"The Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him..."

  Ten minutes walk from Kentish Town, there are roads entirely unchaperoned by lamplight, and where there is light, there are hills, and green, and gates. I don't think of horror passing these overgrowths, I think of a kinder magic, less prevalent onscreen - something I'd hoped to see when Peter Jackson had filmed Lord of the Rings in fact, but those elves turned out more monochromatic, less folksy than I had hoped.

 

  These days, the supernatural born of the natural in British art is nearly always either twee or terrifying. In the real world however – even in NW3 – it seems easy to still encounter uncomplicated awe, a connection to something pagan but unthreatening. Suddenly on my walk, I thought of the chapter in The Wind In The Willows that could never be included in adaptation, in which Mole and Ratty encounter a vision of Pan.

 

 Here imagined by E. H. Shepard (source).

 

 I'd read that this god had a particular significance to closeted Edwardians, and wondered if the inclusion of "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", as the chapter's called, was Kenneth Grahame subtly shipping his two protagonists. I resolved to see if I could find the Cosgrove Hall version when I got home: the company's original adaptation had omitted the chapter, but I remembered it getting a whole episode when they came to make the series. And I found it, and it's perfect, still one of the most startling episodes of children's television you can imagine, the answer to a prayer. All hail Pan.

From the Slipped Sniff to the Sun's Fingers – The Kiss Continues...

"How did yesterday's exercise go? Did you fall into your own reflection?" 

 from Lesson Twelve

 It's Gemma Brockis' birthday today, which is an excellent reason to continue sharing her latest click-and-scroll adventures from The Kiss, Certificate II. Possible spoilers ahead...

  The Ninth Lesson emerges from immersiveness to recall, at a respectful second hand, the discovery in India three or four thousand years ago of smelling with the mouth via a misplaced sniff – literature's first recorded kiss. Alexander the Great, it is said, knew nothing of kissing until he came to India.

 

 The Tenth Lesson throws immediate doubt on this claim however, noting the introduction of the kiss to what would later call itself "The West" over a hundred years before Alexander's campaign, by Aspasia of Miletus, the Persian girlfriend of Pericles of Athens, as an a-romantic symbol of that couple's parity. There was also a kiss in Homer's Iliad – just the one though – a symbol of submission from the Trojan King Priam to Achilles as he begged the Greeks for the return of his son's corpse, even less romantically.

 

 The Eleventh and Twelfth Lessons travel with Aeneas from Troy to Rome, where the kissing of doorposts was instituted as encouragement to protect one's threshold. Other kisses would eventually be available: the Persian-style, aromantic but still unhygienic and consequently outlawed Oculum; the Indian-style taste sensation, the Savium; and the still unsourced but by now irrefutably romantic Basium, of which the poet Catullus begged loads, and then another load. Ovid's myth of Narcissus meanwhile provides the homework. (I didn't know when I first read this lesson that Narcissus had faded away and turned into a daffodil. I wonder if Marie Curie knew this. I'm not sure it would shed new light on their "Day of Reflection" either way.)

 Finally, the Thirteenth Lesson presents the first ever recorded image of a kiss: a kiss of life, passing from the hands of the sun, to the nose of the revoultionarily monotheistic Pharoah Akhenaten, and to his wife Nefertiti, and from them to the mouths of their children; a short-lived, city-founding tenderness inextricably tied to – and ultimately doomed by – the religious repression orchestrated by the man archeologist James Henry Breasted would later dub "the first individual in human history". (Well, look at him.)

 

IMAGES

Metamorphosis of Narcissus : Salvador Dali 1937

Representation of Cow and Family : Artist Unknown

Priam Asking Achilles for the Body of Hector : Théobald Chartran 1876

Narcissus : Caravaggio 1597-99

Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three daughters : the Armana Period c. 1345 BCE

And thanks to Extra Credits for being the only source I could find attributing Breasted's quote.

Night of the Narcissus

 

A shadow takes notice of a rickshaw.

