SWEET VICTORY AT EIGHTS

Last year I became enthusiastic about Oxford college rowing. Specifically the Summer Eights Tournament where, in recent years, my former college has done well. Last year and I think I blogged this, was to put it mildly a disappointment. This year, the college women returned to their (rightful) position as Head of the River and the men held onto second place and, I believe, scared the head crew Oriel on a couple of occasions. A pagan tradition has it that the head crew burns a boat (and then jumps through the flames). Here is a photo of the beginning of that tradition which took place earlier this evening.

IMAGES FROM WW1 - Flanders and The Somme

From time to time, I go to visit the Flanders and northern French WW1 battlefields, graveyards and memorials. To be candid, I am never sure of my emotions on these occasions but I do feel these visits are in some way important - in terms of showing respect as much as anything else. A recent visit took place at the end of (a very wet April). Here are a few photographs: The grave of Noel Chavasse at Brandhoek New Military Cemetery in Belgium. Chavasse was the only winner of two VCs in WW1 (the second killed him). He was in the Medical Corps.

The second and third are images of Tyne Cot, just outside Ypres and, I believe, the largest Allied Cemetery in the world.

The fourth photograph is of the trenches which still criss-cross the landscape of Beaumont Hammel where the Essexes and the Newfoundlanders attacked well entreched German positions on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1st July 1916). Beyond the trenches is the still remaining 'Danger Tree', only a hundred yards or so from the forward allied trenches. Few men, if any, who got past the Danger Tree that day, lived to tell the tale. At the end of the attack, the Canadian general in command was apparently criticized for his failure to gain ground. his reply was, "Dead men can't advance".

The final photograph is of the largest German cemetery - Neuville St Vaast - not far from Vimy Ridge in The Some. It contains 44,833 burials.

DEGREE CEREMONY

As many will already know, I went to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on 4th May, all togged up in sub fusc, to receive my MA from the hands (more or less) of the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University. The photos below provide something of the flavour of the day.

CLUNY 2

And the second series including at the end an image of, I assume, a virgin praying for larger breasts.

STAINED GLASS - MUSEE DE CLUNY

In April 2012, I went for the umpteenth time, to the Paris museum of the middle ages, the Musée de Cluny, not far from the Sorbonne. Here is the first series of photos I took of the stained glass exhibits (many of which are English). There's a particularly jolly one of Sampson having his (first) eye removed.

CLERKENWELL TALES

May I have a word about another bookshop (hot on the heels of my comments on Shakespeare and Company).  The emporium in question is Clerkenwell Tales, located in Exmouth Market and presided over by the omniscient Peter Ho.

I've been there to buy, I've been there to listen to poetry, I've been there to chat.  But mostly to buy.

Last year, around Christmas, my little company invited a gaggle of clients, journalists and other ne'er-do-wells to lunch more or less directly opposite Clerkenwell Tales; accepting our invitation required the guest to buy at least one book in the shop (not that Peter knew anything of this plan until later).  More recently, I find myself wandering in the direction of Exmouth Market claiming to myself that I'm looking for the diversified range of restaurants on show there but in reality wanting to spend a little time among the hard and softbacks.

Clerkenwell Tales is like a dictionary with all the boring or known words taken out.  I consider myself pretty well read but I doubt I've come across more than 10% of the titles and 20% of the authors.  Today, for example, I bought a book on 'Venetian Navigators', the Periodic Table, 'Manhood for Amateurs' (by Chabon) and on Europe - a reprinted classic from Robert Byron.

I suspect Clerkenwell Tales is named after the Peter Ackroyd book of the same name.  If so, that's a pity.   I have no great liking for Ackroyd or his works which I believe are detailed when they should be general and vice versa.

Of the two Peters I'll take Ho over Ackroyd any day.

INKY FOOL'S BISCUIT

Some friends of mine have just given me a copy of The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth, aka, The Inky fool. And I have to say they were pretty quick off the mark (if you'll pardon the pun) given I received the book into my hot hand on 6th November to discover, only a few moments ago, that it had come out but three days earlier.

