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Saturday, February 4th, 2012

The Gardens at Casa Cuseni, Sicily

casa cuseni top terrace

I would have completely forgotten about Daphne Phelps’ book, “A House in Sicily” if it wasn’t for the mouse. We were doing some spring cleaning (a tip- don’t leave it for five years, things can get out of hand) when I found that a mouse had whiled away an afternoon by chewing away at the edges of a newspaper cutting which I’d roughly inserted into the book. Fortunately, the book itself was unharmed.

“A House in Sicily” is about Casa Cuseni, the Arts and Crafts house and garden created by Robert Kitson in Taormina, Sicily, which Daphne Phelps had inherited and looked after for 50 years. The garden is one of several outstanding gardens in Italy created by English men (and women) and is worthy to be mentioned alongside Thomas Hanbury’s ‘La Mortola’, Lady Walton’s ‘La Mortella’ and Ellen Willmott’s ‘La Boccanegra’, but stands out amongst them in that its name isn’t redolent of death or darkness.

My plans to look at the garden when I visited Taormina a few years ago were unfortunately thwarted by the girl at the Tourist Information Centre, where I’d gone to ask for directions. She looked positively alarmed when I mentioned Casa Cuseni. “You won’t get in”, she said, “And if you try to the owner will shout abuse at you”. The owner in question was Daphne Phelps, the author of the book. She was now elderly, and retired, but for most of her life had run Casa Cuseni as an upmarket guest house. Her instructions to the TiC to deter any potential visitors with threats of abuse was no doubt the result of a lifetime spent in hospitality. I know how she feels. She died the following year, and it was her obituary which I had carelessly inserted into her book and which the mice had chewed at.

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Saturday, January 28th, 2012

Alex Kerr’s “Dogs and Demons”

Dogs and Demons

“Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing in the garden, nodding your head to the bees as they sing of the dews and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you?”

Okakura Kakuso “The Book of Tea”

When Alex Kerr wrote, in “Lost Japan” (link to – http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/11/the-slow-life-in-japan/) about the changes which had taken place during the 20 years he had lived in his adopted country he told the story with love and affection. Ten years later, in “Dogs and Demons”, his love has turned to hatred, his affection to scorn. His book contains as much bile and bitterness as the angriest divorce petition. His anger is directed at a corrupt bureaucracy which wastes countless millions on absurd construction projects; on a supine population who take no interest in the environment and allow these projects to take place; on an innate conservatism which won’t allow other nationalities to immigrate or integrate; and an educational system which brainwashes its youth into never questioning authority.

Alex Kerr’s analysis is accurate, but his conclusions are wrong. When he says that the bureaucracy is powerful and intent on extending its power he’s describing bureaucrats everywhere; whether in Japan or elsewhere they’ll get pleasure from standing at a drain and pouring other people’s money down it. In Japan the money is wasted on construction projects, in England on sink estates.

And his pleas for Japan to become more like the United States, with all sorts of bossy pressure groups, open borders and an educational system where anything goes would result in Japan losing that specialness which appealed to him in the first place. Perhaps he just grew tired of being in a place where things got done and you never had to worry about your wallet being stolen.

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Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

The Bad Tempered Gardener

The Bad Tempered GardenerI think I’m in love with Anne Wareham. It’s true that I’ve never met her and the one photo I’ve seen of her has her wearing goggles and driving a tractor. She also appears to be spoken for, as she’s dedicated her book to “Charles with love. Without you, nothing” and writes about making love to him by their “reflecting pool”. So it looks as though my love will be unrequited, but love it is, nevertheless.

