Weekend Deal: a room with a view

Grass, shingle, sea and sky from the first floor window of friends who have a house at the Walmer end of Deal. We spent a happy time there over the second October weekend just after my return from Edinburgh (which meant we didn't go down until Saturday morning). And 'A Room with a View' is not inappropriate, at least as far as the Coward version goes. He turns out to have been the intermediary in the salvation of what is now Deal's conservation area, a warren of small houses and lanes between the sea front and the High Street.

In short, Charles Hawtrey lived here in what by all accounts were his bitter and acid later years. There's a plaque to prove it.

and I'm afraid that I am playing in the below image to J's insistence that I bear an uncanny resemblance.

When the area came up for a potential second demolition after World War Two, Charlie got on the blower to his good friend Noely, who had a place just down the coast. And Noely had a word with his dear pal the Queen Mum, Warden of the Cinque Ports. She loved Walmer Castle best of the royal homes, apparently, and who can blame her?

So by royal command the place was spared and seems safe in perpetuity. We learnt this from another part-time Deal resident, with whom we had a coffee before Sunday lunch. His partner's mother finally twigged what sort of a place it was from the large number of gentlemen out walking chichi little dogs. It has long been thus thanks to the presence of the Marines, whose time here was of course marked by terrible tragedy when the IRA bombed the bandstand and 11 lives were lost.

Anyway I've never seen more little dogs in one place than along the promenade between Walmer and Deal, which we traversed quite a few times. I sorrow to say that dog poo is a rather predominant smell, as the second notice down on one of the fish huts makes clear.

That apart, it's delightful to stroll up and down (a plan to head for St Margaret-at-Cliffe on foot was abandoned owing to the last weekend over which I had to endure the persistent pain and trouble of my stent - now removed, so we went on a long walk along the Pilgrims' Way yesterday).

Our first Sunday stroll was Walmerwards, shared with a group of local walkers young and old,

all the while admiring the clarity of the French coast

and spending all too short a time around Walmer Castle due to the social schedule (I went round it as a kid during annual Whitsun weeks visits with an aunt's place at Tankerton as a base, and still remember how cosy it was for a castle). A circumnavigation of the outside, at least, was possible.

Then it was back and onwards to Deal itself, passing the various flotsam and jetsam around the white huts

and the remnants of weekday sales

plus some more picturesque views out with old boats

and of course Deal's own, more hemmed-in castle

and a few incidental seaside pleasures like the old cinema, which has had some enlivening murals added

until we eventually looked along this side of the channel towards the white cliffs of Ramsgate.

After a leisurely lunch back at the Walmer end, I took yet another walk in different, later-afternoon light

to meet the others at the celebrated Deal Beach (Ice Cream) Parlour, this time to be reunited with the youngest goddaughter, Mirabel aka Dancing Delice, along with her ma and pa. She was got up in her best Alice gear owing to the bond we now share with Lewis Carroll. Here she is with dad Kit at the celebrated Ice Cream Parlour

where immense fun was to be had from the 20p plastic eggs with gifts inside laid by a twirling musical hen. And similar simple pleasures followed simply by throwing stones into the sea (not even any skimmers)

and inviting some unfathomable rushing up and down game with this particular teddy (alas, not Special, who never leaves Aunt Choppy's sight)

while J and Edwina took a spin along what must be the ugliest pier in Britain - but a pier's a pier for all that, and they saw some amusing spectacles.

This slice of London by the Sea has plenty of delights; even if I associate looking at the sea with waiting for the end, the shifting skies over the channel could keep me amused for days on end.

Don Giovanni and Falstaff: choices

So you may have listened to the BBC Radio 3 Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff by now, but if you haven't, it would be unkind of me to blazon the front runner amongst a mostly fine selection to the rooftops. Which is why I've chosen an image of Elgar the conductor, historical choice from 1930, above, after Klemperer and Mackerras, whose recordings of Mozart's Don Giovanni have so far been my lynchpins in the first three of five Opera in Depth classes I'm devoting to the opera.

And of course I'm in seventh heaven, living and breathing Mozart for so much of the week. I must also say that for all its skewered brilliance, Richard Jones's ENO production didn't affect me as deeply as revisiting Deborah Warner's take for Glyndebourne. I've always admired it the most for taking what I'm convinced is Mozart's and Da Ponte's line in the first scene that when a girl says no she means no. Does it have to be a woman director who has the courage to accept this? Besides which, the students agreed that Gilles Cachemaille is a very convincing seducer with an edge.

We all loved the first scene with Zerlina, so softly persuasive with the bizarre on-the-spot suggestion that she marry him; so convincing that Juliane Banse's gorgeous virgin feels like she's in a dream; so clever to have Giovanni dress her rather than undress her, putting on the wedding accoutrements instead of taking anything off.

