We can all do our bit to combat climate change.
Taking Ubers to and from a party recently was a minus contribution – there again it was a stupendously good party. My host took over a hotel in Wimbledon and, suffice to say, at midnight I was sipping white wine watching foxes prowl around on the common and doing a lot of catching-up with friends I hadn’t seen for a while. Others, younger than us, were on the cocktails and dance floor.
But I digress, my first step was not to repair the air con in the attic at Number 56. Should I get the AC unit on the roof removed so the neighbours don’t think it is working? I can get the TV aerial removed at the same time.
Another step is to buy fewer books and re-read ones I already have on the shelves. To that end I have just re-read Going to the Wars, published 1955, by John Verney. It is a memoir of his war with the Barsetshire Yeomanry – in reality the North Somerset Yeomanry. John Verney before the war was an assistant film director (with Charles Laughton and Robert Donat) and artist; after the war he was an author, illustrator and artist. He explains his book in an Author’s Note.
”Modern painting, and the modern approach to all painting, might be described as a quest for those pictorial values which are permanent or, to use the fashionable if misleading term Abstract. In this spirit I have approached the facts of my own life between 1937 and 1945. Although the story, as it concerns me, is true, I have allowed myself freedom, to the point of fantasy, with everyone else. I could find no other way of saying what I wanted to say.”
It’s extremely well written and highly recommended. I’m glad I have kept it.
John Verney’s “Going to the Wars” was described in his obituary in the Times (February 1993) as one of the second world war’s few masterpieces. I would put it alongside Sir John Hackett’s “I Was a Stranger”, Mac Donald Fraser’s”Quartered Safe out Here” and Keith Douglas’s “From Alamein to Zem Zem”.
His days with the Barsetshire Yeomanry recalled “Men at Arms” and the Sardinian exploit Fitzroy Maclean’s “Eastern Approaches”.
The account of the fury of the German officer when he found Verney and his friend Amos drinking wine with the Italian captain was extremely amusing.
I agree with your conclusion – highly recommended.
As it happens tomorrow’s post is the complete Times obit. I’m busy typing it out now.