My infatuation began when I was given a book called “The Bad Tempered Gardener”, of which my beloved is the author. I knew it was love when I came to a chapter on hostas, which was illustrated with photos of some immaculate plants, at the sight of which I thought “They’re not real”. And then I read the opening lines: “There is absolutely no point in growing hostas unless you are prepared to kill slugs and the only sensible way I have found to do that is regular applications of slug pellets”. And then a chapter on her veg plot when she says: “And the results were never so wonderful or so specially delicious as they are talked up to be. The potatoes tasted like potatoes – not a patch on the shop-bought Jersey Royals, whatever variety we grew”. These are truths which garden writers simply aren’t meant to acknowledge, and when she got going nothing was safe, from Show Gardens (most of them are ghastly) to other garden journalists (most of them are toadies).

Would I recommend “The Bad Tempered Gardener?” Certainly not. You might fall for her as well, and where might that lead?

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Monday, November 7th, 2011

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood‘What makes us most normal’, said Reiko, ‘is knowing that we’re not normal’.

I used a minor domestic crisis as an excuse to stay at home all day and read a novel. This was so enjoyable that minor domestic crises will soon be a major part of my life if I’m not careful. The novel in question was Norwegian Wood, which is the most successful book by Japan’s best selling author, Haruki Murakami. A friend in Japan, whose judgement I respect a lot, had told me that she’s read it several times and I wanted to find out why the book was so special to her and the millions of other Japanese who have bought it.

Norwegian Wood gets its title from the Beatles song. It’s set in a university in Tokyo, but that shouldn’t put off the English reader because all the cultural references are western and the setting might just as well be London or New York. It’s essentially a love story, but one which even hardened old cynics like me can enjoy not least because there’s a lot of darkness around the edges. It deserves to be much better known here, and I can’t recommend it enough.

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Sunday, November 6th, 2011

Death Plus Ten Years – Roger Cooper

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n
Milton

Death Plus Ten Years

After his trial in Iran on charges of spying and fornication, Roger Cooper received a visit from the prison governor who told him he had received two sentences: one was death, the other ten year’s imprisonment.
“Which comes first?” asked the prisoner
“Ah, I see yes, a good question. I will recommend they keep you here for ten years and then hang you!”
“Please don’t make it the other way round.”

About a year before his arrest Roger Cooper and I shared a small adventure. We were both at Tehran airport, making our way to the departure lounge for a flight to Dubai. Suddenly armed police appeared and secured all the doors. It seems that a group of transit passengers who had been held up for 48 hours were staging a sit-in. Their protest meant that, although we had checked in for our flight, our route to the departure lounge was barred by locked glass doors. Roger was fluent in Farsi and explained our predicament to the guards, to no avail. I then noticed that it would be relatively easy for us to disengage the lock on the glass doors and so we hatched a plan to make a screen out of some luggage to give us cover and when the lock was free we took our chance, when the guards weren’t looking. We got away with it and caught our flight, feeling very pleased with ourselves. Roger was based in Dubai and we had dinner at his club before I got my connecting flight to London. Roger worked at that time for an oil company called McDermott.  He told me about his adventures working for them in the interior of Iran and his catch phrase was “The things we do for McDermott”.

His arrest came whilst he was on an assigment for McDermott.  The charges against him were trumped up, his trial a farce.  His sentence of death was for an affair he was supposed to have had with an Iranian woman many years before, the sentence of ten years was for spying.  He was used by the Iranian regime as a political pawn and was eventually “traded” for an Iranian prisoner held in England. But not before he had spent 5 years in Evian prison, one of the most brutal, hellish places on earth.

I was reminded of this by a story told by Jimmy Wales at his ‘Free Thinking’ talk (see yesterday’s blog – http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2011/11/05/jimmy-wales-as-howard-roark/). He said that an Al Jazeera journalist called Dorothy Parvez had gone missing in Syria and was detained by the authorities in Iran on charges of spying. She was questioned for two weeks and her assertion that she was a journalist was dismissed by her interrogators. And then, one morning, when she was almost at the end of her endurance and ready to confess to anything, her interrogator said “I think we may believe you” When she asked why, now, after all this time, he replied “We looked you up on Wikipedia”.

There are many similarly ludicrous moments in Roger Cooper’s story, as related by him in his book, Death Plus Ten Years,  but none, regrettably, which led to his early release.

