Scarred for Life

Tags

Antiques Roadshow, ATS, Buckingham Palace ballroom, Camilla, Colgate, Da Vinci Lady with Ermine, Duchess Cornwall, Gavin Maxwell, Inner Hebrides, Lady Denham, Land Girls, leather gauntlet, Martini, Nutkins, Prince Philip, Pugs, Queen Mother, Ring of Bright Water, Rupert Maas, Simon Bolivar, Sotheby's, St Vitus' School for Academically-Gifted Girl

Carrie had brought her mother-in-law, Ginevra Brewer-Mead the

Saturday newspaper while she had been out walking her over-

weight pugs, Algy, Pooh-Bah and Humbug.

She had to leave them in the porch, as Magda, the carer

detested them.  Fortunately she was out shopping.

Suddenly the old lady put the newspaper down and sighed.

What’s wrong? asked Carrie.

Oh, it’s just an obituary for someone I knew.  All my friends

are popping off.

Carrie picked up the paper and scanned it.

Augusta Snodbury…passed away in Snodland Nursing Home

for the Debased Gentry…..choked on an olive in her Martini.

Oh, she was the same age as you.  How did you know her?

Actually, I knew her through her younger sister, Berenice.

Remember The Palace had afternoon tea for Land Girls in

2009? We met there.  Got talking about The Queen Mother

and what kind of gin she preferred.

Was Berenice in Glasgow too?

No, no.  She joined in 1942 under Lady Denham.  Get me

that blue photo album out of the cabinet, will you?  Third

drawer down.

See, said Ginevra, after flicking through a few pages.

There we are.  Remember that fascinator I had?  Got quite

a bit of use out of it.  Augusta is on the right.  I’m the rose

between two thorns…she giggled.  Berenice looks the elder,

but that’s because she didn’t wear sunscreen in Venezuela.

Bolted to follow her dreams of Simon Bolivar, she told me.

She was boasting that she had once helped The Queen to

clean out an engine.  You know, Her Majesty was 2nd

Lieutenant Elizabeth Windsor and a very competent mechanic.

I told Berenice she was a hypocrite.  Can’t be a Royalist and

espouse Republicanism.  Anyway, The Queen didn’t seem to

remember her, not surprisingly.  She shook my hand. 

Berenice just got Camilla.  The Duke chatted up Augusta for

quite a while.  He said he didn’t recognise her with her clothes

on.  I didn’t get it at the time.

It says here that Berenice died a couple of years ago,

commented Carrie, trying to get Ginevra off her uncharitable

tangent.  And it mentions that Augusta was Head Girl of St

Vitus’ School for The Academically-Gifted Girl.  I must tell

Tiger-Lily.

Not strictly true, muttered Ginevra.

What do you mean?

They only added the post-modifying phrase fairly recently.

It’s not the school it once was. It used to be a fairly ordinary

dumping ground for genteel girls whose parents weren’t very

affluent.  Anyone could go there if they had the dosh.  It should

have been called St Vitus’ School for the Academically-

Challenged Girl back then, or for the Financially-Challenged

Parent.

Well, it’s not like that now, said Carrie.  Oh, it says here that

Augusta became the Muse and model for reclusive early

twentieth century artist and mystic, Hamish Diecast.  She

went to live with him in a remote island in the Inner Hebrides,

but managed his sales to London galleries and helped to

establish his reputation.  I suppose The Duke might have had

a portrait of her in his private apartments… He never forgets a

pretty girl, apparently.

Didn’t you see The Antiques Roadshow from Oban? Ginevra

asked.  I think it was last year.  That blonde chap, Rupert Maas,

identified a nude portrait that a gamekeeper brought along,

wrapped in an oilskin, as being Lady with an Otter, a lost Diecast

work based on Da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine.  It went at

Sotheby’s for an enormous price.

Shameless hussy!  She didn’t have a stitch on.  Wouldn’t have

caught me holding one of those creatures without a leather

gauntlet and full body armour.  That chap that wrote The Ring

of Bright Confidence…

That was a Colgate advert, Ginevra.  Do you mean Gavin

Maxwell’s book?

Whatever.  (Ginevra had picked up this insouciance from her

grand-daughter, Tiger.)  He had an assistant called Squirrel

Nutkins, or something, who had parts of his fingers eaten by

Maxwell’s vicious little pet.  Augusta was lucky she wasn’t scarred

for life, though she probably was, emotionally.  Diecast was a

womaniser and a weirdo.

