The Deep North

We passed a definite milestone today. In the chemist. ‘I think’, I said, ‘I need reading glasses’. The Professor and I both wear contact lenses (I have had mine since I was sixteen, not the same pair, I hasten to add). But the last time I was at the optician’s, my eyes were showing the predictable symptoms of Senile Decay — though with my lenses, I could read the appropriate lines of the grisly little chart at the other end of the room with contemptuous ease, I could not focus accurately close to. This is why, for the last two years, most of my reading has been done in one specific place where I have a halogen lamp which I can train directly onto the page. The optician suggested, with a splendid absence of professional side, that I simply invest in +1 off the peg reading glasses and slip them on when I needed to. So there they were in the chemist’s, and I tried on a pair, and the grey blur of text in a pharmaceutical leaflet simply sprang into visibility …. ‘I think I might have some too’, said the Professor. Small print has re-entered our lives.

There is much to be said for the Deep North in a whole variety of respects, but not the least of them is its antique shops. The Professor was in Edinburgh a while back, where one of his hosts was bemoaning the fact that he could not get a finial for a recently acquired grandfather clock, not for love nor money. A few days later, we dropped in on a local furniture specialist and asked him about it, and after a little rummaging, he produced precisely the object in question and sold it to us for a fiver. We had another rather good moment the other day — we had a guest and so took her on a little excursion to a different favourite antique shop, which turned out to be having one of its particularly good days. The guest, who is enviably tall, slim and willowy, found a dark-blue lace party dress from perhaps the thirties, reduced because nobody could get into it, which fitted her beautifully and looked wonderful. And the Professor — we were standing around chatting because of the changing, changing back and so forth involved in buying a frock — said casually that having been staying with the Last Whig, who had dinner knives with silver pistol-grip handles, he had taken a great fancy to them and could our friends look out for them? ‘Oh’, said Mrs Antique-Dealer, ‘I think I’ve got some’. She rootled under the counter. ‘Here you are. They’re a bit of a mixed bag, I’d forgotten about them. You can have the lot for £50′. We got them home , and the Professor and the Northern Gentleman fell on them, brandishing silver-polish and the silvermarks book. A good deal of research followed, which revealed that we were in possession of four large and four small knives with stainless steel blades, eight three-tined forks, and a knife and fork with, respectively, a long sabrelike blade of mild steel, and two tines. But, contrary to our immediate assumption that we were dealing with some kind of twenties antiquarian revival, with a couple of originals, the marks indicated that all the handles had been made in the 1750s by a silversmith called Thomas Swift, who had a shop near the Old Bailey and was frequently called as an expert witness in cases involving silver. They had had new stainless blades and tines fitted (mild steel rusts and is extremely hard to keep in good order. That is why posh households used to have a knife-boy who did almost nothing else). So, given that they shined up very well, and the unit cost of the items was under three quid, we felt we had done about as well as anyone could conceivably expect to these days.