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Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

People who Eat Darkness – The Fate of Lucie Blackman

People who eat DarknessOne November morning in 1995 Lucie Blackman’s mother, Jane, received a phone call from a stranger, a man, who told her that her husband, Tim, was sleeping with his wife.  Jane’s reaction was to throw Tim out of the front door and his clothes out of the bedroom window.  From that moment her life was dominated by bitterness, vindictiveness and thoughts of revenge. Any semblance of happiness in the Blackman family was destroyed.

But what began as a routinely disfunctional family became a tragic one.  Within a few years Lucie, who had gone to Tokyo to earn money to cover her credit card debts, had been raped and murdered; her sister Sophie had been confined to a mental hospital; her brother had had to leave university because of a nervous breakdown and her father had become an object of vilification in the tabloid press.

The story of the destruction of the Blackman family is told by Richard Lloyd Parry in his book, “People Who Eat Darkness”.  This true story is made all the more compelling by the fact that both Lucie and her killer kept diaries and because of the wealth of detail which emerged during a ten year trial. The case was extensively covered in the English press and the author does an excellent job in correcting many of the myths and prejudices about Japanese life which appeared in the papers.  But life in England is also laid bare and there are so many difficult truths that I would be uncomfortable about any of my Japanese friends reading it.  No explanation is given for the enigmatic title “People Who Eat Darkness”, but it may just be us.

Postscript: To give an idea of how compelling this book is, I received it from Amazon at lunchtime yesterday, and although I had lots of things planned, as soon as I’d started the first page I had to put everything on hold until I’d finished it (all 385 pages).

Since writing the above I have learnt that both Rupert and Sophie Blackman are making a good recovery from their trauma. Rupert is a musician living happily in Utrecht and Sophie works for the NHS is Hertfordshire. Their father, Tim, described by the author as “likeable and admirable” runs the Lucie Blackman Trust Missing Abroad programme, with the support of the Foreign Office – www.missingabroad.org, but still has to battle with his ex-wife’s relentlessy destructive efforts.

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Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Peter Gresswell 1922-2011

weekend golfer 2

“The secret of a happy life is the removal of all minor irritations”
Peter Gresswell

Peter Gresswell, my mother’s younger brother, who died today aged 88, understood the Slow Life better than anyone else. He kept his work/life balance in perfect equilibrium. In 1971 he wrote a pioneering book entitled “Environment”, at the same time keeping a golfing diary, which was later published as “Weekend Golfer”, the story, as it said on the dust jacket, of ” the average golfer, ever hopeful, ever hopeless”. 40 years on, both books are available today through Amazon and Abebooks.

In those days “environment” meant the way things looked. Here’s just one of the many things which were important in 1971- the enormous damage done to the landscape by electricity pylons. The book makes a cogent argument for the carrying of electricity on underground cables rather than pylons. It’s ironic that nowadays wind farms are being erected on “environmental” grounds even though they, and the pylons which serve them, are destroying the landscape.
“Environment” was written with a wit and good sense which is missing from modern books on the subject. This extract, headed ” Vulgarity” is a good example:

‘I like vulgarity. Good taste is death’ Mary Quant.
‘I’d rather be vulgar than a bore.’ Clough Williams-Ellis.

So say two people who are eminent in their quite different fields of design. And so would many people if similarly quoted out of context. There is such a thing as a surfeit of good design, of a deadening application of polite uniformity. At present the built environment is such that it is unlikely to suffer from it, and would only be improved by more of it. But the quotations are a caution to everyone who is interested in their environment: places cannot be made by stifling entirely the personalities of the people who live in them. The fish and chip shop should not be made to look dignified. Street Improvement Schemes can emasculate streets if too many signs are removed or redesigned. Some clutter, for instance around the old-fashioned newsagent or tobacconist, can be friendly. And there are whole neighbourhoods of towns, including some sea-side resorts, where a robust vulgarity is part of the scene- and it should be protected against too much ‘good design’.