 

 This evening I visited London's glittering Leicester Square, appalled at how much I enjoyed the emptiness of everywhere – not guilty, just certain that I'll miss it when it's gone. There were cyclists and rollerbladers, and a busker in front of the Empire singing an arrangement of "Simply The Best" set to six notes, but the roads were clear enough to walk down. A lock-in at the World Showcase. The whole city looked like an arcade. I stopped off at the big Lidl on the way home, admiring once again the size of their barcodes, and only found out when I got in that this was meant to be a National Day of Reflection, which might explain why the Senate House – the inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth – had been lit the colour of a daffodil, a nineteen-storey narcissus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A really good day

 An old sketch for a painting of my parents who today received their second, final vaccinations, in a sports hall in Alès two hours' drive away, requiring an Attestation de Déplacement Dérogatoire – or Certificate of Travel Restriction Waiver (for persons residing in departments subject to reinforced measures) – because France is currently under curfew. 

 "A really good day," Mum emailed. "Sun was shining, and the Tramontane Wind of the last few days had lessened" and it wasn't until my sister tweeted her relief that it struck me just how good. 

 I'd been treating this like a census deadline, rather than the granting of immunity to a global pandemic after a year's lockdown, and I hadn't dared give any outcome other than this a second's credit.

 Thank you, Mum and Dad, for staying safe. 

 And thank you to everyone who is staying safe.

The Prestooge!

Mac Ronay (source)

 

  I knew nothing about Mac Ronay until yesterday, when the video below popped up in my recommendations, and if my youtube algorithms are going to keep bringing me gold like this I couldn't be prouder of them. Like bubble magician Tom Noddy, Ronay seems to have fashioned one perfect, unique, ten-minute set that's lasted his whole career. Tommy Cooper is the most obvious comparison – which isn't bad – but the joke's not quite the same: Ronay doesn't perform tricks badly. He performs bad tricks. And he shambles where Cooper swivels. Enjoy.

 

 

 It's true the '61 set ends with a good trick – the egg gag made famous in Airplane – but apart from that, no magical skill is required, which is the joke, which requires skill. When Ronay plays The Bob Monkhouse Show twenty-five years later, to a glowing introduction from a man who really knows his onions (although I wouldn't personally describe the act as "heart-rending") the egg trick's gone, and the most baffling trick Ronay pulls off in its place – eight and a half minutes in – is immediately explained. It would be breaking the terms of the contract now to do anything so soullessly impressive as magic; the punchline is the prestige. Immediately I want to apologise to anyone with an actual skill for suggesting magic is "soulless". If I'd been at all aware of Mac Ronay before now, I would be copying him.

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Often Unenviable Fairy Seat

"A Dance around the Moon" by Charles Altamont Doyle

 I knew that the author of Sherlock Holmes believed in fairies, and was happy to identify, for example, Frances and Elsie's cardboard cut-outs (below) as evidence of psychic phenomena, despite such a verdict seeming to go against every tenet of his creation's practice of deductive reasoning.

 

  But what I didn't know – and what might go some way towards explaining this discrepancy – is how large a part fairies had played in the life of his father, the illustrator Charles Altamont Doyle...

 

 "Meditation, Self Portait" by Charles Altamont Doyle  

 

 According to Alistair Kneal's Transceltic blog, "his paintings were often of fantasy scenes, many featuring fairies..." but "after growing family worries about his moods and desperate attempts to obtain alcohol, he was admitted to the nursing home of Blairerno House at Drumlithie in the Mearns... Following an aggressive attempt to leave Blairerno House he was sent to Sunnyside, Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum on 26 May 1885...

"The seat of fairies is not always enviable"

 

"It is described that he would tell staff that he was receiving messages from the unseen world and accused them of being devils... He maintained to his family that he was sane and had been wrongfully confined. In doing so he complied sketchbooks with caricatures, drawings of fairies and notes...

 

 Painting from "The Doyle Diary" 1889

 

"He inscribed the frontispiece of his sketchbook diary: ‘Keep steadily in view that this Book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? or depraved taste? If in the whole book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me.’"

 

 "The Spirits of the Prisoners" 1885

 

 And there's more of his work on Monster Brains.

Sometimes this blog will just be "The Black Dog".

 Here's a good dream. There's the confidence of a lifetime's work behind it, and when it turned up on television sometime around the late nineties, it immediately became one of my favourite things a person had made. I knew nothing about the person though – Alison de Vere – and that changed little in the intervening decades. She had no channel of her own, no website, and it seemed impossible to find any pictures of her online, unless we count this. Even this was hard to find, and I don't know how long it will stay up, which is why I want to share it while I can, so – quick! – let The Black Dog's nineteen minutes leave their mark on you before they disappear. Alison de Vere died in 2001 it turns out, at the age of 73. I found her obituary this week. Everything I'd guessed about her was wrong.