We had a very fine evening yesterday up Glenbuchat — which is a curly and exasperating Jacobite glen in the general environs of Glenlivet, i.e. seriously up country and a dashed long way from anywhere. There was a Village Hall thing about the Glenbuchat ballads — there has been a recently published edition of probably the last major ballad collection not hitherto published, and the Northern Professor was much involved with the commemorative show which had brought us winding up the long road into the hills. Such things are always a bit like the Majestick Swan; there is a general air of serene glide but somehow there is quite a lot of not totally dignified activity beneath the surface — or not to push the analogy, much had to happen before the event seemed to happen as of itself, casually and invitingly. Glenbuchat is very beautiful at this time of year. A basically stark and bleak and on the treeline landscape made soft, round and lush by the abundant leaves of merry June. The first real surprise of the evening was when the singer first gave forth. He is a local lad, currently managing Fyvie Castle: he was wearing a kilt, a garment which beyond any possible doubt, enhances a compelling masculine presence where one pre-exists, and he has a sort of flashing-eyed, long-incisored look which suggests that somewhere in his ancestry is a seal (Gaelic belief in were-seals is strong, and there is a rather specific type of physical glamour which brings this whistling to the mind). Anyway. He launched into a song called ‘The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie’, which many of you out there may well know as ‘Fennario’ or ‘Pretty Peggy’ — Simon and Garfunkel covered it yonks ago and so have innumerable others since then, even unto the Grateful Dead (come running down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O, come running down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O … does it ring a bell? American versions tend to relocate it to the South and the Civil War). But it actually belongs up here, and what our selkie acquaintance sang was the local version. What surprised me considerably was that when this fine singer hit the chorus, which could hardly be more local and specific: ‘There’s mony a bonny lass, in the Howe of Auchterless, there’s mony a bonny lass in the Gairey-o, there’s mony a bonny Jean in the toon of Aiberdeen, but the flooer o’ them a’ is in Fyvie-o’, approximately 95 of the hundred people in the hall joined in with a crash as if it was the National Anthem. I’ve never quite heard anything like it. He also sung Jean of Bethelnie, which is what they really call a muckle sang, that is, a long narrative ballad. Rather a good one; Jean of Bethelnie throws herself at the head of Gordon of Glenlogie, takes formally to her bed with declared intention to DIE, blackmails him into throwing over his engagement and marrying her. All before she’s sixteen (come to think of it, that particular kind of ruthlessness is distinctly adolescent, and has a certain psychological validity). Later on, there was a traditional fiddler, who wandered out and plumped himself down on a seat and started up without ceremony. I do not dance. Don’t, won’t, can’t make me. But what I found very touching was the spectacle of a fairly motley crew of individuals, ambling gradually out of conversational circling into dance, middle aged and bulbous for the most part, but moving with the unselfconsciousness of Scots who internalised social dancing very young, imperceptibly changing register and moving into a kind of grace and dignity which became them very well. When we left, it was all still very much in progress, the windows of the village hall are some of them clear glass, some opaque, and in the vast green silence of the midnight glen, the jaunty heads of the dancers bobbed in and out of view as they went past the clear panes, with the muted sound of the fiddle winding out into the night.

The Lady Novelist has been South again — to Cambridge mostly, which is looking very May-Week-ish and nostalgic. My days of floating about in a long white dress clutching a bottle of of dubious sparkling wine are long past, thank God: I was banged up in Mill Lane with a roomful of academics at a dubiously sparkling conference. Most peculiar. I was the only historian speaking, and most of the worshipful company were Eng Lit types — I was the only person to speak with a powerpoint, but there were handouts all over the place. I haven’t seen so much Xerox in years. I didn’t know anyone still did, but then, I don’t normally mess around with Eng. Lit. I went down and back on the sleeper, which I rather enjoy: it’s very comfortable and I like the dreamlike feeling of rushing through the night. Dr Biswell is here, though sadly he will have to go back South during the week, but he had cut a great deal of grass and generally made things better.

One of our regular summer visitors, The Greatest Living Shakespearean, has been here this week — which has meant a great deal of gastronomy (and no time for the blog). Even as I write, there is a venison pasty in the oven fit to gladden the heart of Henry VIII — or indeed, St Thomas Aquinas (who as you may recall, is one of the stouter saints). However, a great deal of cooking inevitably means a great deal of washing up, and the dishwasher has churned night and day. Yesterday evening, I came into the kitchen after an excursion to find that it had been invaded by a peculiar smell. Honey the Hamster-Loving Hippie had been round and cleaned us up, and I wondered at first if she had been waving some particularly vicious chemicals about. Pine flavoured, perhaps. The Northern Gentleman was communing with his laptop at the kitchen table — the poor man has been suffering with his athsma, this being a pollenaceous time of year, and I asked him if he’d been inhaling camphor or something of the kind. No. After quite a bit of head-scratching, we observed that it was strongest around the dishwasher. The dishwasher? The NG pulled the door open, and we all reeled back coughing as a wave of something simultaneously foul and aromatic rolled out. Our attitude to domestic appliances is one of abject awe and terror: beyond the mending of plugs, we do not venture. In any case, if it was making such a hellish stink there was clearly something deeply wrong with its innards, and we couldn’t remember where the off switch was. So we rang up Miss T’s Dad, he being an engineer, who turned up, uncomplainingly, five minutes later. He peered into the machine and pointed out to us that one of the dinner knives had escaped from the cutlery basket and was lying on the heating element at the bottom, and moreover, that its resin handle was semi-carbonised. We apologised profusely, and he left, smiling to himself. People might be moved to point out that you shouldn’t put bone-handled knives in the dishwasher in the first place, and all I will say by way of getting my reply in first is, we know that. But sometimes we do.

