In his latest column for the Mail on Sunday, the commentator and Orwell Prize winner Peter Hitchens shares his thoughts on the Blitz — the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign over London that commenced sixty years ago this month. His comments have special relevance given the previous posts on andrewcusack.com regarding the immorality of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, and likewise of the intentional and deliberate targeting of civilian non-combatants. (more…)

Over at afrikaans.be, Anton Raath posts a verbal snapshot of Stellenbosch in 1819 from ‘The Cyclopædia: or universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature’:

STELLENBOSCH, in Geography, a small town of Southern Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope. It consists of three long straight streets, running parallel to each other, and several cross streets intercepting these at right angles. The houses are all spacious, and substantially built, though only thatched with straw.

Each street resembles an avenue, since, on both sides before the houses, are large sturdy oaks, which are almost as old as the place itself, which was built at the beginning of the former century, though it was wholly burnt down in 1710. In December, 1803, a similar accident happened, when the number of houses left standing was about 80. The church was built in 1722, and though not equal in size to the churches of Roodezant and Paarl, it is no way inferior to them in point of architecture.

The number of inhabitants at Stellenbosch, including slaves and Hottentots, is estimated at 1000. Every person in this town carries on, with his trade, some portion of agriculture and horticulture; and as there are none who can be called actually poor, who labour for hire, they are obliged to have slaves, who do not pay the expence of keeping them.

Strangers, who in their long voyages make any stay at the Cape, never fail to visit Stellenbosch; and people of property at the Cape Town also, in the fine season of the year, often make parties of pleasure to this fertile spot. Hence houses are fitted up here for the accommodation and entertainment of strangers.

“Hoe meer dinge verander…” Mnr Raath comments.

The slightly camp Old Etonian atheist neo-con Douglas Murray got himself into a bit of trouble recently when he and Baroness Deech unleashed a splenetic rant against Scotland and the Scots on BBC Radio 4. As head of the HFEA, Baroness Deech presided over the deaths of an untold number of humans in the embryonic stage of development, but it turns out that Mr. Murray (who is Scottish-born, curiously) has advocated hypothetical wholesale slaughter.

In 2007, Mr. Murray helped compose Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership ostensibly written by Gen. Dr. Klaus Naumann (former Bundeswehr Chief of Staff), Gen. Prince John Salikashvili (Georgian prince and former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Field Marshal the Lord Inge (former U.K. Chief of the General Staff), Adm. Jacques Lanxade (former Chief of the French Navy), and Gen. Henk van den Breemen (accomplished organist and former Chief of Staff of the Dutch military).

This interesting document made a number of recommendations, the most intriguing of which is the suggestion that NATO should be prepared to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike… in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”) such as, er, nuclear weapons. You read that correctly: in order to prevent the use of WMDs, NATO should be prepared to use WMDs. You couldn’t make it up!

While my admittedly small work on the Namibian jugendstil was recently published in Catalan, those who are interested in my review of Xander van Eck’s Clandestine Splendor: Paintings for the Catholic Church in the Dutch Republic can read it in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard.

Unfortunately the magazine’s website is mostly behind a paywall, so readers will have to swing by their local newsstand to obtain a copy.

Well, your humble and obedient scribe is retreating to the coast of Maine, whence the defeated loyal men of Berwick fled after suffering defeat at the hands of the wretched Cromwell in the Battle of Dunbar. I am bringing a few friends along, including Mssrs. Trollope, Goethe, Burns, Chesterton, Balzac, von Rezzori, and a Ms. Undset (I am finally more than two-thirds of the way through Kristin Lavransdatter). There may also be a corgi or two. Internet connectivity very sketchy in those parts, though I will see if I can send a pigeon back to Hogarth if any news. (Doubtful it would do any good; the last e-mail I had him send he instinctively translated into dots and dashes — he does remind me of Uncle Otto sometimes).

So I bid you farewell, and you can expect my return in a fortnight’s time, invigorated anew by the salty breeze.

