people all over and rubbing ash and other stuff into the cuts to make sure they produced keloid scars must have killed people, too. It wasn’t discussed in the museum –a rare and disappointing omission.

In the natural history museum, of course we liked the dinosaurs. Our younger grandson spends quite a lot of time being a tyrannosaur, a spinosaurus or a utahraptor. We couldn’t help thinking of how thrilled he would have been to see all this stuff, although we probably shouldn’t encourage him to spend even more time chasing me around the flat, being a velociraptor while I have to be a lamb. He can’t say “l”, so it comes out as “You be a yam, granny.” At first I thought I was in for an easy afternoon, lying on the floor being a vegetable, but no such luck. So it was an easy decision – we’ll take the tyrannosaur skeleton, please.

Swimming and music again.

Going swimming, I’ve been trying to improve my crawl. My style isn’t so bad, but I run out of breath too soon – I am only breathing on one side (the right) and not deeply enough.  Well, how hard can it be to unlearn the habits of a lifetime? Much more difficult than you can imagine, I’m telling you.

After a time, I decided I needed some support in habit breaking, and booked four lessons. My teacher is just about young enough to be my grandson, but I’m not letting that bother me. So after much flogging up and down the bath with floats, either legs only or just one arm working, I have made the following important discoveries.

• My legs are pathetically weak.

• I can’t get the timing right on my left side, and try to breath far too late in the arm movement, with the result that I swallow large quantities of water.

• Swallowing large quantities of water is really unpleasant, and tends to make you feel below par for the rest of the morning.

• It’s really hard to learn to swim, and I have more sympathy than previously with people who’ve never managed it.

• If you don’t breath out under water, after two lengths you  get to the point of being so short of oxygen that your fingers tingle.

• There’s nothing like swimming for making you really starving.

Still, cheering news – today I managed two whole lengths, breathing on alternate sides. I can only manage it if I swim slowly, but, there you are – you can teach an old dog new tricks.

And here’s another update, this time on music. I saw that the Broadway cinema was showing Thomas Ades’ opera The Tempest, as part on the New York Met live series. I’m a bit of a snob about these filmed performances – it’s a lot of money for something that’s a long way from the live experience. But, if I’m going to see The Tempest at all, it’s going to be a filmed one. I can’t see us getting to Covent Garden again, and Opera North isn’t at all likely to put it on.

So I bought myself a ticket and went off, alone, as nobody I know felt they were likely to enjoy it. I wasn’t at all sure I would enjoy it, to be honest. I’ve only listened to Ades’ Asyla and had rather a mixed impression. I’d even promised my husband that I wouldn’t be proud and would leave half way through if I really hated it.

Well, it was great. I loved it. I thought the acting was really good, which is important when it’s filmed because you’re getting much closer to the action than you would in the opera house. Simon Keenlyside (whom I rate highly anyway) was particularly good. He’s hardly off stage. He has an impressive presence, and a wonderful physique and face for Prospero.

I think the music must be very hard to sing, and sometimes I didn’t quite “get” it, but the love duet, Ariel’s music, the trios and quartets, and Prospero’s renunciation of his powers, were gorgeous. The end was really moving. 

So, well worth the ticket, and I shall keep my eyes open for other opera screenings, but what I really want, is to see The Tempest  again.  No chance, I fear.

Nostalgia and remembrance

I went to my grandson’s church parade for Remembrance Sunday today. The cub pack he belongs to meets in the local barracks, so the wreath laying on the monument and the service seemed extra relevant with all these young soldiers present.

I thoroughly enjoyed singing the hymns – they were the old ones that we used to sing every morning in assembly in school. I always enjoyed singing the hymn – usually it was the best bit of the day, because frankly I hated school. I was always bunking off – how I got my O Levels, I don’t know.

Anyway, I heard Alan Bennett on radio 4 and he was waxing nostalgic about hymns in school, and, it seemed to me, the past in general. But I’m sure that children enjoy singing the tunes they sing today, just as much as we enjoyed singing the old hymns, and they may well understand the words better.

I’m very suspicious of nostalgia, which I tend to regard as a particularly English vice; I don’t know that it is especially English, but it seems very prevalent.  In spite of enjoying the hymns, I can’t forget that we were controlled at school by being humiliated and belittled. At my junior school, there was an older boy, who was always kind to me and perhaps not that bright, and often in trouble. I think he was the only one daft enough to get caught. He was caned. I shall never forget my indignation, and how I couldn’t get anyone else to share it. “Well, he must have deserved it. It won’t do him any harm.” But it did me harm, if not him.

When people get nostalgic about days past, when people were more honest and you felt safe on the streets at night, and no one had heard of paedophilia, it drives me mad. It just wasn’t reported. We might have lost some good things, but we’ve also lost an awful lot of horrible stuff. I don’t believe in trying to hang on to what’s past. Things change. Even the best things don’t last forever. But good things are ahead of us too, and changes can be greatly for the better. Let go, and move on. That’s my motto. Not in the American sense of “moving on” after the loss of someone loved. That’s a weird idea, as though you could move on and leave them behind. Of course, that’s just what you can’t do; they are part of you, they helped to make you what you are, even if their life was brief, you can never be the same as you were before you loved them. So that brings us back to Remembrance Sunday.

When I was a child, people were always saying to me, “Of course, you never knew your uncle. He was lovely.” He was killed in 1942, and twenty years later, people who’d known him only slightly were still remembering him. My mother and my granny never got over his death. At least he died in the war against Hitler’s Germany, a war for survival, with few moral complications. How would they feel if he had died in Afghanistan?  How on earth can politicians think they can ever be forgiven for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, when every loss causes such irreconcilable grief?