As for Klemperer, I ordered up his recording thinking I'd want an extreme opposite to Mackerras's perfect and mostly brisk pacing. But I ended up mostly convinced: when I talked it over with Stephen Johnson, who was staying here on Wednesday night before we travelled up to my old workplace the Freud Museum to record for a Radio 3 documentary on  Freud and music, he pointed out the energy of Klemperer's rhythmic articulation, which means that slow rarely feels slow (he used the example of playing OK's Fidelio, and his wife Kate being smitten and surprised that it felt faster than it actually was). Of course there are exceptions rather beyond the pale - his late Mahler Seventh and Cosi, for instance - but this Giovanni brims with energy. And I love the battle of two intelligent basses, Nicolai Ghiaurov and the great, underrated Walter Berry as Leporello, rising to three when the statue of the Commendatore (Franz Crass, also magnificent) comes to dinner.

Here, too, we 'bought' a mezzo Elvira, Christa Ludwig, and Mirella Freni is at her youthful best as Zerlina. Curious that there are two married couples featured - Ludwig and Berry were still together when the recording was made, Ghiaurov was yet to wed Freni (I wonder if the wooing began in the studio here). So, paraphrasing RuPaul, it's a case of 'Klemperer's Don Giovanni - bringing couples together'.

Berry even trumps the superb Alessandro Corbelli, Mackerras's Leporello, in the Catalogue Aria. And the recits are no less brilliant, though of course Mackerras has the greater sense of theatrical pace. We'll be turning to Giulini for the great Quartet and the most ineffable Trio in the middle of the Act One finale. Otherwise, curious how simply wrong early Don Gs were in the conductors' approach to tempi - Andante should never mean Adagio, and Mozart's Andante is brisker than, say, Brahms's (another Johnson apercu).

So, two more weeks and then on to The Nose, with an interpolated visit from Mark Wigglesworth. Seeing Shostakovich's first opera last night reminded me that quite a lot of it doesn't pass muster without the visuals, and Barrie Kosky failed to lift a couple of rather otiose scenes. But there are certainly flashes of genius like the dancing multiple noses (pictured above by Bill Cooper for the Royal Opera). My current earworm, though, is Britten's Billy Budd, which Opera North did so clearly and unforgettably. That was a worthwhile trip to Leeds.

By happy coincidence after we'd finished recording at the Freud Museum yesterday, we walked up to Hampstead and passed the site of Severn House, where Elgar composed Falstaff inter alia. The plaque is getting tatty; how about a proper light blue roundel? Freud has one, after all.

Final teaser with spoiler warning: this is how the Building a Library top choice looked when I first bought it on LP. If you don't want to know whose the performance is, don't read the small print.

European gardens, American nightmares

Asking around about good Edinburgh exhibitions over pasta and pizza at the excellent Bar Italia after Robin Ticciati's Scottish Chamber Orchestra Mozart over the road at the Usher Hall, I found my friend Julie passionately recommending the careful selection of Glasgow-born photographer Harry Benson's American photographs at the Scottish Parliament. Further consultation revealed that Painting Paradise: the Art of the Garden, drawn from the ever-amazing Royal Collection, had moved on from London - where I missed it - to the Queen's Gallery at the entrance to Holyrood Palace just opposite. So that sorted my free afternoon for me.

Having done some of the tourist things I mostly missed in my four years as a student - I feel a Calton Hill chronicle may be in the pipeline - I descended into the valley and headed first for the Queen's Gallery. Greetings and farewells here were very personable, and I ought to briefly mention my post-exhibition chat with a Hungarian postgrad classics student - working as attendant here, undertaking very specific study on the nature of the ancient Greek koinoi within a narrow timespan - about the whole Brexit disaster, how much freer I feel up in Scotland, as I did just after the Referendum, and how none of the European employees without whom nothing would function seem to have had any of xenophobic grief I've been so horrified to report in north London.

Exhibit 1 isn't European at all, but in the first place it refreshed my memory about how 'paradise' comes from the Greek, coined by Xenophon to describe the wonder of Cyrus II's desert oasis, and in the second the image has as its centre what I'd regard as essential to every garden - and what we briefly had in our back yard until the management destroyed it: a fish pond. It's an exquisite miniature by  Hamse-i-Neva'i from around 1510, added to a manuscript when it was transferred from Herat to Bukhara.

