Looking Outside the Chocolate Box: John Constable

 Looking Outside the Chocolate Box: Noticing John Constable

 

 

I stood, in chilly early December 2021, on the edge of the water where Constable had set his celebrated painting now called The Haywain, but originally and more reservedly, Landscape: Noon.

 

Binham Priory

 Binham Priory

 

The Benedictines formed the earliest English monastic communities, starting with St Augustine at Canterbury. Rich and influential monasteries flourished in the Middle Ages, not least those attached to the great Cathedrals. Henry VIII brought an abrupt end. Their lands were confiscated and sold; their wealth seized.

La Mancha, Almagro, Ubeda

 La Mancha; Almegro; Ubeda

 

 

La Mancha is an area of Spain that many have heard of but perhaps few have visited. It is of course famous for being the home territory of Don Quixote. The local authorities have concocted, for the gullible tourist, somewhat implausible Quixote itineraries.

But the real interest, even on a two-day visit, lies elsewhere.

New Old Journeys: Oxford

 New Old Journeys- Oxford

 

 

One of the very few and small consolations of the first lockdown of March 2020 was the exploration of local areas that, in normal times, one wouldn’t explore because of the pull of more celebrated cultural or recreational attractions. This was in the course of the permitted “household walk” of no more than hour (although that limit turned out to guidance rather than law).

Channel Migration: A Modest Proposal

Country Houses; Ickworth

 Country Houses – Somebody’s Got to Live in Them

 

 

One battlefield of the present cultural wars concerns country houses, specifically those now in the care of the National Trust. It seems (what a surprise) that many of these, mainly dating from the time of the acceleration of Britain’s imperial achievements in the C18, were paid for by fortunes derived from slavery in the Americas.

Shillingford Bridge: Wittenham Clumps

 Shillingford Bridge; Wittenham Clumps

 

 

In hot weather, it’s good to head to a wide, sloped, grassy riverbank in the country. One such spot is the river frontage of the Shillingford Bridge Hotel, on the Thames between Dorchester and Wallingford in Oxfordshire, at a point where the upstream view is due west towards spectacular sunsets.

 

A lovely, late Georgian bridge spans the river in three arches. On the northern bank is Shillingford village, occupying relatively flat ground. It is an affluent looking place, with easy connections to fast commuting (remember that?) from nearby Didcot. On the southern side, there’s a steep bank, part of a line of hills going west. 

 

Underneath this bank lies the hotel, and its pleasant expanse of grass falling away to the river. The hotel, although quite large, is squashed in by the hill, the bridge road, and the river. The space between the hotel’s frontage and the riverbank is given over to paid-for parking. This is not a wonderful immediate prospect for the hotel’s residents, but is very useful for the day visitors who come on sunny weekends. Vehicles cram in; their occupants head to the bank, or to the hotel’s bar. Fortunately, the grassy area is so large that it easily absorbs the bodies that the car park disgorges. Carpark full; bank spaciously occupied. 

 

The Thames thereabouts presents many faces: the wide, gently insistent river (no recent heavy rain), between banks that are on the whole lushly green with trees and bushes, punctuated by little natural gaps for fishers and bathers; ducks, and a majestic family of two adult and three adolescent swans;

splashy swimmers; eager and larking paddleboarders; stately canal boats; raked motor yachts; and strange little craft resembling floating caravans (which is their function). All of these mix in watery equilibrium, neither too much of any, nor conflict over precedence. Or so it seemed to me observing.

The southern side of the river between Shillingford and Dorchester is roadless for a fair way south of the river. (The opposite is true on the north side, where the river is for some way hemmed by a busy main road.)

 

There are farm tracks and byways. But the main preservers of the peace are the protected sites of Wittenham Wood and the steep twin hills overlooking the Thames and the land around for miles in all directions. These hills are the Wittenham Clumps (from their dense crowns of ancient beech trees).

 

The slopes are wonderfully wild-flowered to the South and grassy to the North.

Peering into the beech density from the top of the slopes is to experience a Brothers Grimm or Stephen King moment. In the thickly set, but low branched woods, you can imagine all sorts of horrors lurking. But probably nothing more threatening than the ghosts of iron age tribes that once extensively populated these natural defensive positions, and farmed all around.

Paul Nash, the passionate painter of the the First World War trenches, was drawn to the Clumps throughout his life.

 

Below the Clumps lie the hamlet of Little Wittenham and a lock and footbridge over the Thames. Paths wind over the flood plain to Dorchester. 

Dorchester is a small town with a large medieval abbey. The latter met its fate as an abbey in Tudor times, but has since been revived and restored over the centuries. It is now an improbably magnificent parish church. 

