While in the outer world the British people have been electing as their representatives, by the degrading process of universal suffrage, several hundred paid professional politicians, few of them owners of landed property, many of them positively base-born, in the closed world of this column a very different ceremony has been taking place.

In the dark, time-worn Gothic Hall of Assembly, amid crumbling tombs and carved symbols whose inmost meaning few can now read, the Great Feudatories of the Realm have been swearing fealty to the Regent, settling on their broad shoulders once more, for another year, the dreaming loads of Church and State.

In a thousand manors too, throughout the column, the Lesser Feudatories have been receiving the allegiance of village headmen bearing baskets of eggs, indigenous stones and symbolic flowers, of representatives of the craft-guilds – wood-carvers, arquebus-designers and organ-builders prominent as ever – and tenant farmers and yeomen, red-cheeked, bucolic figures in their holiday coats of decent frieze.

After these day-long, solemn ceremonies, rituals so intricate that none but the columnar heralds can understand them, high and low, through all their exact, foreknown, immutable degrees from the Regent to the humblest labourer, feel themselves united, confirmed once more, as the mighty order of society is confirmed.

In the outer world all is ephemeral, unstable, eddying and whirling this way and that in ceaseless, unreasonable change. Within, all is unchanging and unchangeable. As it was, as it is, as it will be, till Judgment Day.

by ‘REDSHANK’

With the prolonged fine weather, all kinds of exotic creatures have appeared in our part of the countryside for the first time in living memory. Hummingbird hawkmoths are plentiful. I have seen not one but a dozen at a time hovering over the snapdragons in our flower garden.

Not only hummingbird moths but hummingbirds have appeared. Calling at the Three Tuns, I found the regulars in an uproar as a whole bevy of these beautiful little creatures hovered over their pint pots, causing the less wide-awake to drop them on the floor.

At last Old Ted, the landlord, fairly lost his temper. “Get away, you pesky little varmints!” he shouted, lunging at the glittering little beauties, then chasing them across the room until he tripped over an antique horsecollar he keeps for grinning through and fell heavily to the ground, cursing all tropical interlopers.

There was a big laugh at this, and Old Jim, who always keeps a stuffed magpie on his person to avoid bad luck if he should meet a single magpie, annoyed the landlord even more by producing it and waving it in his face.

Meanwhile, the hummingbirds were hovering over the shove-halfpenny board, putting Old Frank and Old Amos off their game. Rustic oaths bombinated about the smoky room, growing ever more archaic and outlandish as I tried to make hurried notes in phonetic script.

Nature Diary

by ‘REDSHANK’

Once again, Spindlemass is with us, when the country folk compete in collecting the largest possible quantity of pretty pink spindleberries and displaying them in traditional patterns in their cottage windows. The origin of the Spindleberry festival, or Spindlemass, is like most things in our part of the countryside, lost in the mists of antiquity.

Some old herbal books recommend spindleberries for their purgative qualities and others for their binding effect and some for both at the same time. Many country folk are addicted to them. But old Dr Higgs, who retired from practice in Bournemouth and previously in west Africa, to live at “the Hollies”, an ivy-grown villa subject to subsidence at the outskirts of our village, maintains that this is contrary to reason, and that he could think of many other substances which are equally without any effect on the digestive system.

This is regarded with scorn and derision yet I often think that the traditional beliefs of the country folk, illogical as they may seem, are worth more than any rational argument.

WHETHER Parliament approves “therapeutic cloning” or not, will it make any difference in the long run? Whatever scientists can do, that will be done. Public opinion, at first aghast at artificial insemination and other landmarks on this infernal road, has largely come to accept them. So it is likely to be with this latest triumph.

“Science has put into our hands innumerable gifts that we can use either for good or ill.” This mantra, once regularly intoned, has become less popular now that many of these gifts are plainly seen to be used for ill.

A new palliative has appeared instead: it says that we must be kept well informed about the latest scientific developments, as well as learning more about science and scientific methods, so that we can decide for ourselves whether we want these gifts or not.

But who are “we”? Would it make any difference if we said we did not want them? Would it make any difference if some scientists themselves decided they were too dangerous to proceed with? Others would somehow, somewhere, carry on the work. The progress of science and technology which has seized upon our world seems irreversible, even fated.

Will it, as in some environmentalist fantasy, gradually diminish in strength and become humanly manageable in a new, green and “sustainable” world? Or will it, as seems more likely, proceed to a catastrophic end?

