Hooting Yard

“When Violet and Denys finally get married, after Vita decides just before the wedding not to go through with the plan for the two women to elope (she had heard from Harold, and ’something snapped in my mind’), the honeymooners and Vita all find themselves in Paris together, and Vita takes Violet away from Denys (’I wanted to say “Don’t you know, you stupid fool, she is mine in every sense of the word?”), then Denys takes her back from Vita (’That night I dined at the Ritz, and from the open window of her room Violet watched me, and Denys sobbed in the room behind her’, and the general conclusion is that ‘That day seems to have made a great impression upon him’ – well, I suppose it would) after which ‘they went away to St Jean de Luz, and I went to Switzerland with Harold’, and then they all go back to England, but soon the girls are off again, to Paris (’I used to sit in cafés drinking coffee, and watching people go by’ – fancy!) and Monte Carlo (’divine’), where ‘a complication arose over Denys announcing his arrival at Cannes’ (by now his blue eyes must have been damned near falling out of his head, never mind starting), and they all form twos again and go back to London, but then Violet goes off to Amiens, where Vita is to join her, for ever this time, only when Vita follows she takes Denys along, which complicates the situation until Denys says he will leave them and never come back (’Denys cried the whole way’), but he does come back, this time travelling with Harold and only a couple of lengths behind Violet’s father, and then Harold actually suggests that Violet may have slept with her own husband (’I thought I should have gone mad when she said that’) so Vita makes a scene and goes off with Harold from Amiens to Paris, and Violet’s father catches the same train, but no sooner do they get to Paris than Violet turns up (maybe she was at the other end of the train), and the two girls go up to Harold’s and Vita’s room, whereupon Harold bursts in with Denys (how many people were on that train, for God’s sake?), and Denys swears that he has never done anything unbecoming with his own wife (’I promise you there has never been anything of that kind between Violet and me’), which mollifies Vita a little, ‘but still it was bad enough that she should have deceived me even to a certain extent’, and then it all gets rather confused, except that at one point Vita goes to Paris, Violet goes to Bordighera and Denys goes to Cornwall (no mention of Harold – perhaps he’s just gone to bed), and among other places visited by the various parties are Avignon, San Remo and Venice – oh, now I remember where Harold was – he says he has been ’spending his time with rather low people, the demi-monde’, and he sums up by saying ‘my heart feels like a pêche melba’, and then Violet fades away and Harold and Vita live happily ever after, apart from Vita’s having an affair with Virginia Woolf, and another one, just to vary things, with Geoffrey Scott, while Harold…

“The long and the short of the matter is that practically everybody in this ludicrous story has a nice comfortable income, apart from the charwoman whom Vita steps across when visiting Violet early one morning, and of whom she says ‘There was a dreary slut scrubbing the doorstep’. When you have plenty of money you can not only afford to rush about between London and Amiens and Paris (where you stay at the Ritz, of course – well, I mean, doesn’t everybody?) and San Remo and Bordighera and Monte Carlo and Avignon and Venice; you can also afford (if you are silly enough to want to) to spend your time striking grotesque poses, keening over your own emotions, and saying things like ‘I had been vouchsafed insight, as one sometimes is’. The ‘dreary slut’ scrubbing the doorstep could no more afford the poses than she could afford the travel, and I would dearly like to read her diary, particularly if it contained a passage about some stupid, snobbish, affected woman who stepped right on to her nice clean doorstep the minute after she had just whitewashed the bleedin’ thing.”

Bernard Levin, reviewing Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson in The Observer, 28 October 1973, collected in Taking Sides (1979).

ADDENDUM : Elsewhere in the collection, Levin writes thus of Yoko Ono’s husband (in 1974): “There is nothing wrong with Mr Lennon that could not be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head falls out.”

More at Agence Eureka

One can truncate it slightly, and omit the inverted commas, without altering the essential meaning. This is the best headline since that business about Blunkett and the cow:

Norman Tebbit attacks child in dragon outfit

NOTE : Hmm. The Daily Mail has changed the headline on its story, thus making my truncation and omission comments meaningless. All I can say is that it’s a good job I posted this version before it was lost.

“Snow! Gor had traveled far, but never had he seen a storm like this with white cold in the air. Again a shiver that was part fear rippled through his muscles and gripped with invisible fingers at his knotted arms.

“‘The Beast of the North is angry!’ he told himself.

“Through the dark and storm, animals drifted past before the blasts of cold. They were fleeing; they were full of fear – fear of something that the dull mind of Gor could not picture. But in that mind was the same wordless panic.

“Gor, the man-animal of that pre-glacial day, stared wondering, stupidly, into the storm with eyes like those of the wild pig. His arms were long, almost to his knees; his hair, coarse and matted, hung in greasy locks about his savage face. Behind his low, retreating forehead was place for little of thought or reason. Yet Gor was a man…”

From Two Thousand Miles Below : A Four-Part Novel by Charles Willard Diffin, published in Astounding Stories between June 1932 and January 1933. New research suggests Diffin may have been writing about a fictionalised version of the Grunty Man who is, as we know, older than the Earth itself.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in this country at least, the cultural tastes of top sportspersons are irredeemably bland and lowbrow. Our native footballers, for example, when asked to name their favourite books, will invariably mention Harry Potter or Andy McNab, if, that is, they have ever read any books at all. (This is not the case with foreign footballers, particularly the French, who are intellectual titans by comparison.) Similarly, the default music choice for sporting champs seems to be smooth jazz, or jazz funk, or, in the world o’ rock, U2, Coldplay, and Phil Collins.

The great exception to this has always been snookerist Steve Davis. The carefully-crafted public image of a man who, away from a snooker table, is a boring mediocrity disguises the truth that Mr Davis is a fanatical and knowledgeable enthusiast of prog and related musics. Indeed, I seem to recall that some years ago he used his wealth to persuade Teutonic nutcases Magma to reform for a series of concerts, and has expressed a desire to do the same with Henry Cow, so far in vain.

So I am extremely grateful to reader Alasdair Dickson for drawing my attention to PhoenixFM, Brentwood and Billericay’s community radio station, where Mr Davis has a regular show called The Interesting Alternative. Look at those playlists! As Mr Dickson says, there is a fair amount of witless prog noodling, but also early Soft Machine, the 5UU’s, Camberwell Now, Univers Zero, and many other Recommended or Recommendedish records.

I know that Hooting Yard readers never listen to any other radio station than ResonanceFM, but until the powers-that-be at Borough High Street snap up Steve Davis, you will all be forgiven for tuning in online to PhoenixFM for his show, wherever you are in the world.