Anyway, she is at peace now, conciliated Carrie.  You know,

I have just had a thought: isn’t there a Senior Master at St

Birinus Middle called Snodbury?  I wonder if he is any relation?

Maybe he is the love child of Diecast and Augusta?

Shouldn’t think so, pronounced Ginevra. She was more

interested in power than sex. She wasn’t attracted to men

in that way.  She told me.

While you were at the tea at Buckingham Palace ballroom?!

Oh, we old girls cover a lot of ground!  I suppose there must

be a connection, but I wouldn’t think she had had a son.  No,

not with him.

A key was rattling in the porch door.

‘ello!  I am back.  Oh, shut up, you stupid little dogs!

Carrie took her leave and went to rescue Magda from the

tangled leashes round her ankles.

I got your paper! she addressed Ginevra, triumphantly.

But her charge had already read it.  It was destined for

doggy purposes.

 

Blame Game

Tags

Balmoral Castle, Blue Moon, geraniums, Highland games, History, Neil Armstrong, Prince Philip, Pussy Riot

It has been a day of blaming people for acts that they very likely did not commit.  Two dead women were found stabbed to death, with a slogan daubed in blood on their kitchen wall: Free Pussy Riot.  Was this to incriminate the punk group’s supporters?

270 miners have been charged for the deaths of 34 of their fellow workers at a platinum mine during a strike, even though the police shot the strikers.    Blue moon.

Neil Armstrong’s funeral.

Coldest August night since records began.  Minus 2 degrees at Braemar.  Get the tartan coats on the Corgis.

My geraniums have not come out yet and now I will have to bring them in, if you see what I mean.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012

Recognition

Tags

Antarctica, Argentina, Billy Connolly, Blairgowrie, Border Terrier, Buckingham Palace, Buenos Aires, Canongate, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, coffee, fritillaria, gardens, Holy Fools, honey, Jenny Geddes, Kate Winslet, Lion Rampant, manukah, Mount of Olives, Neil Oliver, Perth, piper, post office, Prince Philip, Princess Alice of Greece, Robert Falcon Scott, Saltire, Scotland, Suttonford, Waterworlds, William Speirs Bruce

Tuesday

Stickily oppressive.  No rain, but grey and the first signs of hay fever appear.  Probably the effects of mould spores from rotting vegetation.

Visited my friend’s professionally landscaped garden which was established at the start of the summer.  Yellowing box edging is probably dying from early drought, excessive waterlogging later on, or simply from the peeing habits of a new Border Terrier.

Our garden is suffering from mordant animals which gnaw every bulb that one plants.  Altruistic bird feeders may encourage rodents.  Seventy six snakes head fritillaria that I bought from The Telegraph failed to materialise, so I won’t be able to recreate the floral watercolours of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, not that I have the skills, anyway, but that is not the point.

Went to Costamuchamullah for a very skinny latte and noticed honey for sale from Perth. It reminded me of a joke told by Billy Connolly – but he might have pinched it from Chick Murray – about how he had stayed at a B&B in the Highlands and the proprietor had served him a breakfast tray with an individual pot of heather honey on it.  He had remarked, I see you keep a bee.

 It took me a moment to work out that it was probably Australian honey.  Is it Manukah? I wondered.

When I returned home, I simply had to check the facts on Wikipedia. Oh yes, you do find it in Perth, Oz, and it is produced by apis mellifera and, to be called manukah, it has to have a 70% pollen count from tea tree Leptospermium scoparium.

The disappointing part was that it also said that: “alongside other antibacterial products, [it} does not reduce the risk of infections following treatment for ingrown toenails.”

So, probably not a best-selling product for Aquanibble then.  Might be fun to say to one of the four optimistically termed assistants in Costamuchamullah, I’ll have a pot of your honey.  Oh, by the way, only if it reduces the risk of infection from my ingrown toenails.

 They would probably just ignore me in the way that they usually do when they are too busy wiping a perfectly clean surface while a serpentine queue builds up and spirals out of the door into the street.  Perhaps I will have to stop wearing my invisibility cloak- you know, the one that envelops females after the age of fifty.

Apparently there are honey outlets in Perth, Scotland too:  Heather Hills Farm and Scarletts in Blairgowrie produce masses, in spite of the predatory nature of a single honey buzzard that seems to have been circling since 2010.

Scientists have confirmed that there are planets out in the far beyond called Waterworlds, but they are not huge theme parks.  In fact they are composed of hot ice.