It poured with rain all of yesterday, steady, drenching rain, which we were quite pleased to see after what has been a rather long dry spell for hereabouts. I nonetheless strolled out into the garden to look at the lake, see if any if the ducklings have survived the trout, that sort of thing. Miss Kit, as is her wont, came after me, but discovered, having done so, how wet it was. She wavered in the rain with an air of wild indecision, glancing back to estimate how far it was back to the house, then made up her mind, and shot under my skirt, where she remained, trotting between my feet, until I went back indoors.

I have just spent the last four hours with the BBC filming what I believe will be 3 minutes of some kind of show on Scottish music. I was discoursing on the topic of the Aberdeen Breviary, which led to some less than thrilling mobius conversations last week. ‘Does it have music in it?’ ‘No, it’s a breviary’. ‘But you said it had psalms in it….?’ Once I realised that as far as the BBC is concerned, psalms means plain-chant, it all got a bit easier, and some kind of communication was established. The Aberdeen Breviary is getting a lot of attention at the moment, because it was printed five hundred years ago (actually, 499 years ago, in 1509) and people like centenaries, so various things are happening which will go public next year. Unfortunately, though it is the first real book printed in Scotland, and therefore interesting, it’s tiny and looks as it was done on a John Bull printing outfit. Any outbreaks of ‘Gosh, wow’ have to be achieved with remarkably little assistance from the thing itself. Meanwhile, as a result, I am wearing makeup for the first time in a decade, and very odd it feels too — I have already forgotten about it twice and rubbed mascara into my eye. Last week I was doing a talk thing with Grayson Perry down at the Charleston Festival, where, as usual, he was under enough slap for sixteen, and having thus reminded myself how annoying the stuff is, I can only say that I admire his dedication. He can have my share of girly, and welcome to it. Anyway, back in the Linklater Rooms, where we were filming this morning, I did an interview which seemed to go reasonably well, with the Aberdeen Breviary sat on a cushion and the unfortunate librarian bored to death in the corner keeping an eye on it (it is one of only four surviving copies, and the BBC is not to be trusted). However, in the course of talking about the thing and what it contains, I evolved a bit of business which was to set the AB itself to one side, and replace it on the cushion with the facsimile which usefully, is twice the size and much easier to refer to. Soon enough, I wished I hadn’t. This became known as ‘Passing the Book’, after I had done it for the twelfth time. It’s a grim business, filming. To my quiet horror, having done the interview, we then did it again with the camera to the right, and again with the camera down a bit, and again with it behind us, and so on, and on: ‘in the last set of shots, you were sort of tapping the book …. could you do it again?’ ‘What?’ … ‘Oh, hang on, Phil, the last time we did this bit, you were wearing your glasses — could you just start again?’. Etcetera. All of which was complicated by the fact that there are seagulls nesting on the top of the Linklater Rooms chimney so every time the chicks woke up and felt hungry there was a chorus of squawking. They were strangely responsive to someone bellowing ‘Shut up’ up the flue — sheer astonishment, I suppose. I’m not generally in the business of saying the same thing six times, so it was all very dull. I do hope they use the least-silly versions of what I was saying but I think it’s a lot to expect. I forgot to ask what the show was supposed to be about, but I don’t suppose it matters.