Among the many charms of the Peter Simple column which was written for so long by the late Michael Wharton were the numerous entities and institutions which existed by columnar fiat. Despite its luddism, the column had a space program, of which the columnar space vehicle, Don Carlos and the Holy Alliance III, was the pride and joy. Here are but two instances in which the operations of the vehicle were revealed.

A Celestial Snub

The British space probe, Beagle 2, now insolently speeding towards Mars, carries a fragment of a pop song and some fatuous art work by Damien Hirst, equally vile symbols of degenerate popular culture. Is there a chance that it will encounter our own columnar space vehicle, Don Carlos and the Holy Alliance III, now motoring on a tour of the solar system?

If it does, our august machine, programmed to avoid the swarm of vulgar objects now buzzing tastelessly about the heavens, will give no sign of recognition other than a slight increase of freezing hauteur. It will leave Beagle 2 to its banausic task of probing and burrowing into the surface of the Red Planet in its futile search for microbes and soda water.

Then away to the remote depths of space, for a weekend in the realm of the satellites of Pluto, discovered by our space vehicle on a previous expedition. There, on those delightful little worlds, a hereditary caste of noblemen spend their leisure hunting, fishing and, in the evenings, in their commodious hunting lodges, discuss such questions as the possibility of life, improbably near the sun, on our own unimaginably distant earth.

Keep off!

Not content with scattering malodorous rubbish all over the solar system (our solar system, incidentally), American scientists have fired a missile at a defenceless comet just to see what it is made of.

Is there to be no end to this senseless rage of curiosity? If our columnar space vehicle, Don Carlos and the Holy Alliance III, should ever find itself motoring in the neighbourhood of one of these senseless acts of aggression, it has orders to take appropriate action, the exact nature of which will be quite a surprise.

by ‘REDSHANK’

ST JOHN’S DAY, Midsummer Day, has come and gone, bringing to the nature diarists’ community, as the country folk call us, melancholy thoughts of the inexpugnable passage of time and of the already declining year. In our neighbourhood, St John’s Eve is a time when age-old customs, elsewhere, alas, confined to the mists of antiquity, still flourish even in these prosaic days.

Young men and maidens, not to speak of some in neither category, forsake their clubbing to dance in the woodland glades, undeterred by ghostly commercial travellers, doomed to play solo whist among the trees for all eternity, who scarcely interrupt their play to hurl traditional insults from another world.

It is different with the watercolourists who, following another ancient custom, come trooping out from the neighbouring town to set up their easels in the woods, industriously sketching everything they see, including the indignant dancers. Many of them are retired schoolteachers recommended “remedial art therapy” by their psychiatrists, distressed gentlefolk and ordinary people lately released into the community.

All take their orders from the big, ginger-haired old fellow who seems to be their leader. From my library window I watched through powerful field glasses as he rallied them amidst the dancers, lashing out with outsize paintbrush or sharp-edged paintbox and generally giving as good as they got.

He encouraged them, too, with anecdotes of eminent painters he seems to have known well: how he and Turner saw off a gang of criminal art dealers in Petworth Park; how he and Edward Lear, attacked by bandits while painting in Albania, put them to flight by endlessly repeating Lear’s limericks.

The village folk regard him with superstitious awe. He lives, so the talk goes in the Blacksmith’s Arms, in a rambling old mansion “way out t’ other side o’ Simpleham Great Park”. He is said to be a “gurt old ‘un for t’ book learnin’.” Some say he is writing a “Book of All Known Knowledge”. Some say he is the king of all nature diarists. All believe he is a powerful enchanter.

When I called at the inn the other day, there was an animated discussion about him, carried on, of course, in the genuine old British Composite Pandialect. Jack, the retired poacher told how, when laying a trail of sultanas to trap pheasants, he had seen the big man sitting in his enchanted garden, where creatures of the wild, deemed to be extinct in other parts of England, came to his call: the speckled linnet, the ringed dotterel, the corncrake and the wolf. Jack swore he had once seen an Andean condor perching on the enchanter’s shoulder and whispering secrets in his ear.

Old Seth the waspkeeper, who has a tendency to live in the past, and contributes a “Wasp at War” feature to the local newspaper, thinks the master watercolourist is a German or even Japanese spy, using watercolours to signal to enemy airmen. All believe he and his watercolourists are creatures of ill omen, and that to speak to them brings misfortune.

