One of the two art-books I ordered back at the top of the month arrived yesterday: Codices Illustres, an illustrated survey of...
...the world's most famous manuscripts... From The Book of Kells to Boccaccio's Decameron and from the Vienna Genesis to Dante's Divine Comedy, this lavishly produced book introduces the reader to the fascinating world of mediaeval miniature painting and illumination.
It is indeed a large and handsome volume, well designed and beautifully-illustrated.
I ordered it from Strand Books of New York via the abebooks service. I was amused to read Strand's tag-line 8 miles of books!, which their website backs up with an offer to sell books by the foot. It still worked out cheaper to buy what I assume was a remaindered copy from the US, rather than to order one new from the UK. Now I'm wondering whether I can find a similarly advantageous deal on Alberto Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, also published by Taschen.
I've accumulated a few Taschen publications now. I bought their book on M.C. Escher years ago, and, more recently, their collection of the graphic works of Piranesi. For Christmas, my wife bought me their Masterpieces of Western Art volume as a stocking-filler, and, in the meantime, she picked up All-American Ads: '50s, which, although I was uncertain if it would be my cup of tea, I nevertheless found very absorbing.
Between two of the pages in Codices Illustres was a loose fold-out card advertising the products of a different kind of publisher... Faksimile Verlag of Lucerne, who specialise in de-luxe reproductions of the very illuminated manuscripts described in the pages of the book I was reading. A glance at their website confirmed my suspicion that they were catering for a different stratum of clientele, what with its ominous mention of payment in comfortable instalments. Their edition of the Book of Kells for example, retails at over 14,000 US dollars!
There has been an apparent revival of interest in the idea of wunderkammern (literally 'wonder-chambers', otherwise cabinets of curiosities) over recent years. These collections are seen as the forerunners of modern-day museums, from which, however, they differed in a number of important respects. Wunderkammern (and kunstkammern, 'art-chambers') comprised exhibits whose purpose was to arouse wonderment rather than edification. Their emphasis was on the precious and rare, the novel and the marvellous. They were, moreover, organised according to pre-scientific criteria, arranged in some cases to suggest a microcosm, a model of the wider world. They were, moreover, oftenest compiled by aristocrats or royalty for private rather than public display.
One of the most famous of all kunst- & wunderkammern was that amassed under the supervision of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague ca. 1576-1612. Some of its exhibits are displayed here. Another renowned collection was built up by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome. Its catalogue, first published in 1678, inventoried perpetual-motion machines, optical tricks, a mermaid's tail, the bones of a giant and a host of other natural and artificial marvels. Britain's oldest public museum, the Ashmolean, in Oxford, can also trace its origins to a cabinet of curiosities acquired by Elias Ashmole (under somewhat suspicious circumstances) in the 1660s from the Tradescant family.
One of the most noteworthy attempts to breathe new life into the wunderkammer tradition has been David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. As described in Lawrence Weschler's book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, this establishment juxtaposes genuine wonders with elaborate hoaxes to disconcerting effect, in an apparent effort to induce that ever-more elusive sense of wonder in its visitors hearts & minds. Also interesting is Georg Laue's latterday kunstkammer in Munich.
What brought me to write all of this down was that, this morning, I happened upon a thought-provoking project to compile an on-line wunderkammer created by artists/designers Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg. A few years back they developed WonderWalker, a graphical tool for individuals to collect their favorite links, forming a collaborative map of web objects. I'm not sure the graphical interface to these links is altogether successful, but their ulterior aim of creating a virtual nexus of overlapping wunderkammern out of web-sites appealed to me immensely. I suppose its not so conceptually different to such admirable & on-going endeavours as memepool and metafilter. Indeed, another such site, boingboing, advertises itself as a directory of wonderful things, by which it can be said to claim a direct inheritance from the wunderkammer tradition.
I made us a full English breakfast yesterday morning, or nearly as fully English as our current circumstances permit, English with a slight & compound accent that would have been difficult for an uninformed arbiter to place. 