So I haven't read it yet (actually am currently reading a fascinating book about typefaces and fonts called Just My Type but that's a different story). Not that reading it, as all critics know, should be any block to making comments. So with that in mind, I will allow myself to comment on the one bit of the book I have just read - The Preface.

Mr Forsyth introduces us to his fascinating world of word derivations and the derivatives of those derivations via the humble biscuit explaining, as my English teacher explained to me at prep school, that the word arose from the French meaning 'twice cooked'.

And so it does but that derivation is not, I think, the interesting one because it causes people to nod with either real or feigned comprehension and then move on to other things.

But hold hard you dunkers of the twice-cooked. Have you ever baked cooked a biscuit? Actually, you only do it once. I've looked through recipe after recipe and have never found a double-cooked item even if we stretch a point and talk about a sort of yeast-based biscuit. After all you could hardly argue that allowing the yeast to prove is akin to cooking.

Now of course Mr Forsyth is right, my English teacher was right and so, I am glad to tell you, was clarifier of this conundrum Kate Colquhoun who, a few years ago wrote a fascinating book called Taste which is a well-researched and thoroughly readable account of the British table from the days of the Celts and Romans through to the wartime powdered egg.

Ms Colquhoun does explain - but en passant in the way of one to whom it's obvious - that twice cooking was the fate of the early biscuit.

I won't go into the detail because the point I am trying to make is broader. This is that we should not accept scholarship blindly as attractive as it is(and I count elucidating the derivations of words as 'scholarship'). After all I wonder whether Mr Forsyth knows how to make a medieval cookie?

Which reminds me of one of my younger daughter's jokes: There are two biscuits baking in an oven and one says to the other, "It's getting very hot in here." To which the second replies, "Good heavens, a talking biscuit!"

L'HERRISSON OF SHAKESPEARE

A little while ago, I fulfilled a long-held ambition by visiting Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris.  I first came across this bookshop which, in its day, was a meeting point for expat writers such as Pound, Joyce and even Fitzgerald, in the pages of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' and that was more than 35 years ago.  But despite numerous visits to Paris in the intervening years, I never made the pilgrimage until, that is, last Thursday, 26th April.  And I have to confess that, at least at first, I was a little disappointed.

Shakespeare and Company is a rather patched together secondhand bookshop.  True, there's a room upstairs for readers (rather than purchasers) but I was unable to penetrate those intellectual heights because they are prohibited to those carrying books they intend to buy and I am one of those who cannot leave a bookshop without a buying a book.  Nor did I see the bedrooms that I understand are still extant, that are reserved to erudite penpushers who have (temporarily) fallen on hard times while striving in the French capital.

But I did have an active conversation with the charming salesgirl when I attempted to buy her copy of a detective novel by Jan Willem van der Wetering (and I must remember to send her my copy of de Wetering's book about becoming a Zen disciple, 'The Empty Mirror').  I was also pleased by the simple act of stamping the books sold with the S&Co Shakespeare's head logo.

So, as I said, disappointed at first .. but only at first.

Despite the higgledy-piggledy shelving, there is a wealth of books, well displayed and easily searchable.  And in among these I found Muriel Barbery's second novel, 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog'.   This is the sort of book I want to find but rarely do; a book I hadn't heard of making me feel the poorer for that (former) omission.

I bought the Hedgehog because of the strangeness of the title, the fact it had sold over five million copies, according to the blurb (although that sort of information can cut both ways) and the fact it is set in Paris and was thus for me, for that brief time, local.

I haven't finished reading the story yet but I can already say that the underlying theme of hidden intelligence longing for yet fearful of exposure is seductive.  So too is the setting in a grand apartment block inhabited (one might say infested) by disparate members of la grande bourgeoisie bringing to mind Georges Perec's fine novel, 'Life a User's Manual'.

The Hedgehog (L'Hérrisson) of the title, is the concierge, Madame Michel, a closet intellectual from whom I have already learned the words 'conatus' and 'pithiatic'.  More to come I'm sure.

Good for Shakespeare and Company so let's give their namesake the last word (from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'), "thorny hedge-hogs, be not seen".