The · Adventure · of · the · Enigmatic · Journal · (or · the · Strange · Cases · of · Hyperreality)

The Baroness sends her regards from the depths of China.

"Dear K.,
This weekend one left the blistering urban heat of Chungking to push even further into the interior (if that is possible). Not quite a jaunt in the countryside by any stretch. The choking air of Xian is every bit as overwhelming as that in your precious wartime capital, which, one must emphasise, is nothing near your 'Ah, Chungking, all those wartime associations, very evocative, one expects'. Still, terracotta armies, imperial tombs, and mystical mountains were all very jolly. And one knows exactly what you would have said:

'Wouldn't it have been grand if we had been out here between the wars? Think of the adventures we would've had!"

Well, the most adventure one has had is getting on board the wrong train that would have gone onward into Inner Mongolia. That, and a near-miss tumble down some pagoda steps that can't have been too pleasant. After no less than five falls in ice-bound Ekaterinberg, one is convinced that one will die with two left feet.

No bandits and warlords and Nazi conspiracies - but you were right in one regard: it would have been grand if you could be out here too. So one must conclude in that trite but no less sincere turn of phrase,

Wish you were here.

Yours ever,
K."

"Luxury yachts offer pirate hunting cruises," from Ananova, June 26

'Luxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast.
Wealthy punters pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders....
Passengers, who can pay an extra £5 a day for an AK-47 machine gun and £7 for 100 rounds of ammo, are also protected by a squad of ex special forces troops....
"They are worse than the pirates," said Russian yachtsman Vladimir Mironov. "At least the pirates have the decency to take hostages, these people are just paying to commit murder," he continued.'

What fun, eh? Reminds one of Baden-Powell's infamous remark on what his favourite sport was.

Listen, the khakis are laughing
A handful of us against their entire might
With our backs here against the cliff face
They think its over...
But the heart of a Boer
Lies deeper and wider that they can see
On horseback he comes riding
The Lion of the West Transvaal!

Isn't this nice. There are repaints, and then there are repaints (with slight re-toolings). Electrostatic Soundwave (can we just say Soundblaster, please?) is one of them. I'd love to have him and Ratbat in my cubicle at work. Unfortunately, there's been some sort of godawful delay since he was announced earlier this year. I don't care if they have to put him in Movie packaging or a paper-bag, just get him out, Hasbro. Now.

Dear Sir,

I am writing re your article dated the 25th of April. I believe a hearty ‘well done’ is in order. Quite frankly, and I believe I speak for many, the current lack of patriotic sentiment among the youthful generation is appalling. Detractors may say that this package of national education is ham-fisted and nauseating, but as the bard once unerringly put it, one must be cruel to be kind.

For where was this cynicism and apathy when we flocked to the colours in our thousands in 1914? Wet and cold in the trenches, heartbroken by the thoughts of home and friends across the sea, honour and duty were mere words: but we sat fast. Did we hesitate, did we refuse, when the barrage lifted and the order came to go over the top? Fear and doubt we had in abundance, but never did we shirk from what, as Nelson immortalised in his injunction, our country expected of us: that every man must do his duty. And as we crossed the wire and our world shrank down to the few yards between us and the enemy, all doubt was gone, and all that mattered was coming to grips with the goddamned Hun.

So if these initiatives can restore in the flaccid youth even one ounce of that fighting, ne’er-give-up vigour that fuelled us in the mud of Flanders, that drove us onward into battle even as hundreds upon thousands of our comrades were shredded by bullet and shrapnel, blinded and driven mad by gas, crippled and broken in body and spirit by a war that was not quite war but the end of the world, it will find me the stoutest of its champions.

And if I might paraphrase a brother-in-arms who made the ultimate sacrifice a week before the guns fell silent, and the news of whose death arrived to his break his mother’s heart the very day church-bells throughout this blessed isle rung out in victory: I write of war, and the pity of war; the irony is in the pity.

This old soldier looks forward to discussing such issues in greater detail in this illustrious column in future. Until then I remain

Yours sincerely,

Lt-Col. Sir Douglas Kelvin, MC, DSO, 12th Baronet of Montcrecy

I know this is written by Longfellow, that great American Romantic, but each time I hear it I can't help dreaming of a balmy, magical August evening in 1898 somewhere in the gentle rolling meadows of the home counties.




And a more recent recording.

The other day, a fellow historian made a comment about something that happened during the world war.
"Which war?" I asked.
"The second," came the reply.
"Ah," I observed, "Not the one in which I got my gammy leg, then."

Bigs laughs; but that aside, there is a subtler point to be made about affectations. You see, affectations maketh the man. For all the talk by assorted psychologists, self-help gurus, and half-baked intellects, one remains personally unconvinced that there is some objective, natural state of the individual being. Affectations you see, are key to our sense of identity. Not to mention very powerful political tools. Ask my spiritual mother Baroness Thatcher if it matters one bit that her ‘original’ voice is some Lincolnshire dialect. Look at how both she and Nixon use what are obviously affectations to goad and confound their detractors. There is a marvellous moment when Ma Maggie appears on Blue Peter and weaves some absolutely first-class tosh about badgers and koala bears (kwalar bai-ahs). And Tricky Dick is a master at feigned surprises: especially the ‘I’m faking surprise but I know you know I’m faking so what does this really mean?’ expression.

So affectations are powerful; and so completely integral are they to the expression of power and the process of self-creation that one can’t deny them their place in the individual being. And not just affectations of mannerisms and speech, but also of life experience. Now, I’m dead against the delusional chaps who tell you they are qi gong masters who can snap steel bars with their hands and take part in secret underground fights. Or those who boast about their prospects in some kick-ass sham career that is very obviously never going to happen. That’s just…sad.