From these beginnings you can move on within the exhibition either to some fine paintings illustrating the Christian imagery of the garden (the 'Hortus Conclusus') or to the more realistic images for the late 16th century Renaissance garden. The work of art used on the poster is Isaac Oliver's miniature A Young Man Seated Under a Tree, with the exhibition poster closing in on the knot garden in the background, drawn from the age's leading manual on garden design.

There's a touch more fantasy in the garden maze placed, by its background, in Venice. This comes from the imagination of  Lodewijk Toeput.

Needless to say, the Royal Collection is rich in paintings of the royal gardens. Most fascinating to me was what part of Bushey Park once looked like

as well as Kew, a couple of centuries later 

and it's fun to see the gooseberry trees in the plantations at Windsor.

Close-up details of plants and flowers come among others from Leonardo, no less, who needless to say took a scientific as well as an artistic interest in such marvels as the seed-heads of two rushes. If he planned a botanical treatise, as seems likely, it was left unfinished at his death.

Alexander Marshal's 17th century watercolours, pictured up top as placed in the exhibition around Adriaen Kocks' two pagodaesque tulip vases. Here are an (unspecified) tulip with common milkwort and white buttercup.

Detail is more witty and accurate than elegant in mid-18th century specimens from the Chelsea Porcelain Works 

and I liked another indoor oddity, the Vincennes Sunflower Clock of c.1752, acquired by who else but George IV in 1819.

There are token nods at the landscape garden, a fine high background to Gainsborough's painting of the Cumberlands and Lady Elizabeth Luttrell.

and one of Victoriana's most Biedermeierish images, by Landseer, focuses on the Queen, Prince Albert and the Princess Royal with selected animals and the East Terrace of Windsor Castle beyond, along which the Queen Mother is being pulled along in a bath chair.

The last swagger exhibit shows how Buckingham Palace's garden parties were conducted in 1897, when this one was painted by Tuxen, the exhibition disdaining to bring us up to date.

The 20th century takes over with more than a bang or two in Harry Benson's photographs of the American great and good, humble and dispossessed. His career properly took off on the wings of the Beatles' big success as American No. 1 in 1964, and there are plenty of fun, if posed images, like the famous pillow fight sequence

and their meeting with Muhammad Ali.

Two years later Benson was among the few photojournalists to accompany James Meredith on the March Against Fear, encourgaing African Americans to vote, and he has photographed all the leading political figures since. What's especially fine about this (free) exhibition is that both good and bad things come in twos and threes. The following pictures I went round taking at the end because there are no catalogue or postcards (copyright issues, apparently, but the warden was encouraging of my snapping). Compare young Hillary and Bill - the hammock image on the right is justly famous as a symbol of youthful idealism and love

with Donald and Melania. On the left he's holding up wadges amounting to a million dollars in one of his casinos, on Benson's suggestion, and the right image is pure trophy-wife-ism.

The tragedies and horrors are especially potent. Benson was there on the Robert F Kennedy campaign event which ended in assassination. Stunned like everyone else, he hung around to catch the horror of the event and the aftermath. The centre photo, of a bewildered young supporter at the end of a terrible day, really got to me. I found myself in tears more than one walking around.

The funeral of Martin Luther King shows the bewilderment of children

and there's a chilling contrast between Benson's photograph of Lennon's killer in jail and the protest against the murder.

Anti and Pro Vietnam War protesters in very strong juxtaposition: 

The three photos up top were taken at a Klu Klux Klan rally. The queasiness of the 'madonna and child' image has made it a classic.

Time and again idealism meets a terrible end, a paradigm of American history repeated again and again. But the showbiz side of the Presidency gives us some wonderful portraits; you can't hate the Reagans when you look at them in the picture on the left.

Troupers include Liza Minnelli,  Truman Capote, Sinatra and Farrow at the masked ball he organised,

Warhol and Bianca Jagger together, Dolly Parton in superb silhouette.

Two northern shots set the seal on Benson the photographer - one which captures the visionary side of Solzhenitsyn, and the other of Bobby Fischer among Icelandic horses on a lavafield  in between chess bouts in Reykjavik.

In such carefully chosen portrait scenes, Benson shows he's not just a photographer of circumstance. A true artist, I reckon.

All Queen's Gallery images - deemed as non-commercial fair use  - from the Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2016. Harry Benson main images © Harry Benson

Citizens of this mad, mad world

...unite! Give 'em hell, fellow Remoaners, Bremoaners, whatever the ghastly falsifying right-wing press which was largely responsible for getting us into this mess cares to call us today: it's our turn to be the gadflies now that the lunatic fringe of the Tory Party, having waged a war of attrition for years, has got what it wanted.

