There was a post about Colet House about four years ago so I expect you remember it.
Not mentioned is Colet House’s blue plaque – the nearest bp to my house – because Colet House was shrouded in scaffolding in January 2017.
It’s a bootleg blue plaque – not put up by English Heritage, the idiosyncratic arbiter of people worthy to be commemorated. A generous philanthropist whose plantations were compassionately administered? Don’t be silly. Ouspensky was born in Kharkiv, now the second largest city in Ukraine and went to school in Moscow. Although he was in London in the 1920s he only bought Lyne Place in Surrey in 1930 where he lived until his death in 1947. To digress, the house subsequently became a lunatic asylum where, in 1973, Bill Bryson was a nurse. Now it has been converted into houses and flats.
What of Ouspensky’s teaching? Sounds a bit rum to me but he was a darling of the intelligentsia and society figures in the mid 20th century. Not a Rasputin, I think, more a peddler of harmless philosophy. Take his Fourth Way. The three ways that might be too demanding are: the Way of the Fakir, the Way of the Monk, and the Way of the Yogi, unless you are enjoying lockdown so much you want to withdraw permanently from the world. Take the Fourth Way and learn to work in harmony with your physical body, emotions and mind. I call this Getting on with Life.
However, I don’t dismiss the 4th Way completely. My harmony between eating, drinking and taking exercise has been getting out of sync. The trigger was when I put on three kilos. I’m not going to fade away. To digress, there have been reports from Texas of alarmingly cold weather. The interviewees reported temperatures as low as 31 and even 18. I wonder how many listeners under the age of forty in the UK had a clue what those numbers mean. To keep this digression going, I have only been to Houston once, in the summer of 1983. It was very hot and humid and a fellow guest in my hotel was a closely guarded Manuel Noriega on a business trip from Panama. Having had appalling acne as a teenager I felt sorry for him; his monicker Pineapple Face was apt.
My 4th Way is to stick to alcohol, eat in moderation and go for walks: Saturday 1hr, Sunday 2 hrs, today 3 hrs. Now I have a tiresome blister.