Though I am inclined to smile, I am sure there is a profound rural wisdom here, far beyond the grasp of your average know-all urban intellectual.

Nature diary

by ‘REDSHANK’

“SNOW in July, we’ll have sunshine forbye,” is an old adage still heard in the gunroom and four ale bar in our part of the country. Another old saying, “relevant”, as the country folk say, to the present unusual summer, is, “Nature diarists make their own weather”, already proved true a hundred times over.

As well as snow, we have had a freak sandstorm which deposited outsize date stones from North Africa on my croquet lawn; earth tremors which brought down a grandfather clock in the Chequers Inn on top of Old Frank, the landlord, causing much hilarity; and, to crown all, barn owls roosting together with a whole flock of magpies in Paxman’s Oak.

And – another sign of an unusual summer – when Old Seth the Waspkeeper, last of a dying breed, began his yearly “telling the wasps” according to immemorial custom, covering all the latest divorces, seductions, rapes, muggings and drug-peddling cases in the village, the cantankerous creatures would not listen, buzzing round in circles with a monotonous droning sound and giving every sign of cynical boredom.

CULEMBORG in the Netherlands is the birthplace of Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch East India Company bureaucrat who founded Cape Town, and thus in a sense the city is the birthplace of South Africa. That country’s had more than its fair share of racial tensions, but NRC Handelsblad reports that race riots recently erupted in Holland’s Culemborg. The rioting was not between Dutchmen and foreigners but rather between Moroccan and Moluccan youths in the district of Terweijde.

“It’s typical of ‘young male syndrome’ says a riot-expert with 25 years experience,” the article informs us. There’s rather something of Peter Simple in referring to a “riot expert with 25 years experience”. In NRC’s case, they are referring to behavioural scientist Otto Adang, but one could easily imagine Michael Wharton referring to a football hooligan or some other ne’er-do-well as “a riot expert with 25 years experience”.

by ‘REDSHANK’


With the prolonged fine weather, all kinds of exotic creatures have appeared in our part of the countryside for the first time in living memory. Hummingbird hawkmoths are plentiful. I have seen not one but a dozen at a time hovering over the snapdragons in our flower garden.

Not only hummingbird moths but hummingbirds have appeared. Calling at the Three Tuns, I found the regulars in an uproar as a whole bevy of these beautiful little creatures hovered over their pint pots, causing the less wide-awake to drop them on the floor.

At last Old Ted, the landlord, fairly lost his temper. “Get away, you pesky little varmints!” he shouted, lunging at the glittering little beauties, then chasing them across the room until he tripped over an antique horsecollar he keeps for grinning through and fell heavily to the ground, cursing all tropical interlopers.

There was a big laugh at this, and Old Jim, who always keeps a stuffed magpie on his person to avoid bad luck if he should meet a single magpie, annoyed the landlord even more by producing it and waving it in his face.

Meanwhile, the hummingbirds were hovering over the shove-halfpenny board, putting Old Frank and Old Amos off their game. Rustic oaths bombinated about the smoky room, growing ever more archaic and outlandish as I tried to make hurried notes in phonetic script.

by ‘REDSHANK’

THE badgers were out again last night. Not content with taking three pockets from the billiard table. Old Brock had made off with all the billiard balls as well, as I discovered when proposing a game with a fellow nature diarist this morning. What can your average badger want with billiard balls? Will this sagacious beast barter them for more useful objects with owl or weasel?

Musing on this, we wandered out across the garden in the golden September sunshine, and into the village giving a “good morning” now to Old Jim the Poacher, sweating in his heavy multi-pocketed poacher’s greatcoat, now to Old Miss Briggs, the former dame school economics teacher, now to a foursome of commercial travellers setting off for a solo whist session in Bragg’s Wood.

Passing the lopsided thatched cottage of Old Seth Gummer the Waspkeeper, last of his kind, we knew by the unusually loud buzzing from his garden croft that he was busy with the ancient custom of “telling the wasps”, so different from that equally ancient custom “telling the bees”. A grizzled figure dressed in waspkeeper’s sacking, with a perforated tin pail over his head, he was telling his vespine charges about all the happenings in the neighbourhood this summer that he thought would interest them.

Sure enough, their eager buzzing grew frenzied as he described, in lurid detail, adulterous affairs, divorces, rapes, lesbian elopements, cases of drug addiction, paedophilia, muggings and other assaults, and, most exciting of all, the formation of a retro-techno-sado-rap group in the village.