Of course the Conservative Party Conference was just an orgy of self-congratulation and puffery, destined to smash against the rock of reality this week. No way was Amber Rudd's 'policy' for getting companies to register their 'domiciled foreigners' going to pass muster in the outside world. But still they managed to alienate a whole raft of doctors and nurses without whom the NHS couldn't function* - and who have been helping it to function at least since I was a child - as well as 'loony lefty' human rights lawyers ('hands off our boys!'), the 48 per cent who voted Remain as a sneering metropolitan elite and, indeed, all those who had previously thought of themselves as citizens contributing in so many ways more than just the mere financial to a society that's still worth fighting for. I've already heard of the personal impact from Brexit's licence to hate - which this Conference will only have stoked - from my Polish friend Magda, as reported here. The current leadership must now be held to account for this.

As for Bray (= Brexit May), good luck all those people around the country whom she encouraged to 'take back control' at a local level when at around the same time the government overruled Lancashire Council's rejection of local fracking. Reports on the subject are helpfully rounded up here.

Like many of her colleagues, this woman with her 'Born Again' credentials no longer passes muster as a politician of conviction. Say what you will about Corbyn - like many, I left the Labour Party in consternation at his deliberately poor show during and after the referendum - but he seems consistent. Of course it sticks most in the craw of us liberals (not neoliberals, please) to be told by our unelected Prime Minister that we're actually 'citizens of nowhere'. I was reminded shortly after spluttering that the negation is even more offensive to those who've crossed half the world under impossible conditions now that there's no home for them in the country of their birth.

Alongside typically firm statements emerging from Sadiq Khan and Nicola Sturgeon - how I breathed more freely up in Edinburgh last Thursday - less familiar champions have emerged, too. LBC chat-hosts never used to be as articulate, in my experience, as a new hero of the day, James O'Brien. Having caught us all out by claiming to read out a couple of lines from Rudd's speech, only to tell us that they were from Mein Kampf Chapter Three, he was on top form pursuing Ashley, an amiable enough sounding electrician from Plymouth, on which EU law he didn't like. Couldn't name one, of course. And what didn't he like? Packs of immigrants wandering around the centre of Plymouth. But then packs of Englishmen were just as bad. Of course it was an unequal match; I'd like to see O'Brien's relentless logic versus the Three Blind Mice aka Brexiteers Johnson, Davis and Fox. But nailing the total lack of facts behind the average entirely delusional Outer's vote to leave is just as useful. Not on YouTube yet, but here it is on LBC in the meantime.

In the meantime, Blind Mice One, bumbling Boris, showed his usual diplomacy by recommending protests outside the Russian Embassy against the destruction of Aleppo. Protesters are not, in our democracy at least, liable to follow instructions from government, though God knows something has to be happen as the Russians ruthlessly target hospitals. Which is indeed a new depravity which the UK and America cannot be blamed for in Syria (what's Stop the War up to, making equivalence between the two?) It was not widely reported that at the weekend Russia again vetoed halting the attacks and returning to talks in the UN. Obscene. I want to hear from our valiant doctor in Aleppo again, and hope he's still able to function in some way.

As for the cesspit into which a man not fit to be called a politician - though still supported here by several extreme Tories who should know better - has tried to drag American politics, the entertainment aspect has vanished and all but the most diehard Trump supporters who steeled themselves to watch the second debate with Hillary saw the fangs and the male space-invading monster, not Farage's fine silverback. Still, though, there can be some innocent relief and of all the creative responses, this one I adore:

Preserving the link/embedding as much for myself as for anyone reading, since these are tonics to which I'll be happy to return in the future. And please, America, though a Trump presidency now begins to seem as unlikely as it has always been incredible, don't make a mistake which would be on an even more colossal scale than the UK's.

 Rant over. Not checking for grammar - let it be a spontaneous snapshot from this very strange time.

14/10 From the worst to the very best: here's the lady I hope will be the next President-but-one of the United States at her emotive best, remarkable not so much for her attack on Trump as for the way she uses it to follow her reactions to participating in Day of the Girl, for young women's education all over the world. I love that couple, even if Obama failed in one grave area - acting strongly enough when he could on Assad's use of chemical weapons. On the home front, I have nothing but praise. This speech is impressive for the way the whooping crowd goes silent with intense listening in the middle - something unthinkable at a Trump rally. Make sure to watch it all.

*Update - 13/10:  I met and chatted to quite a few, the salt of the earth, when I had my stent removed this morning at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. No need to ask if they're UK citizens or not, but the entirely delightful and friendly nurses were, inter alia, from the Middle East and what I guess to be Indonesia and my doctor told me he goes to North Kurdistan a lot. I'd like to have talked to him more but then the procedure - quick, weird and only briefly painful - went ahead.  This is the good side of our International Health Service, and there's no way we could do without these people.