Written 13th, posted 20th June
Having twice now pontificated on the macrosocial circumstances of the present tribulation, it is, perhaps, behoving that I should, on my third foray, come down to the microcosmic and personal. For how ‒ I hear you cry ‒ is No-Dogge himself making out in these unusual times?
I should like then, first of all, to thank you for your crying; but to answer your cry: ‘Rather well ‒ I thank you again!’ This is no doubt partly because I have had the good fortune to know no-one, personally, who has been afflicted by coronavirus. And as for No-Dogge himself …
In fact I can confidently say that my situation is rather exceptional. For while many people in this time have, perforce, been living in isolation, No-Dogge can claim to have been living in positively splendid isolation: ensconced in a ‒ liftless ‒ top-floor flat, up twelve flights of stairs (comprised of 106 steps) with the transient occupants of all five flats below having, since the start ‒ somewhat before the start ‒ of the current lockdown, to the last man (or woman) broken camp and taken flight. Lack of moral fibre, I say! And hence, as, once or twice daily, I run down, and walk up, the echoing stairway, I echo myself the words of Tom Moore’s song:
‘I feel as one
Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!’
This is ironic on No-Dogge’s part: the fact being that he finds the total vacancy of the building more agreeable than otherwise. Indeed, each morning, as he rubs the sleep from his eyes, he is fain to sing ‘For I’m the King of the Castle!’
But how greater is his delight, on leaving his flat, to find London all but deserted! The blessed quiet of the streets, the disappearance of motor traffic, the breathability of the air, the closure of offices, of estate agents, fast-food joints, tattoo parlours, the marbled atriums of asset management companies …! ‘And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil …’ ‒ Would that this present time could continue for ever!
One can actually look at the city! It is, perhaps, the empty roads that elicit greatest gratitude. To be able to walk, a chartered subject of the Queen, insouciantly traversing highways, free from the slightest apprehension of sudden death; to cross, of an evening, an empty Trafalgar Square and see, for once, Landseer’s lions, unsmothered with crowds of clamberingchildren; to stroll through a barely peopled and buskerless Leicester Square … ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …’!
And the delightfully quiescent business premises! Normally Irving Street, through which I often pass on my lawful occasions and frivolous avocations, is alive ‒ if that is the word ‒ with end-to-end, cheek by jowl tourist-baits ‒ I mean restaurants: all fronted (a recently, and unhappily, imported practice), like the barkers at a fairground, by encomiasts who, should one be so heedless as to glance for the least division of a minute at their menu, are liable to engross one’s elbow and expatiate on the rare quality of the comestibles within ‒ ‘The burger in a bun is particularly good today, sir’! It has thus been pleasant to be able to pererrate this short thoroughfare these last weeks, and find all at peace: and ‒ what is particularly grateful to No-Dogge ‒ no barkers!
The one unhappy intrusion in this Elysium was that while all whose work was deemed anything less than essential had, supposedly, been instructed to stay home ‒ for reasons on which I invite my readers to speculate, an exception was made for those employed in construction. And so the rare quiet was, even now, shattered at intervals by men required, without protection, to take the early-morning tube, and employed, with wielded sledge and pneumatic drill, in erecting yet further uninhabited hotels and gormless louring towers of glass and concrete, à la mode de … J.V. Stalin. For flats? … for offices? As a congruent annexe to the ‘Ministry of Justice’ in Petty France? Who knows?
Alfred Nobel is reputed to have established his Prizes, and most notably that for Peace, in repentance at having invented high explosives; but observing the rape of London in ever-continuing progress ‒ in Soho … in the central West End … around London Bridge … in Shoreditch …, one might reflect that dynamite indeed has its uses. Increasingly one wishes for a mask, to cover ‒ not one’s nose and mouth ‒ but one’s eyes. The urge to cover London in skyscrapers, like a copy of New York (a reversal ‒ nicht? ‒ of the natural order of things), was first conceived, when he was London’s Mayor, by tribune-of-the-people ‒ and anti-American! ‒ Ken Livingstone, but was continued with equal zeal by that connoisseur of Greek culture, Boris Johnson. Not that the Greater London Authority has sole responsibility in the matter; even as he writes this, No-Dogge has the pleasure of gazing out at a stonking great, light-occluding ‒ and wholly vacant ‒ construction, of quite demoralizing brutality, erected ‒ before mandated consultation ‒ with the sanction of his very own beneficent, munificent and ‒ and he cannot emphasize the epithet too insistently ‒ totally incorruptible, City Council.