I began with the bacon, Swedish bacon alas, the only kind stocked in our nearest supermarket. Despite our relative proximity to Denmark, Danish bacon is not widely available here. We have made no sightings of British or Irish bacon, beyond what we have smuggled in ourselves. I put the rashers in a frying pan with a little vegetable oil and watched them shrivel away to about half their initial size as they fried, picking them out when done to a suitable crisp. Next I fried some sliced mushrooms in the same pan, adding a little more oil, meanwhile frying some readymade hash-browns in a thick layer of oil in a second pan on the back burner. These weren't hash-browns per se, which, in any case, would have been a concession, to my mind, to the North-American breakfast experience, but rather frozen potato rôsti. Also at around this time I heated the contents of a can of Heinz baked beans (organic ones, naturally - why stint on the wholesomeness now?) in the microwave, and toasted the first couple of slices of bread. We also had sausages in the freezer, and, I think, even haggis, but I resisted adding these into the mix. Putting aside the fried mushrooms and would-be hash-browns, I then fried four eggs, two sunnyside-up for myself, two overeasy for my wife, before putting the heated beans in the frying pan for a minute to take on some of that bacon-grease flavour. By this time the second round of toast was nicely scorched & ready for buttering. All that remained was to arrange the bacon, eggs, hash-browns, mushrooms, beans and toast on to a pair of plates and take them upstairs to bed... very tasty!
A small show of lithographs and paintings by Swedish artist Sven Lingardsz opened at a nearby gallery today.
The image above is one of the most striking on display. It is the central panel of a triptych of lithographs entitled Ouverture till metafysisk uppståndelse.
The three prints are collectively priced at a not-unreasonable 7,500 SEK. If we'd had a good spot to hang it, I would have been seriously tempted. Besides the lithographs, there was a handful of oil paintings. Of the two that caught my eye, one was Not For Sale, the other Beyond My Means at a steep 45,000 SEK.
A number of the prints were presented as carefully-composed diptychs or triptychs, to satisfyingly symmetrical effect. The prevailing style was lightly surreal, with several pieces centred on images of fruit: pears, for example, or cherries, and others having childrens' toys as their subject, or boats, or wooden houses.
The show as a whole was good, if not spectacular, but it was a delight to see any kind of eye-pleasing art in this town...
We bought a new VCR earlier this week. Our old 'Luma'-brand model - which had been just about the cheapest we could find on our arrival in Sweden, had just stopped and died one night last week, part-way through Kill Me Later. We were only watching the movie on tape in the first place as it was an advance distribution copy that the nice video store people had lent to us. I wasn't convinced that it was worth our while to buy a new one, what with the advent of recordable-DVD, and these newfangled hard-drive-based recorder whatnots. It struck me as a bit of a backward step, seeing as how we've been a DVD-owning household for three years or so now. My wife disagreed, however, and we picked up a regular VHS VCR, a heavily-discounted former-demo JVC model, from On/Off.
Wednesday night we perched it on the bedroom TV, wiring it up to my old JVC micro hi-fi, to which we connected a pair of Canton mini-speakers left over after last year's home cinema upgrade. We went out to the Co-op & picked up a handful of tapes along with our groceries: Vampires 2, Almost Famous, O Brother Where Art Thou?, conspiracy.com and one other I forget. We watched Vampires 2 that same night. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, given that Vampires 1 had been nothing special, and the last John Carpenter movie we saw, Ghosts of Mars was worse.
I was a relative latecomer to the VHS experience: I don't think my folks bought one until '86, or maybe even '87. I recall that the first tape I rented was Blade Runner, which was closely followed by The Emerald Forest and Romancing the Stone...
Like many others, I was unwittingly introduced to the music of György Ligeti by way of the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, wherein Ligeti's compositions Requiem, Lux Aeterna, Atmosphères and Adventures feature prominently. I can't say I was impressed with them upon first hearing: as a thirteen-year-old who happened at that moment to be suffering from chicken-pox, I found the unearthly screech of this music painful and wished it would stop.