Since the decision by ICANN, the mysterious council of elders whose nomenclatory dominion spans, it seems, the entirety of the “world wide web”, to designate .cat as the “sponsored Top-Level Domain” of the Catalonian linguistic and cultural community, much speculation has arisen in various sub-statal lands throughout the world about future TLDs. In our favoured realm of Scotland, a campaign has arisen for .scot to be designated the TLD for Scotland. While I wholeheartedly support the campaign for a Scottish TLD, I have already expressed my reservations about the increasing size (not number) of TLDs. The traditional country-code TLDs are all two-letter combinations, and any new TLDs representing geographic entities ought to stick to this restraint.

But then what would Scotland’s top-level domain be? .sl is taken by Sierra Leone, while .sc belongs to the Seychelles, and .st to São Tomé. We might hark back to the Gaelic with .al for Alba, except that it’s already occupied by Albania. Ah! Caledonia! How about .cd? Nope, that belongs to the Congo. Blast. It might be necessary to go to three letters then, which brings us either to .sco or .sct. Neither look all that attractive, though .sco has the advantage of being pronounceable. Actually, .sco is quite imaginable, when spoken: parliament.gov.sco, fifeherald.sco, glenfiddich.sco. It just doesn’t look right. .scot looks better, but the rhyming nature of “dot scot” is irritating to say aloud.

I do wish they’d make .gb available again. I’d much rather be a “gee-bee” than a “yoo-kay”. Great Britain is a natural entity, after all, whereas the United Kingdom is a government construct. Perhaps if the Union is re-negotiated, we might move from .uk to .gb, just as .yu was changed to .cs when Yugoslavia was renamed Serbia & Montenegro. (The two split not long afterwards, and went for .rs and .me).

With four letters, at least .scot is not the longest proposed top-level domain. Some ninny thinks there should be a .quebec — how cumbersome! .qu would be much better, and one can just imagine the Québécois pronouncing it. Other British proposals include .eng for England and .cym for Wales. “Norn Iron” loses out, as .ni belongs to Nicaragua, but .ul or .uls are conceivable for Ulster. Perhaps the Vatican could dole out .sre — Sancta Romana Ecclesia — for ecclesiastical domains.

THERE WAS MUCH debate in the better tea-drinking circles of New York in June when the sixteen-year-old Californian sailor Abby Sunderland had to be rescued by French fishermen in the Indian Ocean during her attempt to be the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly. The main concern among my fellow tea-drinkers was trying to locate philosophically the appropriate dividing line between parents enforcing a proper level of safety for their own children and encouraging the appropriate spirit of adventure & human endeavour. The Dutch girl Laura Dekker, two years younger than Miss Sunderland, is now going to go for it herself and, like the California youth, was born into a sailing family.

Peter Hitchens wades gently into the debate in his latest Mail on Sunday column with these thoughts:

Good luck to Laura Dekker, the 14-year-old Dutch girl who wants to sail round the world on her own. Laura was born on a yacht, had her own boat by the time she was six, and began sailing alone when she was ten. How I envy her. The last time I tried to sail alone, I was clinging to the wreckage within five minutes.

The efforts of the authorities to stop her were obviously motivated by reasonable concern. Imagine what the British state would have done. But children can do so much more than we think they can, and grow with responsibility. Once, this attitude was common. Does anyone now read Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, in which the children’s father is asked for his permission for the youngest to sail unsupervised, and replies in a telegram ‘If not duffers, won’t drown. Better drowned than duffers’.

In a later book, the wonderful We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea, the same children unintentionally sail across the North Sea to Holland, when they accidentally slip anchor. They arrive safely, entirely because they have been trusted in the past. Someone should send Laura Dekker a copy.

Last night a Requiem Mass was offered for Father Kevin Fitzpatrick, who died two years before on July 27, 2008. The requiem was offered according to the 1962 Missal at the Church of St. Mary in Norwalk, Conn., with music under the skillful direction of David Hughes, the organist & choirmaster at St. Mary’s.

Fr. Fitzpatrick was a giant of a man, with an intelligence and a sense of humour that easily matched his size, and was an easy conversationalist. His library was one of the most enviable collections I have seen (a bibliophile like myself can’t but help wonder what’s become of it). While I couldn’t make it to the Mass yesterday, I’m very happy to see that Fr. Fitzpatrick is being suitably remembered.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

For those who didn’t come across it already, I penned a little Bastille Day guest post over at Curated Secrets, the companion blog to Stephen Klimczuk & Gerald Warner’s book Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries. The post consists of a brief meandering from Bastille Day to the World Cup to Iberian reactionaries to vexillological conspiracy theories.