We had an extremely enlivening morning. One of the projects currently on the boil is the rehabilitation of a dreary patch of weed sycamores, half-hearted car-parking and general mess immediately proximate to some of the university’s more formal and important buildings which would, in the view of the Northern Professor, be infinitely better as a formal garden. This would provide a home for the Jacobite Sundial (a species of artefact not often used for political comment), and the Fat Lady — aka ‘The Second Empire Adoring the Genius of Hellas’– a callipygean and extremely french-looking female swooning at the feet of Pheidias’s Athena of the Parthenon, which is the funniest statue the university owns bar none. Anyway, leaving the merits of the Fat Lady to one side, one of the obvious steps towards making this happen was to make friends with the university’s clerk of works department. Thus the pair of us ended up wandering amid the weed sycamores with the second in command thereof under a light and dreary drizzle, some time around mid-morning. The charm offensive went well. In fact, it went so well that the scheduled ten-minute meeting turned into a discussion of his pet project (quite lovely and we are all for it), and after an hour or so, to our being taken to the Secret Stash, an architectural Aladdin’s cave. Apparently, a big house in Fife was pillaged to adorn a house in the Chanonry which itself was demolished decades ago — piles and piles of top quality cut stone were salvaged and are lying about in vast heaps in a disused corner of nowhere much. We clambered about on the moss-covered piles, with young trees growing through them, a dripping canopy of leaves overhead, and the smell of wild garlic heavy in the wet air, finding one treasure after another. The makings of Vanburghian gate-piers. Plinths for the Sundial and the Fat Lady. Stone seats. Balustrades. Flagstone paths. The more we found the more things we thought of to do with them. All of which goes to demonstrate the principle that the more time you spend being nice to people, the more interesting life becomes.

We are engaged in a great deal of organisation at the moment. At any one time, at least one person in the house is trying to finish a book, so it is easy for domestic matters beyond the day-to-day to disappear vanishingly beneath anyone’s list of priorities. Therefore, for the last few years, we have treated the arrival of the Canadian Professor as a sort of D-Day — not to imply that we imagine she would scorn us if the gravel were not beautiful, but because we thought she would appreciate everything being nice, which she does, or rather, has done. However, this year, she remains in Canada for the best of all possible reasons, awaiting a first grandchild. We are therefore undergoing a somewhat accellerated version of the usual annual tidy-up, because we have a lot of people coming to lunch this coming Sunday (an event referred to by the Northern Gentleman as ‘Armigergeddon’), who we would prefer, on the whole, to see us at our best. This is rather earlier in the year than our usual clean-up campaign. Still — writing as I am in an atmosphere of industry and white spirit — it is as always, good to see things looking so smart, We have replaced the ropy stair-carpet, for example, and though house-proudness is not a leading feature in my character, it was genuinely pleasing to come in this evening and see it looking nice again.

I have finally completed the painting of the Professor’s studiolo, which has been something of a long haul. Phase one was a painting of Holy Wisdom enthroned, which was begun by the Last Whig in Captivity about seven years ago, finished by me a year later with the aid of Peter’s cousin, and mounted on the ceiling. Phase two was panels of different colours of faux marble beneath the dado, which was last year some time; the Malaysian Correspondent helped out with that one, as I recollect. Last Christmas came stage three: the upper half of the room was fielded with panels, with the assistance of Mr Brennan the Artist, who is a whiz with masking tape, and then painted in two shades of grey and a soft pink. The Dublin Correspondent mixed the colours. Finally, I have got around to stage four: the North, South, East and West Winds painted on the appropriate walls in the middle of the four biggest panels, and butterflies on the ingoes, and two small sacro-idyllic landscapes in grisaille above the doors. I think that’s it now. Suggestions for stencilling the floorboards, marbling the remainder of the ceiling, or gilding anything whatsoever will not be entertained. Many thanks to all those who helped along the way.

Miss Best Friend was faced with an agonizing dilemma last night: on the one hand, I was in the kitchen, dissecting the bone out of a half-leg of lamb, a procedure of the keenest interest to her since she is an old jackal at heart and passionately fond of raw bones: as I was well aware, she was sitting just behind me, her unwinking owlish stare boring into my back. On the other, even I could hear that the Northern Gentleman, of whom she is also passionately fond, was coming up the front steps, and needed to be greeted. Let it be said to the old creature’s credit, she left me to my horrid labours, picked up the Mucky Duck and waddled off to greet the NG in what she considers a proper and seemly fashion.