A few years ago, my then-colleague Mr. H____ lent me a CD of his entitled Wien Modern which included fabulous performances of Ligeti's two most famous orchestral works: Atmosphères and Lontano. This was music that, it seemed to me, had an uncannily alien quality about it: it somehow didn't move like music was supposed to move but rather sounded as though propelled by some otherworldly motive force. At the same time I found the music beautiful.
Admirers of Ligeti are fortunate in that a complete edition of his works is currently being released on CD, under the composer's supervision. This series is being completed by the Teldec label after Sony Classics, who produced the first eight CDs, dropped out of the project. Three of a projected five discs in the Teldec Ligeti Project series have thus far reached the shops, with the final two due for release later this year, in time, it is hoped, for the composer's eightieth birthday.
I received my copy of volume III earlier this week, and am listening to it right now. Having taken time to familiarise myself a little with some of Ligeti's work, it strikes me less as uncanny, and more as the fascinating expression of a singular musical intelligence. Even so, I would admit that it is still music that, for me, remains easier to admire than to love...
And now, put ice in your music: it'll turn to mathematics... - Mirkka Rekola.
Painter and graphic artist Paula Rego (1935-), born in Lisbon but resident in London, is renowned, amongst her many accomplishments, for her series of prints illustrating nursery-rhymes.
I happened upon the Thames and Hudson edition of these etchings and aquatints in a Bristol bookshop back in '94 or '95, and couldn't help but buy it.
There have been several times when I've wished I hadn't left this book in our storage locker in England - we always thought we'd be back there after a year or so, but have yet to get around to it.
Many of these images tease out more or less sinister or perverse meanings from the fabric of the rhymes:
Whereas others, for instance the one following (my favourite of the set) are more-or-less straightfoward depictions of their bizarre characters and imagery.
On Saturday morning my wife made us french toast for breakfast, over which we poured some of our precious stock of Cleary's maple syrup. Then we watched Scooby Doo on DVD. I don't recall reading many positive reviews of this movie, but I enjoyed it a lot. I liked it that it was kept sweetly innocent & dumb for the most part. I thought the actor who played Shaggy was particularly good.
We ventured out in the afternoon, but only as far as Börje Olssons Skafferi, our local deli, from who we purchased five croissants, a bar of Valrhona chocolate, some packs of fancy flavoured pasta, a jar of capers, some cookies, some fresh basil and a few vanilla pods. We ate a few of the croissants, by far the best that can be found in this town, as soon as we got back home. I read some more of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and took a long afternoon nap.
Hours later, prowling around the kitchen, wondering what I could make us to eat, I opened up our copy of The Conran Cookbook and scanned the pasta recipes. My eye stopped at a recipe for a Pesto alla Genovese that looked like it would be an excellent use for the basil we'd bought earlier that day. I took out our mortar, and dropped in several handfuls of chopped basil leaves, some chopped garlic, and some salt. I pestled and pestled until this somewhat resembled a smooth paste. Next I tried toasting three tablespoonfuls of pine-nuts in a cast-iron pan, as advised by the recipe, succeeding rather in scorching some of them on one side. Undeterred I added the nuts to the mortar along with two tablespoonfuls of grated parmesan, or grana padano to be more exact, which is what we had in the fridge. I ground some more before adding the first of a projected six tablespoonworths of olive oil. The whole grinding thing was rather more laborious than I had anticipated. In the end I didn't use quite all of the oil, as the pesto was beginning to look... satisfactory. Meanwhile a few handfuls of spagghetoni were boiling in a nearby pot. I was pleasantly surprised at how delicious the resulting mix tasted: much better than any ready-made pesto I've yet sampled. I'll certainly be making it again.
We ate well on Sunday too, as my wife made us a Greek salad for lunch, which was excellent as always. For supper my wife made a batch of gnocchi from scratch, which we ate with a simple tomato & herb sauce: buonissimo!
