Andrew Marvell grave, St. Giles in the Fields
Maggi Hambling- Touch, works on paper, British Museum, to 29th Jan, 2017.
Today might not have been the best day for a day out in London but what can you do. You book your time off to enjoy that first chill in the air, the cooler evenings and mark off another summeras gone and what happens, it's about the hottest day of the year. I perspire readily and the big city in that heat is not a remedy. Added to that, my advancing years seem to make me less inclined to attend to minor detail and so I was lucky to get to London on the wrong train unnoticed but had to undergo the trauma of the tube to come back via Victoria, for which my ticket was valid.
It's a shame Jeremy Corbyn was quite so vilified for his photo opportunity on a crowded train because he's absolutely right, as any who use Victoria must know. Cancellations due to shortage of staff can only be the profit-making company's fault whereas, yes, the overcrowding coming out of Victoria was only augmented at Clapham Junction until it gradually dispersed but Corbyn's mistake was to make it a photo opportunity, like the Eds being pictured with their meat pies.
And one can't help but notice the ongoing 'development' of London, being further packed with flats and office space, possibly in time for the city to be deserted by any number of global trading companies post-referendum. I'm not quite as bothered about the aesthetics of the projects but worry more pragmatically about how the utilities can cater for such lurches in the numbers they have to serve because they all need water, gas, electricity and waste water taking away.
But now I'm home again, it's not for me to worry about, only to remember to make sure I do it better next time.
I even got the programme wrong for the lunchtime concert, expecting Bartok and Brahms on piano but getting songs forbidden by the Third Reich, by some famous C19 Germans, then Alban Berg, Korngold and Poulenc. But I was glad of that, only a week after declaring an interest in C19th German lieder.
Sarah Gabriel could have come straight out of a fairy tale book with her flowing red hair and siren voice. Pieces by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Schubert were exquisitely done and then followed by 7 early songs by Berg. While one appreciates the audience's willingness to show their appreciation between four discrete items, they do need a bit of a reprimand if they insist on it in every break of a longer set, or, especially in the Korngold, when they've been told they will be sung straight through. It's as if the audience want to impress with just how much they appreciated the performance at any opportunity.
Well, don't. Clap louder and longer at the end. Stamp your feet if you like, shout 'bravo' or provide a standing ovation but there really is no need to punctuate a concert so insistently your own craven offerings.
The Berg was a great, modernist contrast to the Romantics. Korngold, I'm afraid, struggles at the wrong end of my league table of composers but did himself no harm with his Songs of the Clown, from Shakespeare. But I'm with Sarah, who said that Poulenc is a favourite composer of hers and we could have done with more than just Les Chemins de l'amour, in all its glamourous, Parisian decadence. Anything banned by the Nazis is a recommendation in itself and I can see why they didn't like that. It looked suspiciously as if people might enjoy themselves.
His body was interred under the pews in the south aisle next to the pulpit.
but I don't think there's any sign of it now. All we have is the grandiose plaque on the wall, put up several decades after his demise by a grand nephew. We are less inclined to such fulsome tributes now and there is evidence to suggest that Marvell, however true much of this eulogy might be, might not have been the easiest of company. And if he didn't feel like it, why should he have been expected to be.
I thought of Prince Buster's Ghost Dance, for which see below, with Marvell so nearby,
If you see old Johnny Donne down there in boneyard,
Tell him from me, Hello.
The Toughest.
And thoughts of mortality were also on hand in the exhibition of her drawings in the British Museum, from her father eventually using the oils she gave him when he retired, aged 60, to when he died, aged 96, pictures of her mother dead and three studies of a tired Stephen Fry who fell asleep while sitting for her.
After some wave drawings that are not as absorbing as the coloured oils because one can't trace the hints of different shades in them, were some of Beryl reclining but I hadn't realized we had moved on from waves until I looked at the second one, so fluid is Maggi's art. It is possible to enjoy a poem without knowing what it's about and, similarly here, it doesn't always matter what the subject is.
The only colour in the exhibition is the red-pink of Edge, ink and acrylic, 2015, echoing Japanese and Chinese calligraphy on an environmental theme and if it came more affordable than the great Broken Moon, which I now look up only to be referred back to my own website, it could become a substitute target when I'm rich enough
Otherwise we are left with other memories of close friends, like Lett Haines, Henrietta Moraes and Tory looking down, 1985, of the partner Maggi has lived with since 1987. I mean, you paint their picture or write poems for them and they seem to stay with you for a while. It can't have always been easy for Tory but it also must have been the most glorious fun.
On an entirely parsimonious and ill-befitting note, the book costs £35 in the British Museum but can be found via those dealers who sell through Amazon for a few quid less. Not everybody will have quite the same compulsion to add such a thing to their collection. Perhaps if I had fewer such compulsions, I'd be less careful about paying what is asked at the drop of my new, more flamboyant hat.