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Sunday, August 7th, 2011

The Garden in the Clouds- Antony Woodward

Garden-in-the-Clouds

“It is better to have your head in the clouds and know where you are- than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think you are in paradise.” – Thoreau

“The best moment in love is climbing the stairs to your beloved’s apartment” – French saying

You’re not allowed to use a mobile phone in a quiet coach because, as the Japanese say, “this may annoy the neighbours”, but what’s the etiquette about laughing out loud? I fear that I may have annoyed quite a few neighbours when reading Antony Woodward’s book “The Garden in the Clouds” because I couldn’t help bursting out laughing. At times it’s as funny as a P G Wodehouse, which may seem odd, as the book’s about making a garden on a remote Welsh hillside, and then opening it under the “Yellow Book” scheme. I would recommend the book to anyone, but particularly to some-one who is considering opening their garden to the public.

The story is about the author’s attempts to get the garden up to Yellow Book standards, for which he needs to convince the County Organiser, a formidable lady of the old school who he nicknames “The Dragon”. When The Dragon finally comes to assess the garden, the author’s 7 year old daughter is there to greet her and asks “Why do you call her a dragon daddy- she doesn’t look anything like a dragon?”.
This afternoon we opened our garden for one of our Yellow Book days and our County Organiser, who is tall and imposing but not at all dragon-like, came for a tour and some tea. We discussed “A Garden in the Clouds” and she listened politely while I raved about it, but she didn’t seem so keen on the book, which puzzled me. It was only after she had left that I remembered, with one of those acute spasms of embarrassment, the story-line about The Dragon.

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Sunday, March 27th, 2011

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Koitsu20MatsushimaSmall
The passing spring,
Birds mourn,
Fishes weep
With tearful eyes

Matsuo Basho- The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A fortnight ago Sendai, Fukushima and Matsushima meant nothing to us. Now, they are all too familiar as places hit by the Japanese tsunami. We’ve seen the images of the wreckage but the pictures on TV give us no idea of the beauty of the landscape which was destroyed. It was a beauty as renowned in Japan as the Lake District is here.

On 27th March 1689, exactly 322 years ago, the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho set off from Edo on a journey north, which he described in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, one of the best travel books of all time (now published by Penguin Classics). He stayed in Fukushima and Sendai (where he threw fresh leaves of iris on the roof of his inn and prayed for good health) and took a boat to the islands of Matsushima. This is how he described them:

“I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan and the beauty of these islands is not in the least inferior to the beauty of Lake Dotei or Lake Seito in China. Indeed the whole beauty of the entire scene can only be compared to the most divinely endowed of female countenances, for who else could have created such beauty but the great god of nature himself?”

Not much later our Romantic poets would be describing described the beauty of the Lake District in similarly ecstatic terms. Basho’s words give us a deeper understanding of why the Japanese love our Lake District so much, and make it even more poignant that their own favourite place of beauty has been destroyed.

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Saturday, February 12th, 2011

Matt Ridley- The Rational Optimist

Rational-Optimist1
I’ve got the feeling that if Matt Ridley were to read this blog he’d dismiss it as so much New Age tosh. The quote from Thoreau on the title page would really get up his goat. He’d be surprised to hear me say that I, on the other hand, think his new book, ‘The Rational Optimist- How Prosperity Evolves’ is brilliant in every respect and I agree with every word. It’s the sort of book which you want everyone to read because if they do then they might just “get it”.

Here’s an extract, which hits the spot exactly:

“There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquillity, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past which has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet. Imagine that it is 1800 somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathering round the hearth in the simple timber-framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable. Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radio-active fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window.
Oh please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages pneumonia that will kill him at 53- not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.) The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be the chattel of a drunkard husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. Toothache tortures the mother. The stew is grey and gristly yet meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad in this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever sen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never travelled more than fifteen miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts and one pair of shoes. Father’s jacket cost him a month’s wages but is now infested with lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy”

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