Pausing only to say a hurried “good morning” to Old Seth, who was fumbling vaguely with his antique Edison Bell recording apparatus, we walked on, accompanied by a few enterprising wasps, pondering on the strange mixture of old and new, of immemorial tradition and brash modernity in our part of the countryside.

by ‘REDSHANK’

To many, the end of summer and onset of autumn brings melancholy thoughts but for us in the nature diarist community it has many consolations as the season unfolds, bringing all the traditional customs still observed in our part of the countryside.

Old Seth the wasp-keeper, last of a dying breed, has now celebrated the age-old custom of “telling the wasps”, when he gathers his vespine charges about him and confides, with their buzzing approval, all the notable events that are taking place in our neighbourhood: actual and grievous bodily harm, rape, fraud and the formation of new gangs of hooligans of ever-increasing ferocity.

This is the season when late groups of water colourists invade our neighbourhood with their easels and brushes, under the aegis of the big ginger-haired old fellow who seems to hold them in a state of awe and even terror, making no secret of his utter contempt for their efforts.

“Now pay attention!” he can be heard roaring miles away. “First get control of your picture space. I well remember my old friend Jack Constable telling me that command of your picture space was half the battle, and you could forget all about composition, structure, tonal harmony, conceptual values and all the rest of the stuff you learnt at art school.”

His group of amateur artists, mostly pensioners and elderly people who have been advised by their psychiatrists to get something to do, and old ladies who seem unable to distinguish between paintbrushes and knitting needles, received his advice with reverence, positively elated that he should speak to them at all.

I felt rather sorry for them, but mindful of the belief, common among the village people, that any contact with these strange folk can bring misfortune, I did not intervene, even when a pathetic old pensioner with several hearing aids grasped my arm and begged me wordlessly for help.

The whole group disappeared over the brow of Mandelson’s Hill preceded by the ginger-haired leader, who is still shouting about “Bill” Monet and other eminent painters he had known, waving an outsized paintbrush, and I saw them no more.

Oddly enough, the country folk have great respect for him and seem to regard him as some kind of enchanter. Certainly they believe that all the creatures of the wild, from magpies to badgers, will come to his call. He lives in a big rambling old house with a large overgrown garden where he can be seen sitting and meditating on the secrets of nature. Old Frank the gamekeeper swears that once, peering through a gap in the garden wall, he saw him sitting amid the brambles and deadly nightshade with a huge Andean condor perched on his shoulder as he whispered his secrets to it.

The country folk call this enchanted garden “an European eco-habitat” and are agitating for an official warden with a degree in environmental studies.

by ‘REDSHANK’

St John’s Day, Midsummer Day, has come and gone, bringing to the nature diarists’ community, as the country folk call us, melancholy thoughts of the inexpugnable passage of time and of the already declining year. In our neighbourhood, St John’s Eve is a time when age-old customs, elsewhere, alas, confined to the mists of antiquity, still flourish even in these prosaic days.

Young men and maidens, not to speak of some in neither category, forsake their clubbing to dance in the woodland glades, undeterred by ghostly commercial travellers, doomed to play solo whist among the trees for all eternity, who scarcely interrupt their play to hurl traditional insults from another world.

It is different with the watercolourists who, following another ancient custom, come trooping out from the neighbouring town to set up their easels in the woods, industriously sketching everything they see, including the indignant dancers. Many of them are retired schoolteachers recommended “remedial art therapy” by their psychiatrists, distressed gentlefolk and ordinary people lately released into the community.

All take their orders from the big, ginger-haired old fellow who seems to be their leader. From my library window I watched through powerful field glasses as he rallied them amidst the dancers, lashing out with outsize paintbrush or sharp-edged paintbox and generally giving as good as they got.

He encouraged them, too, with anecdotes of eminent painters he seems to have known well: how he and Turner saw off a gang of criminal art dealers in Petworth Park; how he and Edward Lear, attacked by bandits while painting in Albania, put them to flight by endlessly repeating Lear’s limericks.

The village folk regard him with superstitious awe. He lives, so the talk goes in the Blacksmith’s Arms, in a rambling old mansion “way out t’ other side o’ Simpleham Great Park”. He is said to be a “gurt old ‘un for t’ book learnin’.” Some say he is writing a “Book of All Known Knowledge”. Some say he is the king of all nature diarists. All believe he is a powerful enchanter.