I have finished the draft of the current novel, a fact which reveals to me, thought this has doubtless been apparent to the rest of the household for some time, that I have been living in a state of mania and denial for some time. A tsunami of neglected this and that is crashing about my ears. My refuge, in these difficult times, is ending my little day watching DVDs of nature films about extinct life — unlike films of Life on Earth, where one is intermittently depressed by ‘and if we do not do something this lovely monotreme/slow loris/three toed something or other will fail to delight future generations with its unique mating habits’, one knows that the dimetrodon, gorgosaurus, what have you, is DEFINITIVELY EXTINCT and has been for a very long time. Yet computer animation is now very good, and the soothing tones of K. Branagh intoning ‘this is typical feeding behaviour …’ lulls you into perceiving what you are looking at as real, while at the same time, being aware that it is quite wonderfully nothing to do with anything, as if you were genuinely time-travelling.

One piece of news we have not as yet shared with the blogosphere is that the Apparitional Gamekeeper has taken the Queen’s shilling, or 5p, perhaps one should say. We weren’t sure how he would take to it, but he has just returned from his first week of basic training, and the words ‘duck to water’ come to mind. He was telling me that the rookies were all taken out for a night exercise — paintballing — which was something of a challenge for city boys who aren’t used to running around woods in the middle of the night. Our erstwhile gamekeeper, however, put his little band of brothers up to removing their jackets (which had a fluorescent flash on the back, the army having some concern lest they lose the little blighters for good and all) and hanging them on roughly boy-sized saplings. He is not, we believe, entirely unaquainted with the logistical difficulties posed by eluding enemies in a wood in the dark. Anyway, he led his little lot out of the wood, made a wide circuit, and was in position to see the sergeant and a bunch of real soldiers creeping up on the jackets. Whereupon he shot the sergeant in the back of the head. They are — with perhaps limited rapture on the part of the sergeant — very pleased with him. And he is very pleased with them.

As time has gone by, we have found ourselves increasingly identifiable within an existing type, crisply defined by one of the thousand-odd direct descendants of Hilaire Belloc, great contributors to the breed: ‘let’s face it. We’re all posh hippies’. One defining category of posh-hippydom is engaging in quite elaborate buildings and works, substituting ingenuity, and when necessary, elaborate swops, for the writing of large cheques to accredited professionals. Another, absolutely essential, is a devotion to lime. Slaked lime putty, as a building material, limewash as a paint. No posh hippy worth his or her salt will tell you anything but that gypsum and concrete are materials for a day, limewash is for ever. Of course, if you are going to limewash any part of a building the stone of which looks like ageing corned beef, the question of colour becomes crucial. As I noted in a previous blog, I sent off a patch of paint to our local(ish) limewash firm, who identified the colour firmly as ’sang de boeuf’, and sent a sample. This came as a bit of a shock. Limewash, when you put it on, is transparent, and the natural creamy-white takes three days to come through. What we had was a jar of what looked like liquidized red Pacific salmon. We have put on some patches, with a certain trepidation, since they look ghastly, but it is nor beyond the bounds of possibility that the limewash merchants know what they are doing. They sent a catalogue along with the dread jar — we were greatly taken by the concept of ‘feebly hydraulic lime’. As if it was carrying a glass of water upstairs, grumbling all the way.