Ice was a theme this evening with a Neil Oliver repeat of his journey to the Weddell Sea and South Atlantic.  After he had left The Falkland Islands, it took him four days until he reached the first icebergs.

I thought he might stand, lashed to the prow of the boat, and let his hair flow behind him, but he sensibly stayed in the cabin.  I don’t think he would fancy Kate Winslet, but I haven’t asked him.  Maybe a nautical Jenny Geddes might be more up his Canongate. Anyway, he very commendably seemed resistant to seasickness.  You wouldn’t want his macho Celtic image to be undermined by a shot of him leaning over the side, or taking Quells.

Of course, the whole point of the expotition seems to have been to draw attention to the Scot, William Speirs Bruce, who had discovered many firsts, rather than that Sassenach Scott, who might have had the correct name, but wasn’t related, at least by surname, to Robert the. Scott had an interesting middle name, though – Falcon.  Another Pointless question to which I shouldn’t know the answer.

Anyway, Bruce had filmed penguin colonies and measured ice and been a thorough scientific Scot – self-conscious flick of the hair.  He hadn’t been as shocked as Levick, a scientist on Scott’s team who witnessed the sexually delinquent behaviour of the Adelies.

I’m sure Neil just loved the opportunity to transmit old photos of a piper in full Highland regalia, playing the bagpipes, surrounded by Saltires and Lions Rampant on huge ice floes.

The irony is that if Bruce hadn’t been so stereotypically parsimonious, then he might have bought his fuel nearer to the South Atlantic base, instead of trying to save a bawbee by sailing up the coast to Buenos Aires, where he took on board some Argentinian scientists and cut-price provisions.  The Argies set up a post office with a franking machine and this influences territorial rights to this day.

Meanwhile Scott and even his stoker were awarded polar medals and Bruce didn’t even get a packet of Fox’s Glacier Mints.

 Explorer Bruce went to his ice hoose

To get his poor husky a bone,

But when he got there

The cupboard was bare.

He found a wee note

Saying, “Taken your boat

And your seal blubber lamps,

But have left you some stamps.

We don’t want to seem mean

But our franking machine

Proves this land is for Argies,

So no argy-bargies.

And we’ll claim the minerals, Bruce.”

 

The other brilliant programme was about Princess Alice of Greece. She served as a nurse in the Balkan wars, but when her faith became too difficult for the rest of the family they had her detained and irradiated by early experimental psychiatrists and psychologists.

When she was released she protected a Jewish family in her own apartment and used her deafness to advantage in deflecting soldiers’ questions.

I loved the image of her being re-united with her son and roaming the corridors of Buckingham Palace in her nun’s habits, smoking Woodbines.  She only owned three dressing gowns at the end of her life, but had used her jewels and other assets to help the poor.  She is buried on the Mount of Olives.  If this be madness, then she is in the tradition of The Holy Fools and it makes me question who is sane and who is mad.  Prince Philip should be incredibly proud of her, as he very likely is.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012

Sunglasses in the Rain

Tags

Ben Ainslie, Boris Johnson, Coltsfoot, Financial Times, Flybe, Jesus, matthew pinsent, National Trust, NHS, Prince Philip, St Swithun's Day, sunglasses, The Queen

Maybe I’ve got it wrong, I considered. Maybe it is Ben Ainslie who is going to carry the torch.  At least he won’t be fazed by a little water, since he is practically a Merman.  I admired his full page b&w endorsement of sunglasses in the How To Spend It section of The Financial Times, with his sexy stubble.

I like cool shades as much as I like cool dudes.  My optician advised me to wear sunglasses, even in the rain, as you could still be affected by glare.  A medic had commented, however, that over-use of reactive lenses was positively linked to high levels of neuroticism and madness.  Oh well, they are cheaper than a blepharoplasty and Jackie Kennedy carried them off.  The only problem is that I fail to see much in the murky gloom of the present summer and so I fell to wondering how Posh Becks could keep an eye on what her husband was up to, if she continually resorted to those owlish lenses.  They probably don’t prevent her from seeing well enough to put in his pin number, however.

You don’t see the Queen wearing sunglasses much.  Not that she’d needed to for her Regatta thingy, when a soaking band of singers stood before the Royal party and Prince Philip had nearly burst his bladder trying not to wet himself, laughing at the state of them. The old boy had become extremely enervated at the hornpipe music, what with having been a naval officer.  At least the rain had held off for most of the day, though you couldn’t have seen anything from the bank side, whether you were wearing sunglasses or not, I’d heard.

