HS09

Thursday May 12,  2016

The day set out to perplex.  The weather forecast introduces a golden sun, while the rain drizzles down outside the window.  I put my trust in the window.  This is that time when the line from bed to kitchen windowsill is very strait.  Lined up along the sill are pot after pot of minuscule vegetable seedlings, corn and lettuce, parsley and various beans.  All have apparently slept well.  Seagulls are not vegetarians it seems.

The domestics out of the way I go back to painting the hall.  I am reaching the  “I wonder . . ?” stage.  I am painting wallpaper – hundreds of fish swimming round the wall.  Just how many fish can one invent without going insane . . .   hundreds it seems.  I paint away.

Time to get going.  This is an outing day, see Sussex by the Sea.  Driving to Glynde the rain got the BBC's message and shamefacedly let the sun out. The drive is one of those how many large continental lorries can you cram onto a glorified country lane without the whole thing clogging up.  Not many it seems.  The clog ups won a few times.  It is wonderful how one leaves these “main” roads and in a few seconds is in the  tranquil rural peace any reader of  Sunday supplements knows to be under dire threat of bungalowitis.   Appropriately Glynde has the great distinction of being the first village to be inoculated en mas at the command of the Lord of the Manor (My Lord Trevor the umpteenth)  against anything  (it was cholera then).  One hopes his descendant and heir has the bungalow serum ready for the approach of the first developers.

Another delightful oddity, also the doing of some long gone Lord of the Manor          (actually also the Bishop of Durham, some commute for the 1740's) is as you might expect the Church.   The age of reason didn't think much of prehistoric Norman gloom so tore it down and put up a new church inspired by his Lordship's time in Italy, all the sun and light of the sweet reason of Palladio and his perfectly reasonable architectural symmetry.  However Sussex is not to be out done by some reasonable Italian.  Next door the collapsed cow barn defies any symmetry or reason.

So back to the pub for Lunch - the Trevor Arms.  You can't get away from these Trevors. The inoculating Lord Bishop with his reasonable church was another of them.  The unique feature of an otherwise reasonably predictable country pub is a gigantic bass tuba hanging over the Public Bar.  Exactly why the publican couldn't explain.  By now the sun was the outright winner so lunch in the garden.  The garden is a long strip of grass neatly dividing the pub from the Railway Station.  Lunch is punctuated by the station speaker  “Stand back from the edge of the platform, the train approaching does not stop at this station”.  After a few of these non-stoppers one began to wonder just why there was a station at all.   When finally a train did stop nobody got on or off which may explain things.

The road home, such an emotive phrase, passes many places and among them a farm that has set up a splendid “Come and buy me, Come and buy” operation slap on the aforementioned 'main' road.  A pull off was called for if only to congratulate myself on not falling for the marketing wiles of “ye Olde Countrie fayre”.  I fell.  A large flat of celeriac seedlings.  Not too much guilt attaches to that – blame Sainsburys for not selling them! 

And so back. The obligatory cup of tea and so to 'work'.  Work at present is inventing a hallucinatory ghost of 'The Great War' for instruments and chorus.  The prospects of my getting this Pandoras box open before the authorities decide it is time for the next World War are remote.  Never mind, I am having a splendid time reliving an era of absurd lost ideals veiled in blood and mud.  As Thomas Pynchon put it - “In this latest war, death was no enemy, but a collabrator”.  A truth echoed on a thousand pious memorials in churchyards and public places across the land.

With not enough done the day quietly dissolves into a complex mix of sunset colours and rain greys out to sea and I settle into an evening of old Poulenc again and so a good long read in the vitally alive world of Thomas Pincheon – the last author to lull one into never never land.