 

On the Dorchester side of the river runs the Thames Path. It crosses a sluggish tributary stream, called, somewhat lazily one thinks, the Thame.

And then, alas, above Shillingford the path is truncated. The unsuspecting walker is callously diverted for several hundred metres onto a very narrow footway beside the hurtling main road. Eventually one can dive off through Shillingford village, back to the Bridge.

 

July 2021

Studying JMW Turner

 Studying JMW Turner

 

 

The Courtauld Summer School is an excellent series of one-week intensive art history courses, held, these last 2 years, online. Last year, I went to France to visit Manet and Cezanne (see blog post “Being a Zoom Student”, July 2020). This year, as befits the time of final Brexit, I withdrew to England.

Hereford Cathedral; Mappa Mundi

 Hereford Cathedral; Mappa Mundi

 

Hereford Cathedral has a couple of local saints (one martyred in Saxon times; the other generally holy in medieval times), a construction of tough red sandstone, and, among other more traditional memorials, a shrine to the SAS, whose “home” town is the city. (the SAS even get their own modern stained-glass window.) I suppose the SAS monument is in the long tradition of military church memorials, especially those of armoured medieval knights whose effigies rest in repose. The Cathedral is surrounded by beautiful gardens.

Highgate Western Cemetery

In Highgate East Cemetery

 Highgate Eastern Cemetery

 

 

I’ve become a regular visitor to Highgate Cemetery. By “regular”, I don’t mean frequent – rather, every two months or so. And by “Highgate Cemetery”, I mean the lower side (Eastern). I’ve yet to wander round the older, more gothic upper side (Western). Until recently access was only permitted by guided tour.

Making Up our Own Minds

 We’ll Mostly Make Up Our Own Minds 

 

 

March 2020. It all seemed very strange. We were in Spain, leaving a couple of days before the lockdown that had just been announced there. 

 

Given two days’ notice, the second homeowners of Madrid and other metropolises busted out in refugee numbers, fleeing to the Costas. At the time, it seemed that the Spanish authorities had badly bungled. This year, a similarly signalled lockdown in France was deliberately timed to allow people in Paris to escape to second homes… thus it goes. Nothing short of police state tactics is going to prevent the well-off from arranging their lockdown lives away from the cities, if they so choose, in spite of the hollow guidance of governments everywhere.

Lockdown Dissent

 Lockdown Dissent

 

 

One of the more curious features of the lockdowns and other regimes brought in to protect against the pandemic has been the emergence of do-it-yourself forms of anarchism.

Turning 70

 Turning 70

 

When I look back on significant anniversaries, my main impression now is that I had a sense of relief that nothing had suddenly changed overnight. A 40 I still looked and felt young. I had a young family. At 50 I looked youngish and felt reasonably young. In that decade I would take up triathlons. I enrolled for, and successfully completed, a philosophy MA. I was still working steadily and confidently. 60 felt okay – advanced middle age rather than old. To prove that, a celebratory last Olympic-length triathlon, and in the next couple of years, 2 half marathons.

Time & Tide Bells; Trinity Buoy Wharf

 Time & Tide Bells; Trinity Buoy Wharf

 

 

Antony Gormley is the pre-eminent artist of the tidal foreshore, where land and sea converge. He has positioned 100 iron casts of his body (as usual) on a beach in Merseyside, spaced out over 2 miles.

 

The figures are wholly exposed at low tide and fully submerged at high tide. The figures are neither waving, nor drowning, and they are certainly not King Canutes. They are poignant occupiers of the watery, sandy, liminal space

Vaccination Diary

 Vaccination Diary

 

 

At some time at the beginning of the first century CE (AD) the Romans conducted a tax census in  the province of Judaea. According to one of the Gospels, it was decreed by the Emperor that people must return to their tribal areas to be registered. Two returnees were Joseph and the pregnant Mary, who had to get back to Bethlehem – where they had no place to stay, their home being in Nazareth, in another province.

Enemies of Liberal Democracy

 Enemies of Liberal Democracy

 

What is “liberal democracy” in a multicultural society, where citizens have different, and often opposing, beliefs and viewpoints, many grounded in absolute, or fairly absolute, conceptions of the world?

 

One theory of liberal democracy is that it is a system, not for resolving differences, but for managing them, grounded by respect for the equality of all citizens, and in the justice of its institutions.

Testing Times

 Testing Times

 

 

Car parks may sometimes be a welcome sight, but they are seldom a pretty one. Alexandra Park and Palace in North London, for all its attractive features (not least the views) has some pretty grim examples.

 

Fortunately, the largest area reserved for cars is in a corner by the southerly road entrance, screened by the slope and by trees. It is known as the “Paddock” car park – a name connected to the fact that for many years there was a small but popular racecourse on the flat expanse of the Park.