lblanchard | Reading

£3.40 to send a Christmas card to Switzerland!

I remember when we'd send 30-40 Christmas cards thither and yon. Who can afford that now? Well maybe Elon Musk, but apart from him....

We're sending four this year. All to people we need to communicate with- like the lady in Switzerland who very kindly sent us a copy of her book.

The Christmas card was invented (if that's the right word) by Henry Cole in 1843. The design he commissioned from his artist friend John Calcott Horsley shows a scene of wholesome revelry flanked by images of people performing good works. All very Pickwickian.

firstchristmascard.jpg.webp

Will people still be sending cards when the bicentenary comes round in 2043? I very much doubt it.

poliphilo

I don't like biopics. They isolate, simplfy, betray. This is true even of what I take to be the greatest of all biopics, Lawrence of Arabia. Want to know about Lawrence? Don't start here; so much is wrong. For starters Peter O'Toole is very tall and Lawrence was very short.....

Ken Russell had the right idea. He didn't do cradle to grave. Cradles were for rocking madly and graves for dancing on, both to the music of whatever composer he was having fun with. He reduced the life of Tchaikovsky- in his own words as I remember them- to the story of a homosexual married to a nymphomaniac. He reduced the life of Mahler to the story of a Jew married to a Nazi. He turned the life of Liszt into a psychedelic, head banging rock and roll circus, with added Nazis. His films isolate, simplify, betray- and don't pretend otherwise- but by God they're cinematic!

Last night we watched Lee. The biopic about Lee Miller. Who was Lee Miller? She was a model, a muse, a photographer, a war correspondent, a drunk, a lady of the manor. The film can only hint at much of this. For instance she was a friend of Picasso- and he was the first person she went to visit when she entered Paris with the US army.- but he doesn't appear at all or even get a mention- but then how could you reduce him to a walk on part in someone else's life story; he was too big, too dominant, too mythic. Where the movie succeeds is as a story about war and the effects of war. As I watched it I had two thoughts, one after the other: firstly that I avoided this god-awful mess by a mere six years, secondly that war is so bloody, bloody stupid.

Lee was a witness who fixed her memories by photographing them. She saw the Yanks use napalm against German positions at St Malo, women who'd slept with Germans having their heads shaved in liberated Paris, railway carriages and storerooms piled up with corpses in Buchenwald and Dachau. When she got to Berlin she blagged her way into Hitler's flat- then being used as a kind of clubhouse for American officers- and had herself photographed soaping her back in his bathtub. No wonder she suffered from PTSD! But then so did that entire generation- my parents not excluded.....

After the war Lee boxed up her pictures and stashed them away in the attic of her farmhouse. Her son didn't discover them until after her death- or really have any idea till then of who and what she'd been. They can be found online at the Lee Miller Archives, thousands of them, all higgledy-piggledy- fashion shots next to portraits of Picasso next to images of Dachau next to family snaps. Quite extraordinary.

poliphilo

He keeps popping into this blog but I disguise his identity and make no attempt to link his appearances. Over a course of three years- or something like- we (because he attends the Quaker meeting) have seen him devolve from eccentric to psychogeriatric. He craves help but refuses help. Self pity has eaten his brain. He still has his moments of lucidity- when he can discourse with apparent cheerfulness on renaissance art and politics- but mainly now he paces and mutters. "O dear, O dear". Most of us have heard his story by now but if if someone new comes by he'll corner them if he can and perform his ancient mariner act. We apologise to one another for going out of our way to avoid him....

poliphilo

Doone turned up in my dreams- not the woman herself but just her name. It was attached (in the dream) to someone rather different.

As a first name it is possibly unique. And I have remembered it right. It's Doone (as in Lorna). It may have been a stage name because Doone was a dancer. A professional dancer- who performed in Monte Carlo- where she met Leonide Massine- and in the chorus line of the London production of My Fair Lady.

She lived next door when I was in my teens. She had a husband called Gervaise. My parents didn't care for him, though they had them both over to dinner once; they thought he was a bit of a wide boy. They might even have used the word "spiv".

I looked Doone and Gervais up on line. and found a brief notice of their marriage. After that Gervaise fades from the record, even though he is described as a writer. Maybe he did write but never published. Doone, though, carries on. She had three children after the time I knew her, one called Lorna (of course), one who became a businessman and a third who is currently rector of a parish in Bexhill- just up the road from here. This parsonical son is the kind of Christian who thinks Tai Chi is of the devil. Doone herself went on to become a mainstay of a local community theatre. She was alive in 2013- and will have turned 90 if she's still around.