The Management apologises for an interruption in transmission. We got back from London all right (limping, in the Lady Novelist’s case: she had been suffering for her art in the Tower of London). Since then there haven’t quite been enough hours in any one day. She is locked in battle with the twelfth and final chapter of the current draft — hence the Tower of London — and will be more conversable once the last exciting episode has been committed to type. Yesterday produced one of the less attractive of local seasonal manifestations: driving home from the University, we observed with gloom that every other field was turning stark cadmium yellow. Yup, it’s oilseed rape time again. The stuff is the planet’s friend, we believe. Due to its rich, oily seeds, it is responsible for the massive boost to the lark population which delights us on a daily basis. However, it also features some of the nastiest pollens known to allergenic mankind. Our contact lenses promptly clouded up with protein, we sneezed, we fell into a state of general and unspecific malaise. Experience suggests that after a brief adjustment, we both get used to it, but the first impact of the year is always a bit of a moment. All that yellow aside, things are very beautiful up here. The trees have suddenly popped into leaf, the bright, clear lime greens you get in the first week or so of growth. The larks are thanking the Lord for oilseed rape. The ground elder is threatening to take over the world. And so on. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Once more, we are deserting the Deep North: the Lady Novelist is spending a week in London and discoursing on Mr Edward Burra, the Professor is dodging between London, Manchester and Oxford. We will probably be off line, so expect to hear from us again at the beginning of May. We are in a slight state of fiscal gloom at the moment, because the Refugee Gardener and his son-in-law are sorting out the extension. You do not want to know what was underneath the pebbledash which was coming off of its own accord. We did not want to know either, but we had very little option in the matter. The only fun bit was working out a colour for the limewash: a sort of dusty pinkish shade. Not a colour I would ever have chosen in cold blood, but the assertive nature of red sandstone leaves one with few, if any, options in the matter.

The Real World Consultant and the Arts Consultant suggested that, this being Saturday, we met them at a farm shop and had lunch together. Thus we ended up tootling off on a variety of Southward roads towards Deeside, an area which is not very familiar to us. What is most noticeable about it is a strong flavour of Highlandness: as one approaches the Dee it begins to feel as if one has been going due West rather than due South. There are fine mountains, snow-capped, on an almost Alpine scale, on the horizon, as opposed to the purple dragon’s-back of Bennachie, and in every respect the landscape seems larger. We had slightly hoped to take out Craigievar castle, but they are re-harling it at the moment: thus that most romantic of structures is entirely wrapped in polythene and looks like something by Christo. The farm shop was an agreeable institution, and lunch was slow, extensive and prolonged. Having been disappointed of Craigievar, we had a small antiquarian moment on the way back, which was to try and find the grave of a major eighteenth-century aesthete called Byres of Tonley. He had been somewhat in our minds since we visited the Ashmolean about a fortnight ago and found there, to our black delight, the eight-foot-high marble candelabra which he and his talented associate Signor Piranesi had , erm, ‘found’ at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and ‘restored’. Best guess is that about four cubic inches of actual first-century work was involved, and they made up the rest as they went along, including the three two-foot-high cranes looking in different directions on the top. We were very chuffed to find that the objects in question had been successfully flogged to an English Milordo on the Grand Tour, since they had doubtless involved a great deal of work — the Milordo then gifted them to the Ashmolean with a self-praising inscription in Latin from which the story could be readily deduced. However, finding Mr Byres’s grave turned out to be easier said than done. He died quite well off, and at one stage, contemplated building himself a mausoleum, so we thought there would be something pretty dashed grand and neoclassical in the churchyard of Tough (which, by the way, is pronounced Tuke, not Tuff). But there wasn’t. There was a perfectly good obelisk covering his nephew and heir, confirming that we were in the right churchyard, a perfectly extraordinary edifice over a late-nineteenth-century Farquharson which involved three different colours of granite and looked like a municipal drinking fountain, and acres of quietly excellent lettering, but Mr Byres was nowhere to be found. A mystery. We got severely lost after that, and saw more of rural Aberdeenshire than we have ever seen before in one go. It is looking very fine at the moment. The larches are coming out.

We have seen, for two days running, an exceedingly fine libel. An elderly individual had been standing with a placard in the immediate environments of a gentleman’s residence, with a placard some three feet by two displaying the following legend: ‘P***n of G********m House is a corrupt liar devoid of any scruples’. As a form of protest this seems both polite (up to a point, admittedly) and grammatical. I suppress, naturally, the name, not merely because promoting a libel is illegal, but also because in this particular case I doubt very much if it is true; I know and like Mr P***n. and if he has a fault, lack of scrupulousness is unlikely to be it. But I still enjoy the spectacle of someone asserting the right merely to declare his point of view.