Here are some cute snapshots of Dog. The first was taken shortly before Christmas, here at the Mañana.
That's me in the blue-and-white shirt. The next one was snapped on the deck of the cabin in Stavsnäs, east of Stockholm, where we holidayed last August. We'd just been playing the water-pistol game, which involved us firing streams of water at Dog, who would excitedly snap his way upstream toward the 'barrel' of the gun...
Lastly is a picture I've posted before, of Dog as a Puppy. It was taken in our back yard in Redhill, England.
Earlier today we gave Dog a Bone, which made him a very happy puppy indeed. We also helped him play with two of his current favourite toys: three-legged camel, and squeaky monkey. He seemed to enjoy that too.
Last night, before taking a bath, I spent some minutes pouring viscous, fragrant amber fluid from two large plastic containers into two blue-glass bottles by way of an orange plastic funnel.
The fluid in question was bubblebath, newly-arrived in industrial-sized 1-litre units from Neal's Yard in the UK. Our original 200ml bottles, ordered last September, had lately run out.
The fact that I was able to take a bath at all I owe to our decision, one overwhelmingly stifling day last August, to head out to the co-op forum superstore to see if they stocked any portable air-conditioning units. I'm really sorry man, said the fellow at the information desk in the hardware department. He went on to explain that they were having a problem with their air-conditioning-unit supplier, and that the soonest they expected to receive any such items was christmastime. Just to coincide, presumably, with peak demand...
As all of the other stores that could potentially have sold us an A/C device were closed, we began to head dejectedly out of the store, when another kind of item altogether simultaneously caught both my wife's eye, and mine:
Our apartment at the Mañana, its stuffiness in high summer notwithstanding, is splendid in most respects, and is, in general, a pleasure to inhabit. One of its few shortcomings, for us, had been the absence of a bathtub - both my wife and I prefer to bathe than to shower, and, although our shower is excellent, and the supply of hot water seemingly endless, there are occasions when there can be no good substitute for a leisurely soak in the tub.
As we regarded, and coveted, this desirable piece of enamelled steel, we bore in mind that our shower is not the kind that is built into an enclosed stall, but rather one that forms an extension of the bathroom, with that part of the floor angled in such a way that the water can drain away without flooding the rest of the room. We considered the fact, moreover, that this was a freestanding tub, of a good length and depth, yet of a width that could fit through our bathroom door, and, crucially, of a kind that didn't have to be plumbed in, but that could, say, be positioned over a drain such as the one in our bathroom floor.
We went back to the information desk and asked the man if they had any of these baths at home (the Swedish way of saying in stock), and, although he was initially doubtful, after making a call he told us that we were in luck... Twenty minutes later I was wheeling it out to the Jeep.
That night then, we enjoyed - such sweet luxury - our first baths in Sweden since our arrival here twenty-three months before. It took a half hour for me to attach the feet to the tub, and to assemble the plug-mechanism. The bath barely fit through the bathroom door, but, though it looked incongruous, was easily positioned such that its outflow was adjacent to the drain. We had to fill it up by carrying in buckets of water we'd filled in the kitchen sink. Luckily, we still had some bubblebath we'd bought on one of our trips to the UK. My wife brought a half dozen candles into the bathroom, lit them, and turned out the lights.
There follows a selection of images from Frans Masereel's 'novel without words' Die Stadt (The City).
Masereel (1889-1972) was a Belgian-born artist known for his strong pacifist and socially-committed views, who, by working in the medium of woodcut prints, hoped to make his work accessible to the common man.
Die Stadt is a remarkable sequence of images which, collectively, tell the story of a day in the life of a 1920s metropolis. They variously illustrate moments of love and hate, birth and death, toil and revelry, bustle and quiet, luxury and squalor, day and night.
Die Stadt and Masereel's other wordless novels could be seen both as precursors of the more recent phenomenon of graphic novels, and as inheritors an older tradition of picture-books printed for an uneducated public.
Click on the thumbnails to see a full-size image. The entire sequence of 100 woodcuts can be found here...