Doone matters to me because she was one of the few adults to take notice of me at a time when I was isolated and lonely. Also because she involved me briefly in am dram and gifted me with the role that represents the peak of my acting career- having me deliver Jacques speech on the Seven Ages of Man- that great essay on Mutability- from the stage of the village hall. I can still- though now positioned somewhere between the fifth and sixth age- recite most of it by heart.

poliphilo

The cat is an old, old man- older than I am to judge by his behaviour.

He shouts a lot. I think the caterwauling translates as "Where am I? Where are you?"

Perhaps even, "Who am I?" Who are you?"

And, of course, "Isn't it teatime yet?"- because, although he grows lighter and bonier, he hasn't lost his appetite.

He hangs close. And you can hardly move around the house without falling over him. You think he's asleep on one of his cushions and you step out regardless and find you've trodden on one of his paws because he's somehow materialised right in front of you and you go "O, cat!"

poliphilo

A quarter to eight in the morning.....

Pale blue sky, pink clouds

The moon in its last quarter

Silver

Very high up a pink plane trailing pink vapour

Very low down, on what was once marshland- and still is underneath- a thread of mist lying below the house tops

poliphilo

The recycling centre is just across the road. It takes me about a minute to walk to the gate where they admit pedestrians.

Only I'm not walking there as often as I did because they've instituted a booking system- and you can't just turn up. Instead you have to go online, sign up for a time slot and it's a faff.

Is "faff" recognised as a noun by tthe gatekeepers of the language?

Yes it is. I just looked it up.

Why did they bring in the new system? Presumably to stop the queue of cars that used to build up along St Philip's Drive at peak hours.

Was that something that was worth doing? The official mind which abhors untidiness obviously thought so....

poliphilo

"Sombre" is the word.

It cropped up in the formulation "Everyone seems a bit sombre at the moment."

"Why do think that is?" someone asked

And I chipped in with "Because the old world is coming to end."

Later we rehearsed the conversation with someone who hadn't been present.

"The old world is always coming to an end," he said.

"Yes," I said, "But this time it really is."

poliphilo

Look at meeee!

I have assembled a flat pack table all by myself and without mistakes.

Damian offered to do it for me, but I wanted to prove to mayself and the wrorld that I'm not as incompetent as I like to pretend I am.....

poliphilo

Picture Diary 112

1. Sidhe

2. Marcel

3. On the brink

4. Silence

5. Astrologer

6. Great great great grandpapa

poliphilo

I dreamed that I encountered one of my more significant exes on the streets of Tunbridge Wells. She was sitting on the shoulders of a brown-skinned man who- I found out- was the son she'd given away at birth. She looked a little shocked to see me. I acknowledged her by waggling my fingers at her in friendly greeting.

Later I visited her and her partner in their flat. It occupied the middle floor of a three floor building. The apartment above them had been completely burned out and the roof was gone.

When people from my past show up in dreams I always wonder whether it's their way of informing me that they've died. In this case I have no way of finding out.....

poliphilo

Perfect Days was showing at the Towner a few months back. People who'd seen it were going on about how wonderful it was. Oddly enough none of them mentioned that it was directed by Wim Wenders.

Back in the day we cineastes used to talk in terms of directors. Stars and screenwriters were secondary. The director was the man (he generally was a man)- and as much in control of the work as a novelist is of their novel. We went to see a movie because it was a Bergman movie or an Antonioni movie or- even- a Wim Wenders movie. These guys were auteurs- you knew when you went to see one of their films that you were entering a certain kind of world, that a certain kind of imagination was at play. You loved 'em, you felt an affinity- or you felt a distaste. I gave up going to Polanski's stuff because it radiated negativity. I became a Bergman completist even though, objectively speaking, some of his films were crap.

Wenders is one of the last of the old style European auteurs. And Perfect Days is one of the last of the old style auteur movies. You can see, feel, intuit that it comes from the mind that gave us Alice in the Cities way back in 1974. It was made under auteur conditions too- for very little money, with a shooting schedule (which it stuck to) of a mere 16 days, and without studio interference.

Contemporary cinema interests me very little. Maybe I'm just old. Or maybe the golden age is over and what we're being fed is silver at best. Still, if Wenders (who is 80) manages to make another movie I'll be wanting to track it down......

poliphilo

Splendid public toilets they have in Tokyo!

And reading up about the movie afterwards I find that the Nippon Foundation- which commissioned the toilets from a bunch of top architects- originally brought Wenders in to make what they thought would be a short documentary about them. However the project developed....