Miss Best Friend has had a bath this evening. She has compounded her recent litany of crimes by rolling in otter poo. According to the Gamekeeper, we are now regulars on the local otter circuit. Since both he and the Northern Gentleman have seen trout cruising about in the lake which are practically the size of whales, this is not unduly surprising. I am for otters. However, the spraints (I believe this to be the relevant technical term, on no better authority than T.H. White) which they leave have a peculiarly musky, penetrating quality, when imported into a domestic environment by a labrador. We are all for Nature but we would prefer, on the whole, that some of it stayed outside.

Miss Best Friend has been dining away again. Yummy carrion, it would seem, and too far gone even for canine digestive processes, since we have just discovered the results in the back drawing room. Well, we had been saying to each other that the recently acquired oriental rug from the Praisegod Carpet Co. (via Ebay; a mysterious outfit who have been flogging dodgy rugs for almost nothing for the last two months) looked a bit offensively new for the country. It doesn’t any more. Labradors as an aid to interior decoration, discuss. The funny thing about Miss BF is that her general demeanour is suggestive of a censorious Old Lancashire Catholic housekeeper, but the Good Old Thing, as she is sometimes called, can be a remarkably Bad Old Thing on occasion. She seems, so to say, to be an Old Housekeeper who periodically mounts a broomstick and disappears into the night with a flash of lisle stockings — without for a second conceding her possession of the high moral ground.

I was going to say a bit more about the Italian jaunt. Perhaps the single most magical thing we did was to visit the marble quarries above Carrara. Loredana had told us of a tunnel through the Monte Altissimo, dating perhaps from the fifteenth century, linking the quarry regions with Tuscany. Since it is simply bored through solid rock and is not a modern tunnel, it is not lit or anything, and she was saying she had been warned not to attempt it in winter since the ice forms vast stalactites as water filters slowly through the marble, and these can fall on you. Or you can drive into one, in the pitch dark. Dauntless driver that she is, Loredana agreed to take us up the Monte Altissimo, on a road that looked like a diagram of something’s insides. I hadn’t known that the marble for all that Renaissance and Baroque statuary came from quarries about 3,000 feet up. All of it was brought down by men- and mule-power, lashed to crude sledges, on what were little more than goat-tracks; if you think of the size of the block needed to create Michaelangelo’s David, to take a single example, the logistics of getting it to Florence would have been absolutely hideous. It was a strange, secret world up there. Snow lingered on the tops, and from any sort of a distance you couldn’t tell snow from marble. It was blindingly white under a very blue sky up there, and completely silent; from the highest point of the road, one could see the ground plunging away vertiginously, quarries looking like strange white futurist cities from above, because of the way the great blocks are cut out in neat rectangles. Villages in the laps of distant valleys, like little huddles of Lego bricks, and range after range of misty blue hills marching down towards the sea. The tunnel was just as terrifying as expected, but what was really strange was that it seemed to be a tunnel through time. On the Ligurian coast, it was spring, and the sun was warm. In Tuscany, a mere half a mile away through the Monte Altissimo, it was winter, and snow lay thick on the ground. That bit must have been still in deep shadow, but it was massively disconcerting as an effect.

A brief post to say that the Northern Professor will be tipping up on a Radio 3 arts programme called The Verb this coming week — I think it goes out at 9.45 on Friday evening but in any case I should think that if you go on to the Radio 3 site, for about a week after the broadcast, you can probably have a listen — it was certainly the case with Book of Ed last December. As always with radio he came away wishing that he had said things other than what he did say, but I suspect it went off perfectly well. I will also take this chance to apologise to anyone who has submitted a blognote and has not found that it appeared. Once the number of comments goes over about 200 I can’t actually get into the spam-file to check through them, because it siezes up. I usually do a clean-up every day or every other day. Having been in Italy or travelling for a fortnight, I found that the mass of revolting nonsense trapped in the spam filter was over 850 items, and I am waiting for a Blogmeister to come and sort it out. He will, unfortunately, pull the plug on the entire contents; I can hardly expect him to sift through looking for genuine observations. So, sorry, everyone.