Yesterday we went for a walk somewhere I hadn’t been for half a century.
“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often , in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest. (Brideshead Revisited)
What a magnificent, poetic opening sentence – not a word too long. Anyway yesterday, after an hour and a half we came upon a pub and stopped for lunch. Pub food when I was a student at Durham was a hard-boiled egg preserved in vinegar, or chicken and chips in a basket. Standards at pubs in the Home Counties are stratospherically high today and yesterday.
The quartermaster had inadvertently left Bertie’s picnic in the car and this is what the chef rustled up for him; his first luncheon à la carte. I helped him out with the sauvignon blanc.
At the end of yesterday’s post, Shadows on the Grass, there’s a 1997 documentary screened on LWT in The South Bank Show series.
There were 736 South Bank Show episodes. It was axed in 2010. It lasted longer than LWT which became part of ITV in 2001. In the middle of the documentary there are advertisements for BT pagers and Kodak film (30 mins in), both overtaken by technology. However, one of the pleasures of watching the programme is in seeing things that haven’t changed much: Ascot, Lord’s, the library at The Travellers and the Charterhouse. I didn’t know of the secret door, disguised as bookshelves, in the library (42 mins in). It was an appropriate setting for Simon Raven, beneath copies of the Bassae Frieze from the 5th century BC Greek temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. The originals are now in the British Museum.