....And turned into a minimalist story film about a guy who cleans the toilets. While I watched it I was thinking "Ozu!" and it seems the makers were thinking "Ozu!" too. Lead actor Koji Yakusho is wonderful in what is almost a silent performance. His character Hirayama has a backstory that is hinted at but never disclosed. And why should we care about it anyway? Once he was something else. Now he's a saint.

"Is it a little sentimental?" I found myself wondering.

But that's my 20th century conditioning showing through.

poliphilo

I have two spray bottles sitting on my desk. One dispenses Vitamin B12 the other is for cleaning my glasses.

Guess which one I spritzed into my mouth this morning.....

poliphilo

If I were a Catholic Christian and not a Quaker (so not necessarily a Christian at all) I would currently be observing the season of Advent.

Advent is all about waiting, anticipating, looking forward- not to Christmas but to something called The Second Coming- which you can interpret as you will.

Buddhists also wait, but for them the waiting is a thing in itself, its own consummation, whereas Christian wait for something....

Huge generalisation coming up: The spirituality of the East is passive, the spirituality of the West active. Both are appropriate to the situation we find ourselves in.

I always loved Advent. For one thing it has the best hymns.

I was in the Meeting House on Thursday and a text came into my head and kept on pestering me until I gave in, picked a Bible off the table, looked it up and then read it aloud to the Friends.

Luke is talking about John the Baptist. The text that was pestering me is "The voice of one crying in the wilderness" and passage in which it is embedded goes like this:

Now in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar.....the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins- as it is written in the the book of the words of Esias the prophet, saying, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; And all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

poliphilo

"What's this?" asks Ailz- and half-sings a lyric that goes. "Honeymoon, honeymoon....' She's got it going through her head and she doesn't know what it is.

"No idea," I say. "Never heard it before."

Only I have. We look it up and it turns out to me a misreembered line from "By the Light of the Silvery Moon"- a song published in 1909 but fixed in the collective memory by a version sung by Doris Day nearly 50 years later. It's the epitome of the June, moon, spoon" school of song-writing- twee and sugary- but what a pretty tune!

Half a century goes by, two world wars- and all sorts of other awfulness- and it was still cutting the mustard. "How odd", I think.

But then again no odder than people still finding the Beatles cool- indeed obsessing about them- in 2025.

Last word to Noel Coward- himself no mean purveyor of charming little ditties- "Strange how potent cheap music is...."

poliphilo

Picture Diary 111

. Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne

2. In a hurry

3. Lizbeth

4. Wanna come up and see my etchings?

5. Welcome Stranger

6. Iced

poliphilo

The tamest of our pigeons has only one leg. He is the first to the food and the last to fly away when I get too close. This morning when I scattered bird seed he was the only one to show up. We call him Hoppy.

I know he's male because I've seen him perform a slightly jerky version of the pigeon courting dance.

Look away now if you're squeamish but I know how he lost his leg because I found it about a year ago in a joint of our complicated metal bird feeder. I suppose he made to fly away and it snapped. I hope it didn't hurt too much.....

poliphilo

In a dream last night a woman- who was both myself and someone I was observing- stood up on a chair and speechified to a table of people eating breakfast. They weren't best pleased with her because she'd mistaken the time and had got them out of bed hours too early. The speech was inspired and inspiring but all I remember of it is the line "God can come after me if he wants but I doubt that he has the guts". Later she made the same speech again but it was far less effective because she was repeating some of what she'd said before instead of delivering it in the moment.

In another dream I was wandering through a building in Oldham that was mainly a hospital. I was under the impression I'd worked there but when I couldn't remember anything about it I concluded I can't have done. I had a dog with me but the dog went missing and the gay guy who was also a dog owner said it must have gone to the kitchen. In a green space among the buildings was a huge black monument with a sculpture embedded in it of an old saint on his death bed. The monument spoke and said "Pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death" and I crossed myself because my companion was a catholic and I wanted to show respect.

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lblanchard

November 2025

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Page generated Dec. 16th, 2025 06:14 pm

The News from South Philly

and other points of interest

Reading

Christmas Cards

Lee

O Dear, O Dear

Doone

O Cat!

A View From My Window

It's A Faff

Sombre

Flat Pack

Picture Diary 112

Fancy You Showing Up

Perfect Days 2

Perfect Days

I Don't Think I've Poisoned Myself

The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness

Cheap Music

Picture Diary 111

Hoppy

Does God have The Guts?

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November 2025

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