While you’re at it, you might want to listen to Gerald Warner being interviewed for Australian radio, a fascinating exchange in which the Much Honoured Laird of Craigenmaddie discourses about topics as varied as the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center to the Santo Caliz of Valencia.

Some World Cup watchers found it slightly incongruous that as they balked in the heat of the northern summer, spectators in the stadiums were bundled up for the cold. It does snow in South Africa, though not every year and usually much less the closer you are to the sea (or rather sea-level). This recent photo distributed by Die Burger shows the Hottentots Holland range, near my former neck of the woods, capped with snow.

Even on days when you can see the mountain peaks topped in white, the temperature closer to the ground still allows you to spend a care-free afternoon relaxing at a vineyard with friends.

I felt as if I were going from a noisome prison out into the morning air in the countryside. … After the clangor and tension [of New York], and so many faces taut or ugly or vicious, life in Portugal might be unaffluent but it was still quiet, still kindly, still human. The lack of development and the poverty struck one as a blessing. The absense of advertisers and of mass media men and of vote-catching politicians, bawling out their meretricious wares, was like relief from the presence of the demented.

via R.J. Stove

Matt Alderman, already the subject of his own tag on this site, finally has a website of his own for Matthew Alderman Studios. You can investigate his prints, drawings, ecclesiastical furnishings, and liturgical objects. You can even ‘like’ it on Facebook.

Saturday I popped in to have a friendly chat with Paterfamilias Gill, of which the usual topic of conversation is the decline of civilisation and the amusing side effects thereof. We had reached Afghanistan when Mrs. Gill eventually joined us, and, after showing me the latest addition to the Gill collection (a splendid maritime scene by William Edward Norton), Mr. Gill suggested an expedition to the auction house down a back alley in neighbouring Larchmont, and I happily agreed.

Above is a gilt bronze and patinated metal clock in the French style. I’m rather fond of the curvature of spherical clockfaces, and the serpentine hands are a nice detail as well. This clock would fit in at 15 East Ninety-sixth Street. Estimate of $800-$1,000. (more…)

Something you don’t see every day: a set of triplets from Pretoria recently completed basic training as part of their enlistment in the South African Army. Dirk van Zyl, Tjaart van Zyl, and Hendrik van Zyl (above, left-to-right) are 20 years old and got their mechanical engineering qualifications before enlisting in the Defence Force.

The three brothers are all part of Foxtrot Company, 3 South African Infantry Battalion based at Kimberley in the Northern Cape; Hendrik in Platoon 1, Tjaart in Platoon 2, and Dirk in Platoon 3.

Large-scale operational deployments of the South African military have been few and far between since the country withdrew from the Angolan conflict and granted Namibia independence. Since then they have mostly consisted of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping operations, as well as other endeavours such as South Africa’s 1998 military intervention in a dynastic dispute in the neighbouring Catholic monarchy of Lesotho. Current defence regulations prevent siblings like the van Zyl brothers from being operationally deployed simultaneously.

Our carbuncle alarm, which went haywire over the Brooklyn Museum’s offensive new entrance, has alerted us to a new monstrosity nearing completion in the adjacent borough. (more…)

Instagram: @andcusack

Most Recent Posts

• A Christmas Gift from the Governor December 24, 2024
• Oude Kerk, Amsterdam December 24, 2024
• Gellner’s Prague December 19, 2024
• Monsieur Bayrou December 18, 2024
• Dempsey Heiner, Art Critic December 17, 2024

Most Recent Comments

• Andrew Cusack on Amsterdam
• Andrew Cusack on Season’s Greetings from the Seventh
• B T Van Nostrand on Season’s Greetings from the Seventh
• Gousset van Heel on Amsterdam
• Andrew Cusack on Amsterdam
• Adam Rhéaume on Le drapeau « Jacques Cartier »
• John Lannigan on No. 82, Eaton Square
• Gousset van Heel on Amsterdam
• Frédéric-Nicolas Gerace on The Last Will and Testament of Louis XVI
• Peter Forster on The Catholic Apostolic Church, Edinburgh

Book Wishlist

Monthly Archives

Categories