When I called at the inn the other day, there was an animated discussion about him, carried on, of course, in the genuine old British Composite Pandialect. Jack, the retired poacher told how, when laying a trail of sultanas to trap pheasants, he had seen the big man sitting in his enchanted garden, where creatures of the wild, deemed to be extinct in other parts of England, came to his call: the speckled linnet, the ringed dotterel, the corncrake and the wolf. Jack swore he had once seen an Andean condor perching on the enchanter’s shoulder and whispering secrets in his ear.

Old Frank the waspkeeper, who has a tendency to live in the past, and contributes a “Wasp at War” feature to the local newspaper, thinks the master watercolourist is a German or even Japanese spy, using watercolours to signal to enemy airmen. All believe he and his watercolourists are creatures of ill omen, and that to speak to them brings misfortune.

Though I am inclined to smile, I am sure there is a profound rural wisdom here, far beyond the grasp of your average know-all urban intellectual.

Sometimes something rather interesting is right under your nose and you never even notice it. I read the Catholic Herald — the premier Catholic newspaper in the English-speaking world — every week and have been reading it since university days, but I have rarely read Stuart Reid’s “Charterhouse” column on the back page. A few recent perusals have exposed my foolishness for neglecting it. They are presented for your reading here.

(Of course, there has never been a columnist as brilliant as Peter Simple, whose works we have shown you in a series of installments.)

Charterhouse
by STUART REID

Everyone needs a secular hero or two, and one of mine is Rian Malan. In the Sunday Times at the weekend he had a very nice diary, in which he said that he liked Jacob Zuma, because the president-elect of South Africa had “old-fashioned views on stuff like law and order”.

Malan also said that it was a good time to be a Boer: “…as South Africa staggers towards its destiny, it’s white Left-liberals who are wailing about our government’s shortcomings. The Boers never expected any better, so we are generally immune to the gloom.”

The diary made my heart go out, once again, to the Boers. They are brave, honest, hard-working, courteous, old-fashioned and often God-fearing, with a weakness for the bottle. Plus they were on the right side in the Boer War and their women – sometimes their men too – are beautiful.

(more…)

Michael Wharton, the genius behind the Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph, died on Sunday at 92 years of age. Wharton was “a quietly spoken, cherubic-featured man who ate corned beef sandwiches and drank brandy and ginger ale in a Fleet Street pub every lunchtime” according to his obituary in the Telegraph which provides some background to the man who invented an imaginary realm with which to point out the faults and foibles of the real one. Here we provide some excerpts which we found particularly interesting, amusing, or explanatory.

Wharton’s first volume of autobiography, The Missing Will (1984), opened with an evocation of childhood memories: the great house, with its Long Gallery and the smooth green lawns, on the day news arrived from the Western Front that his elder brother, the Viscount, was dead. It went on to recount, however, that he was really born Michael Bernard Nathan, the son of an unsuccessful businessman of German-Jewish origins, on April 19 1913 at Shipley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Young Michael was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he learned to drink and to be idle. He took on the persona of a Tory anarchist who supported Franco and was determined to be of the Right, even if not a paid-up member. Eventually he was rusticated for throwing an egg at High Table and dismantling a sofa which was then pushed out of a window.

On the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the Royal Artillery, under his mother’s maiden name of Wharton. After obtaining a commission, he was sent to India, where he became an intelligence officer, eventually being attached to the General Staff and rising to the rank of acting lieutenant-colonel. Since the threat to India from both Germany and Japan was largely theoretical towards the end of the war, Wharton’s restless imagination came into play. He invented the Thargs, a sect of redheaded tribesmen in the Sind Desert, descendants of Alexander the Great’s soldiery who were in wireless contact with Hitler’s High Command. While studying the few facts available on some dull Japanese generals, he conjured up a one-eyed officer of the Imperial high command who had developed a fierce hatred of England after living in Harrogate where he had learnt the secret of toffee-making.

An advertisement “Learn Etruscan the Way They Did” produced a host of orders which eventually led to an announcement that the Etruscan records were sold out but that there were still stocks of Old Prussian, Aztec and Pictish; several requests inevitably followed.

The Daily Telegraph even devoted a lead editorial to Wharton’s passing, entitled ‘Death of a Genius’. God rest the soul of this brilliant and hilarious man, who provided thought and amusement for so many throughout his years.

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