Right poetry is full of virtue-breeding delightfulness. - Sir Philip Sidney.
At one time or another I've owned books of poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Charles Baudelaire, John Berryman, William Blake, Ana Blandiana, Alexander Blok, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Basil Bunting, Raymond Carver, Nina Cassian, C.P. Cavafy, Paul Celan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hart Crane, Idris Davies, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Sylva Fischerová, Allen Ginsberg, David Gascoyne, Paavo Haavikko, Miroslav Holub, Ted Hughes, James Joyce, John Keats, Primo Levi, Federico García Lorca, Osip Mandelstam, Eeva-Liisa Manner, Vladimir Mayakovsky, John Milton, Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Wilfred Owen, Boris Pasternak, Octavio Paz, Pierpaolo Pasolini, Thomas Love Peacock, Meryn Peake, Fernando Pessoa, János Pilinszky, Edgar Allan Poe, Jacques Prévert, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edith Södergran, Marin Sorescu, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas, Paul Verlaine, François Villon, Walt Whitman and W.B Yeats. Plus others I've doubtless forgotten, not counting numerous anthologies, virtually all of which I've read and more or less enjoyed, some of which I've loved and treasured, and a couple of dozen of which have survived my several changes of taste, circumstance, and address, and are still on my shelves today. The sorry fact of it is though, that I seldom read poetry any more.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. - William Wordsworth.
I never try to write poetry any more either. For years I strove, in hour after hour of frustrated creative endeavour, to distil a few shining lines of the stuff. The worthwhile resuts of this work, alas, would scarcely fill both sides of a single sheet of A4, let alone a slim volume of verse. Yet it was not dissatisfaction with the quality of my efforts that brought them, very gradually, to a standstill, rather some ebbing away of my desire to partake of poetry's essence - a loss of appetite, perhaps.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty. - Edgar Allan Poe.
I spent the larger part of my first proper pay-cheque on poetry-books, which seemed to me at that time a more urgent necessity than buying myself one good pair of shoes. These days, I must concede, my priorities have reversed, and the shoes would come first.
Writing a poem... is reaching out into the unexplained areas of the mind, in which the air is too thickly primitive or too fine for us to live continually - Thom Gunn.
So, I wonder, where did the poetry in me go? Did it evaporate away with my youth like some volatile spirit, never to return? Is it in abeyance, a Muse in sullen exile? Or has it merely cooled and congealed into prose?
All lyric poems are narcissistic. They are the earliest form of the personal ad. They’ve been saying for more than a thousand years, ‘I’m a sensitive, vulnerable, misunderstood, barely solvent, lovable little fellow who would like to meet a person of exquisite taste who is not averse to an occasional roll in the hay.’ - Charles Simic.
I'm listening to a minidisc onto which I've recorded some solo piano music by Lubomyr Melnyk, a composer and virtuoso performer of what he characterises as music in the continuous mode, a species of contemporary classical music with a somewhat ’ambient’ feel to it which he plays very rapidly and without interruption or respite, but also without apparent exertion, given that his compositions often exceed forty minutes’ duration. It’s somewhat like some of Steve Reich’s work in texture, but with more of an emphasis on melody than on pure pattern and rhythm.
I discovered a double LP of Melnyk’s 1979 Lund-St. Petri Symphony (a release on the Toronto-based Apparition label) in a foray through a particularly musty junkshop last summer, and, intrigued by the eccentric cover notes, and the rather intense-looking Rasputin-like photograph of the composer on the back, I took it home, only to be more than pleasantly surprised by the quality of the recording. This Symphony is an idiosyncratic work which comprises three pieces for solo-piano (or organ - indeed the work was originally conceived for performance on a church organ) each of equal (c. forty-five minute) duration. The performer decides which of the three movements to play first, and arranges for his performance to be tape-recorded. Then, the next day, say, the performer selects one of the two reamining pieces, and plays it simultaneously with the recording of the first piece. The second performance should likewise be recorded, and this recording played in conjuction with the third, and, last piece.