I also wondered if the Queen was a fan of Who Do You Think You Are?  Clearly, she is fully aware of her own identity, but she might have been alarmed that she was related to Boris Johnson.  Matthew Pinsent is less embarrassing.  So long as there are no Germanic links to Boris Becker or Angela Merkel!  As Pinsent rowed by, with his back between his knees, did she wonder if he had more of the seed of the Conqueror in him than she did?  All that barge stuff and burnished throne imagery might not compensate if he had.

As for Philip, he was Greek and possibly partly responsible for their huge deficit and possible default. However, he has always shown a good example as to how to survive a rainy stint at Balmoral, or wherever.  You’ve got to admire the man’s resilience: all those damp corgis and midge-infested  puddles!  Still, the water is soft in Scotland and gentle in a good malt.  So there are compensations.  But even a stalwart such as he had to be hospitalised after his thorough soaking.  The medics didn’t tell him there was no such thing as a chill or invite him to phone NHS Direct. He’s probably got BUPA.

Water- there is so much of it about this summer, I concluded. People used to say when I was younger that I had so much enthusiasm that I could have bottled it.  Now, with all the talk of water meters and reservoir repairs and Victorian pipework renovation there was a certainty that prices would rise.  The fashionable thing was to dig a bore hole.  I could produce my own label: Suttonford Soft – straight from Izaak Walton chalkstreams.  In smaller print: culled from the countryside of the Compleat Angler.  Maybe Alan Titchmarsh could launch it. He seemed to be everywhere.  Raymond Blanc and Jamie Oliver might take a few bottles for their local eateries.  It would be good to exploit the stuff that was ruining my life.  Maybe I could light a candle to St Swithun in Winchester Cathedral, begging for financial success, and, as a back-up, apply to The Bank of Dave for a handout.  If Theo is to be let down by his investment in Dyas, he may be interested in-say-a 40% stake for £100,000, reducing to 10% after three years of unmitigated success.  The thought of Duncan Ballantyne and Peter Jones fighting it out for my attention gratifies me.  Step back, Deborah Meaden.

Hello! I blinked. I’d wakened up and found that it was St Swithun’s Day.  Perversely, it wasn’t raining-at the moment- I qualified.  I was getting into the swing of  Mark Tully’s aquatic compilation of watery readings on Something Understood on Radio 4 with the joys of The Raindrop Prelude. One had to  admit that Tully compiles an interesting melange.  He included Longfellow on the dreariness of rain, protesting that behind the clouds, the sun still shone. Yeah, right. Maybe through a Flybe porthole, but not this far down.

Ella Fitzgerald had sung:

Into each life some rain must fall

but too much is falling in mine. 

Now I could identify with that.

It was all very well for Thoreau to say that rain made us feel at one with Nature or God, but he was referring to the Spring or Fall variety, not the unseasonable cascades we had been experiencing. Yet I seemed to recall an old part song called As torrents in summer, so all this perception of climate change might be old hat after all.

There might have been something Romantic about a full-blown orage, such as that portrayed in Debussy’s Jardins sous la Pluie and something very like special pleading in Sitwell’s positive focus on the rain at the Crucifixion.  Apparently it could not dampen Christ’s love for us.  Maybe it helped to wash away our sins.

Well tried, Mark.  You must have had some kind of placatory response from the Rain God after your paeon of praise for the pluie.  You seem to have held it off for one day, but let’s not get up our hopes too quickly.

In the couple of hours in which the drizzle desisted, I stepped out gingerly into my back garden, tripping over my Coltsfoot wellies, which I’d forgotten were sitting on the doormat and which were now waterlogged.   Cascades of rotting rosebuds and blossoms required dead heading.  However, the hostas were- as yet- ungnawed.  The dispersal of coffee grounds from the trendy shop had caused the slugs to limbo under someone else’s fence, in a caffeine-induced high.

Every time I type wellies into my computer, it corrects me and produces willies.  What is going on?  I thought willies was an acronym for people who work in London yet live in Edinburgh.  Somebody is having a laugh.

It had been announced by The National Trust that this year had been apocalyptic for birds and other wildlife, but slugs and mosquitos were lovin’ it.  I congratulated myself for having given them a hard grind- literally-by emptying out the cafetiere straight into hostas at my back door.  (Or is that hostae?)

I tried to harvest as many redcurrants and blackcurrants as I could, before the wood pigeons descended.  They were not having any kind of Apocalypse now, as far as I could determine.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012