What I mean is this: the intelligent fellow twists the telling of his lived experience as a form of commentary on certain issues, to elicit certain reactions and responses, to make a goddamned point. For instance, when my late granddad made certain unverifiable remarks about our family history, it wasn’t at all important whether or not what he said was the truth – what he was doing was making very pointed comments on 20th century Chinese history. Remember my previous post about great Wesleyan hymns? When I start spouted rubbish about my schooldays, it’s not that I somehow delusively believe what I speak to be true, but I say what I say to make a point about the state of Christianity in this current day and age.

And so in about a year’s time, when some unsuspecting soul asks me, “When did you leave the army?” And I reply, “Early in 1919, shortly after we came back from France, where I got this gammy leg,” there is a certain message I am trying to convey.

'Alice Prochaska (nee Barwell) has been elected as Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, effective from 1 September 2010 in succession to Dame Fiona Caldicott.

Alice studied at Somerville College (1965) and received her undergraduate degree and D.Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford., following in the footsteps of her mother who was also a Somervillian. She is joining Somerville from Yale University where she has been University Librarian since August, 2001. She has an extensive career in research and academic administration and was Director of Special Collections at the British Library from 1992 - 2001.

To read the full press release, please go to www.some.ox.ac.uk/news

Professor Fiona Stafford
Chair, Appointment Panel'

Yay! A historian at the helm! Now we can press on with more important reforms: namely suppressing Red Somerville's socialist tendencies.

This is the sort of perfection one can only dream of in one's dreams.

Every Panama should look this good.

It was an afternoon in spring, just as the cold and wet of a Blighty winter began to drift away from E’s G and P Land. Katie – this was before she trekked off to Prague – and I were celebrating our having survived a week of surly wops and Mediterranean damp, and the hour found us nursing our G&Ts in the first floor of the Drones. We sprawled in the chairs beside the large bay windows that overlooked a St James’s paved with gold by the approaching sunset. Behind us, that everlasting portrait of Lord Curzon looked with approval on our Indian Army habits. With the vision of Umbrian foothills and the titanic double basilica of Assisi still fresh in our minds, Katie drawled in her very plummy voice, “This ghastlay business of Greyfrahs. St F of A must be turning over in his crypt, one suspects.”
The recent dissolution of our resident Minorite house had caused rather a lot of heartache in many quarters. I made a disapproving noise and said, “Foxes have their holes, and the birds of air their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Katie’s robin’s-egg-blue eyes flickered without amusement. “And the worst part of it is that they move the remaining students to Regent’s!! Regent’s of all places!!”
I commiserated. “The happy-clappy Baptists. A fate worse than death.”
“Have you seen their rainbow chapel of happayness?” A cold sneer flitted across her aristocratic face.
I shuddered outwardly, but beamed with satisfaction in the inside. For all our political differences, I got on splendidly with the High Anglicans I knew because we shared so much in common in terms of temperament and character, and we were always mutually sympathetic when it came to religious matters. I always look back fondly on the recollection of Rob B supplicating before the host in a white-washed French church, Rob U agreeing with me about the hymns to be played at our funerals, and Katie rushing round to Blackfriars to catch the Corpus Christi procession. “But rainbows!” I protested dryly, “Everyone loves rainbows! You can’t argue against rainbows!”
Again that aristocratic sneer. “I bet they argue a lot you know, our Greyfrah comrades and the happay-clappay Baptists.” Then the devastating judgement. “And you know, I bet the Franciscans win everay single time.”
Touche, my Baroness: you would have had a brilliant future as Papa Ratzinger’s PR lady.

One of my favourite marches.




Doesn't this evoke the opening sequence of Battle of Britain?

And it just makes you want to shout: Tally Ho! Bandit dropping in for a cuppa at three o'clock!

Or to be more accurate: Indianer! Indianer! Feuer frei!

"When Sir Herbert Butterfield proposes in 'Man on his Past', therefore, that 'every battle in world history may be different from every other battle, but they must have something in common if we are to group them under the term "battle" at all,' without mooting what that thing in common may be, we are now in a position to submit a suggestion. It is not something 'strategic', nor 'tactical', nor material, nor technical. It is not something any quantity of coloured maps will reveal, or any collection of comparative statistics of strengths and casualties, or even any set of readings from the military classics, though the classics brilliantly illuminate our understanding of battle once we have arrived at it. What battles have in common is human: the behaviour of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honour and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration - for it is towards the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed. It is necessarily a social and psychological study. But it is not a study only for the sociologist or the psychologist, and indeed ought not to be properly a study for either. For the human group in battle, and the quality and source of the stress it undergoes, are drained of life and meaning by the laboratory approach which social scientists practise. Battles belong to finite moments in history, to the societies which raise the armies which fight them, to the economies and technologies which those societies sustain. Battle is a historical subject, whose nature and trend of development can only be understood down a long historical perspective."
- Sir John Keegan, The Face of Battle

What a delightful scene. And the first inkling perhaps that Liam Neeson was the man to play Ra's al Ghul? In fact, he looks more like the Demon in his Count von Count get-up than he ever did on the big screen.

The Demon's Head and the most insane vampire ever - now that's a double-act that would give even the Dark Knight Detective second thoughts.

Like so many series - dare I say TF: Animated? - these days, The Brave and the Bold started off on a lacklustre note, but a couple dozen episodes later, it really starts to shine. First we had the Mirror Universe spliced with the alternate dimension Batmans/Batmen. And now, Trials of the Demon. Etrigan, Holmes, Gentleman Ghost, and Batman in his Gotham by Gaslight duds. This is wonderful. And wait for the ending. It's simply heartwarming when Batman says what he does.

Cologne Cathedral Choir, conducted by Professor Eberhard Metternich (a relation of Klemens?).




I never thought of this song as a choral piece. Nor that Krauts would do it so well.