I was interested enough to search the internet for more information about Mr. Melnyk, discovering that he is of Ukranian émigré parentage, was born in Germany, grew up in Canada, and now lives in Sweden, an hour or so southwest of Stockholm. Unexpectedly, I found his home address detailed on one newsgroup post, and, from another post learned that recordings of his work could be ordered, in some cases, directly from their composer, being otherwise scarce and obtainable only with difficulty.
I decided to write him a letter, expressing my admiration for the recording I had stumbled upon, whilst tentatively inquiring as to what else of his oeuvre was available to buy. I suppose this is the closest thing to a fan letter I’ve yet penned. I was delighted to receive a reply from him the following week, warmly thanking me for my interest, and listing a dozen or so titles, described as available on LP or cassette, or CD upon request, despite Mr. M’s professed aversion to digital recording in general: I find digital sound to be very inferior to hi-fi recording in respect to the higher frequencies where the digital process cheats abominably, he wrote.
I ordered three more LP titles, including the Song of Galadriel, perhaps the least obscure of his releases, whose inspiration springs, as one might suppose given its title, from Tolkien, albeit abstractly. These arrived after a few more weeks' delay. I still listen to these occasionally, marvelling at the man's singular technique. The one adverse criticism I might offer is that these continuous works, whilst like almost nothing else, sometimes seem to resemble one another a little too closely, although not so closely that to have heard one piece is to have heard them all.
The following is a fitting summary of Melnyk's work, in the composer's own sonorous words:
I disavow the so-called 'avant-garde' tendencies of contemporary music, because these are far too programmatic to permit pure music to surface, and because I remain in awe of the fabric of beauty which permitted Chopin, Mozart and others to let loose a fountain of harmonic splendour with just two notes. Modality and tonality are both as modern as dissonance. Still, even though my music's structure might slide between atonality and consonance, much of the music's path is given by the very technique of continuous music, i.e., incongruent patterns in each hand. Piano technique, involving the ultimate balance between the Left and the Right. The body and instrument become the Voice, the two parts forming a harmonic choir of activity.
Late on Saturday the temperature rose above freezing-point for the first time this year: it's so good to see water in its liquid state again. My spirits were beginning to feel somewhat frostbound too, so this thaw is a relief, like a long exhalation after holding ones breath a little too long.
I've been dipping into the new & quite fascinating on-line edition of the diary of Samuel Pepys: well worth a look if you've not already seen it.
I finished Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland last week. I can still say there's not a book of his I haven't enjoyed. The more of his novels one reads, the more they seem to be variations on a limited number of themes, drawing from a fixed troupe of characters. This recycling hardly ever lessens my appreciation of the tales he tells, however.
I've since begun reading José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, whose atmospheric opening chapter relates, in the choicest prose, Dr. Reis' disembarkation in Lisbon on a rainy day in late December 1935. Reis, we soon gather, has returned from exile in Brazil after having learned of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa. The twist here is that, in life, Pessoa was a poet famous for writing as a kind of literary split-personality under several distinct invented identities (which he called heteronyms), one of whom was a doctor called Ricardo Reis...
I never knew it was possible to spend so much money on a bathroom pedal bin. I'd been to the supermarket to return two bags full of recyclable bottles and cans, and, nosing around a few shops on the very short walk home, having extracted some cash from the bankautomat, and having purchased a photo-frame for my wife, I wandered into 'liro', a designer furnishings boutique and art gallery.
Amongst their beautifully overdesigned and overpriced stock were a number of exceedingly smart looking Vipp pedal-bins. I imagined one such in our bathroom, in place of the small blue plastic bucket-shaped bin we'd been using for the past year and a half. I sensed an impulse-buy coming on, but then looked at the price, which startled me and made me think twice, until, very shortly thereafter, having thought about it a third time, I bought one anyway.
I won't embarrass myself further by saying how much I paid for the thing. It looks very good in our bathroom, at least.