In the early days of the lockdown, it was a joy to walk in St James’s Park ‒ a garden not extensive, as Regent’s Park, but, as many of my readers will know, of outstanding charm and beauty. There were few others about ‒ one had the park nearly to oneself. Few other walkers, but a number of runners: a number which has since increased. It would seem that half the population is now in constant training for the London Marathon. Pheidippides has a lot to answer for! With the wonderful cessation of motorized traffic, it seemed for a time that the prophecy of Lear’s Fool had come to pass:
‘Then comes the time, who lives to see’t
That going shalbe us’d with feet’
‒ but he was singing, it is sure, of walking ‒ not running!
And though, if one is in health, to run can, in due season ‒ and due place ‒ be a spontaneous impulse and delight (though not, in my opinion, to run grim and masochistic marathons), these earnest pounders, intent on turning the park into a running track, are, one feels, in some way misusing it. They disturb its peace. The grass, the trees, the marvellous beds of flowers, the tranquil lake, the secluded pool at its western end, the rare and varied waterfowl, the sudden arresting vistas from either bank across the lake … all this can be hardly seen by the head-phoned aspirant athletes as, stop-watch in hand, they self-absorbedly thud past.
So No-Dogge has taken to perambulating in the quieter ‒ more modest, but still quite lovely ‒ Victoria Embankment Gardens. And the air, the fragrant air, these traffic-less days! Walking there some days ago, just after a sudden shower, one could (mountains apart) imagine oneself in the Alps! ‒ These gardens are also graced, near their eastern exit, by William Giscombe John’s memorial to Sir Arthur Sullivan ‒ the operettist sometimes depreciated by British musicians, though adored by notorious foreign philistines: like Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Debussy, Carlos Kleiber … Cast in bronze, the column is topped by a bust of the composer, while at its foot are heaped an opened volume of music, a mandolin (recalling, perhaps, the Italian descent of Sullivan’s mother?), a mask of Pan, and Pan’s syrinx. But what is remarkable is the full-length figure of a desolate young woman embracing the statue, her gown sliding unheeded down her beautiful, sinuous back, her face hidden, with great artistic cunning, in her upraised hand, seeming almost to melt into the column itself. ‒ The figure is, one assumes, that of Euterpe, the Muse of music.
It has to be said that there are those who are as sniffy about this cenotaph as are others about him whom it honours. Nicholas Pevsner, for example, describes the conception as à la Père Lachaise. Others ironize over its delicate, but undoubted, eroticism. But No-Dogge is a man of rude, untutored taste, and frankly avows that he finds this sculpture touching and ‒ to have recourse again to the simple mot juste ‒ beautiful. It strikes him also as a fitting memorial to the one English musician touched with genius in the two hundred years’ stretch between the death of Purcell and the advent of Elgar.
In fact No-Dogge would wish for just such a memorial himself. Though not just yet, perhaps! Indeed he would, in his ferocious – his insatiable ‒ egotism, stipulate for not just one, but a whole platoon ‒ a company ‒ a battalion ‒ of distraught maidens, whose staunchless tears should deplore (aet. 120) his unbearably premature passing.
Forgive me. I digress.
So, to return sternly to the matter at hand, and to sum up No-Dogge’s negotiation of this past time ‒ the fact is, that with the food shops open, the one serious frustration he has experienced has been the closure of the tobacconists, which alone has driven him, nolens volens, to seek fresh supplies on the internet. That apart, he has been more than content, these last weeks, to forgather in groups of one, and, returning to his eyrie ‒ in Flann O’Brien’s pleasing phrase ‒ to ‘retire into the kingdom of his mind’.
But now, looking back over my scrawl before, with poised forefinger, I try typing it out, it strikes me that much of this letter has been regrettably acerbic, and you will have concluded that its author is lacking in all charity: captious, cantankerous, morose and terminally anti-social: not at all the sort of person you would choose to spend time with. You are almost certainly right: though No-Dogge fondly believes that he can ‒ if the occasion demands, and if there seems no alternative, and if he has a decent drop of drink inside him ‒ make himself passably agreeable.
Whatever! The car showrooms have, with a fine sense of priorities, been long since thrown open, the retailers will now follow, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone ‒ and the voice of the concrete-mixer is heard in our land. On which heartening note, No-Dogge concludes this letter, with (he hopes) a gracious au revoir.
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