I'd already been out once, on another recycling errand, this time to dispose of a bag full of glass bottles, which I walked down to the bottle banks at the far end of Fisktorget. On my way back from there I stopped in at one of the town's two antiquarian booksellers, who also offers a small but occasionally interesting selection of secondhand classical CDs. I rifled through these and picked out one that caught my eye, a disc of Michael Nyman's string quartets. I had a quick listen to this on my return, having eaten a reheated bowl of Friday's delicious home-made leek-and-potato soup.
After that I took back the DVD we'd watched that morning: Monster's Ball, and rented another: Dragonfly. I'd enjoyed the former movie, although I'd not been quite in the mood for such intense drama so early in the day. I enjoyed the latter film rather less: we watched it that evening. I found it too slow-paced. Whilst at the video store, the proprietors, a very friendly husband-and-wife team, surprised me by asking if we'd be interested in borrowing some of their advance preview copies of movies sent to them by the distributors. I replied yes, of course.
How did I end up here? I remember wondering, the traffic speeding past me on the A5 as I stood, shivering, in the frostglazed carpark of the Bull Inn, Witherley, North Warwickshire. Only six weeks had passed since I'd quit my job in Rome, and here I was, waiting in the cold of a December Tuesday for my new colleague, the floppy-haired Mr. Petite, my tongue exploring what remained of the ruined molar from which a sizeable piece had broken off during our hastily eaten full English breakfast.
The Inn was a short drive from the offices, attached to a huge transport depot, where we had both just begun our six-month contracts. As I didn't (and still don't) drive, I had to find myself somewhere more convenient to stay, in or near Atherstone, which was the closest town. At lunchtime that day I made a few phone calls, and got an answer at a place called Abbey Farm. I walked straight over there to check it out, and found, after a ten minute walk along a country road, a handsome old stone farmhouse that stood near an old church, and which was overlooked by Merevale Hall, a rather grand-looking country house.
The room there was basic but clean, and the promise of a farmhouse breakfast every morning was appealing, so I opted to stay there that night, as, it turned out, I stayed there pretty much four nights a week for the whole year that followed. I would sometimes wonder what passing motorists thought when they'd catch sight of me in my suit & raincoat, umbrella in one hand, Toscanelli cigar in the other, strolling alone along the dark country lane.
I shudder to think how much cholesterol I must have consumed that year, as hardly a weekday morning went by when I didn't have a full, fried breakfast. I would sometimes wonder whether the enormous pig who was kept in a barn close to the farmhouse could somehow guess that I was eating bacon and/or sausage every day I was there... the thought would raise in me a distant pang of unease, though never quite strong enough that I would consider the vegetarian option...
I like the remark attributed to Robert Proust about his brother's masterpiece: the sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read 'In Search of Lost Time'. It is true that I've made my best progress through the book on idle vacation days, when empty hours couple together like vacant railway carriages into long, static trains of time yawning to be filled.
Heartened by my rapid progress through the the second half of The Guermantes Way, I opted to plough direcly into Sodom and Gomorrah, which I found very little trouble to get through, enjoying the first half in particular, which continued the narration of Marcel's entry into Parisian high society. By the end of Christmas week, I'd finished that too, and now I find myself fifty pages or so into The Prisoner (aka The Captive), the first part of volume five.
Amongst my other vacation reading was a heavy art-book I'd bought back in the summer, but which had since been lying at the base of a stack of other volumes: Rudolf II and Prague: the Court and the City. This is a catalogue of a grand exhibition staged in Prague in 1997, part of a broader festival which celebrated 'the reign of this enlightened and eccentric Habsburg ruler (1552-1612), and the kaleidoscope of talents he assembled at his court.' Numerous other books had collectively nudged my interest in the direction of Rudolfine Prague, with the marvellous monograph about Giuseppe Archimboldo I picked up in Rome last February having provided the final shove.
One of the most fascinating, to my eyes, of the artworks discussed in the book is an illustrated manuscript entitled Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta, a collaboration of sorts between the Croatian calligrapher Georg Bocksay and the Flemish miniaturist and illustrator Joris Hoefnagel. Bocksay, a virtuoso penman, had been commissioned to compile what amounted to a very elaborate calligraphy sampler by his patron, Emperor Ferdinand I. Thirty years later, Ferdinand's grandson (Rudolf II), asked Hoefnagel to illuminate the manuscript, a task he executed to outstandingly beautiful effect:
Hoefnagel also appended an abecedarium to the original manuscript, a series of pages on the design, proportion and construction of the alphabetical characters:
The manuscript is now in the possession of the Getty museum, who have also published a complete facsimile of the book with an accompanying commentary.
My last item of holiday reading, which I've still not quite finished: Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
At 02:30 this morning we packed my mother-in-law and Miss M______, her travelling companion, along with their four suitcases, into a taxi which would take them to Copenhagen airport in good time for their 07:00 flight to London. It was very cold as we bade our farewells, and an unblemished inch of powdery snow lay on the ground. Provided all is going to schedule, they should be in Heathrow by now, wearily pausing for breath before their flight back to Canada. They had been with us for two weeks.
The day they arrived (Sunday December 22nd) was no less chilly. I had travelled out to meet them alone, as we'd had a veterinary emergency that morning, having observed Cat spend an inordinate amount of time in the litter box, to which he would return every few minutes, in evident discomfort, depositing no more than a pinpoint of urine each time. A few phone calls led me to speak to the on-call vet, who advised an immediate examination, suspecting the possibility of a urinary tract obstruction. Within an hour my wife and I were in the deserted clinic assisting the vet as she sedated, examined, anaesthetised and cathetered the unfortunate feline, before syringing saline solution into his bladder and draining blood-tinted fluid back out. She could find no stones or crystalline deposits, which led her to prescribe an anti-inflammatory and to test for bacterial infection. Cat was in a pitifully groggy state upon our return to the Mañana, so my wife opted to stay and keep an eye on him while I packed a book (Proust's The Guermantes Way), some pistachios, an apple, two oranges, and a bottle of mineral water, all of which had been consumed by the time we returned, some eight hours later.
Between arrival and departure: much shopping; feasts of julskinka (Swedish Christmas ham), roast turkey, and roast beef; a whole lot of lounging around reading and watching TV; rounds of phone-calls to the folks back back home; a few hours exchanging gifts; a champagne toast on our balcony as a fusilade of fireworks and a carillon of bells announced the turn of the year.
I came into work by mistake today, forgetting that January 6th is a Swedish national holiday. I should have realised by the dead quiet that prevailed at 07:00 when I was out in the park with Dog, but it wasn't until I stepped outside again at 08:30 to find the streets scarecely less deserted, that the truth of it belatedly dawned on me. Holiday or no, I reasoned, there was enough for me to do at the office to make a half-day worthwhile - so here I still am.
A few minutes ago I went downstairs to pick out a snack from the freezer-cabinet vending-machine there, spending 18 SEK on a pre-packaged köttfarspaj (minced meat pie) which I popped into one of the bank of microwaves. I sat down to eat at one of the tables that afford a fine view of a Baltic inlet, dotted with islets, which separates my place of work from an arm of the mainland beyond. The water has been frozen for days, a bright white plain after last night's snow. Dozens of distant figures could be seen skating across it: a parent and child, the latter being towed by the family dog; a 'paraskater' being dragged along by a bright orange fabric canopy; a cyclist using the sea as a shortcut. I heard and then saw a helicopter, gleaming in the bright sunlight black and orange like some poisonous bug I thought, and watched with growing interest and alarm as it circled and descended to a point on the ice a mile or so away. Its rotors conjured up an almost opaque cloud of floury snow around it, so I could not see exactly what was happening, only hoping that the ice had not given way under a skater's weight.
Cat, it turned out, was suffering from an infection and inflammation of the bladder and urethra. After a few days' medication we were delighted to watch him return to full health.