Prescience of Immortality

"A mother's love for the child of her body differs essentially from all other affections, and burns with so clear and steady a flame that it appears like the one unchangeable thing in this earthly mutable life, so that when she is no longer present it is still a light to our steps and a consolation.

It came to me as a great surprise a few years ago to have my secret and most cherished feelings about my own mother expressed to me as I had never heard them expressed before by a friend who, albeit still young, has made himself a name in the world, one who had never known a mother, she having died during his infancy. He lamented that it had been so, not only on account of the motherless childhood and boyhood he had known, but chiefly because in after life it was borne in on him
that he had been deprived of something infinitely precious which others have--the enduring and sustaining memory of a love which is unlike any other love known to mortals, and is almost a sense and prescience of immortality."

Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life, WH Hudson (1918)

le recours aux forêts

"Contre l'Etat technicisé omniprésent...le recours aux forêts réelles ou symboliques où se réfugiaient autrefois les hors-la-loi islandais permet d'affirmer individuellement sa liberté...L'Anarque qui, au lieu de s'opposer brutalement à un pouvoir qui risque de l'écraser, se met en marge de lui par un semblant d'acceptation qui lui assure sa liberté intérieure".

Ernst Jünger

The Light Pours Out Of Me (Magazine)

Occidental Dandy-Club

Old School Ties I

Monks and Grey Flannel

Recent capital market gyrations have encouraged me to rummage round my walk-in closet and get out my banker kit. In the photo (above) I am depicted wearing a pair of Alfred Sargent monk shoes and a grey flannel chalk stripe suit from Brooks Brothers. The current unpopularity of financial workers has probably discouraged some bankers and brokers from sporting the uniform of their profession. Not me. Within the office or without, I sport the chalk stripes with defiance.

The Last of the Montecristos

Women and weed rightly belong to the world of young men. For more settled chaps such as yours truly, their very availability is temptation itself. Resistance, I find, becomes harder to sustain. It was with that thought in mind that two months ago I accepted a box of 25 Montecristo cigars carefully hand-delivered to me from the Middle East via Paris. The picture (above) shows the lone survivor of the initial shipment.

Portrait: Gregor von Rezzori

A Strategy for Living: Pt. I

(i) Today our people exist in a modern techno-managerial state whose increasingly authoritarian form of rule is directly proportional to societal decline.

(ii) To get along, we must be reduced to a lowest common denominator. Any differences or inequalities in thought, culture, achievement, and feeling, must be eliminated. But inequality is the natural condition of mankind; to eradicate inequality we must eradicate mankind.

(iii) I repeat: inequality is the natural condition of mankind. We differ in many things, such as abilities, talents, material success, level of suffering, perception. Each one of us has a place, a part to play. Every one of us has a unique destiny. Yet we are all interdependent. Man is a social being.

(iv) There are those -- perhaps the majority of people--who are happily oblivious to life’s deeper meanings, who are content to amble through life like mere vertebrates. And then there are those people endowed with a penetrating vision that is as cruel as it is clear. These are the poets.

(v) One of the most painful things a man can endure is to be aware of the fundamental absurdity of life. It sets him apart from the masses, for whom physical pleasure is everything.

(vi) Life is absurd and tragic. But in the end we can only set our face to the wind and laugh. That, I think, is the best strategy.

In Praise of Auberon Waugh

J.Press Tie Selection

Silhouette Island, Seychelles, August 2008

During our honeymoon tour of the Indian Ocean and East Africa late last year, my new bride and I travelled in the Seychelles, including a stay on Silhouette Island. My natural excitement at being in the Seychelles with my bride was enhanced by the diverse wildlife to be found in the country.

Silhouette, as I discovered, is home to the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles (NPTS). The NPTS was established in 1992 as the first environmental non-governmental organisation registered in Seychelles. NPTS aims to restore and preserve viable ecosystems and takes a long-term view of ecology. Much of its work involves monitoring and scientific research. This research is providing new insights into ecological problems and ecosystem management. My bride, knowing my intense interest in zoology, herpetology, and wildlife in general, insisted we visit. However, when we did, we found the NPTS centre closed; I duly left a note with our name and number. That same evening around 9:00PM, as we were headed to the bar, we received a call from the nice English scientist and conservationist who runs the centre. He apologised for having missed us earlier, but had gone to Mahé (the main island) for supplies. He invited us for a tour that night.

The NPTS site on Silhouette features a visitor centre, giant tortoise enclosure, and tortoise breeding compound. In fact it is home to the Seychelles Giant Tortoise Conservation Project, dedicated to the preservation and propagation of the Seychelles giant tortoise. The visitor centre itself contains a thorough exhibit of the local fauna, including a live endangered Seychelles terrapin, incubating giant tortoise eggs, a miniscule tree frog no bigger than the fingernail of your smallest finger, and a ferocious-looking (dead) specimen of the poisonous giant centipede (we had spotted one during our earlier stay on Mahé).

The Great Tweed Look: J.Press Autumn 1986

Locals Only !

Ffizz

Does anyone, I wonder, remember this most delightful televisual programme from the 1980s? It aired (if that is the right term) in the late 1980s, only for a season or two. I recall watching it not with any special attentiveness, but with a fervent sensation growing in my breast, which, on mature reflection, can only be called envy. Why? It featured two hard-drinking, well-to-do wine merchants, Hugo and Jack, suddenly forced, by an impending recession and their accountant's demise, to brazen out their wine business in grubby shirt sleeves, moist brows, and hours of hard work. It was notable, I think, for the amount of serious wine-drinking it portrayed. Which is why I celebrate it here and raise a glass (or three) to its memory.

Simon Raven Respectfully

"For any authority, however flexible and however enlightened, must in the last resort of all depend upon respect. In King’s we were all accounted equals but we were equals who respected one another and based our respect in a proper recognition of individual excellence; and so there could be authority between equals. But in the world at large there is no respect. Or rather, there is so much respect, since anything or anybody at all must be accorded it, that the word is made meaningless. The most trivial platitudes, the most misleading and sentimental half-truths, the merest non-sense—all must be received with ‘respect,’ less feelings be hurt and ‘justifiable resentment’ aroused. Is the work shoddy? Are the foundations shallow, the support unseasoned, the bricks carelessly laid? But this, my friend, is the work of free and equal men, and even as the house totters to the ground you must treat the builders with ‘respect.’ Fools, knaves, malingerers; the stupid, the incapable, the idle and the vicious, the spiteful, the envious, the mediocre and the mean—any and all of these you must ‘respect.’ Respect the people, respect their ‘rights,’ respect labour and respect its dignity, respect simplicity, respect ignorance, respect superstitious opinion, public morals, minority prejudice and majority hysteria—all these you must and will respect. But one thing you may not respect. Excellence or merit. Because if you respect this, you stand to allow that someone is better than someone else, and that, by current reckoning, is to destroy respect. Respect has been inverted: it is now what the great or gifted man must pay to his average fellows—in return for which they may possibly suffer him to serve them. Their respect is reserved for a different purpose—to console and flatter themselves. There can be none to spare for the authority of learning or of practiced tolerance or even of plain fact: still less to spare for that honourable figure of a vanished age—the English Gentleman."

Simon Raven, The English Gentleman (1961)

Kill Your TV !

Girls on Film (Duran Duran)

Eton Wall Game (1921)

My research at the BFI National Archives has uncovered footage of the Eton Wall Game from 1921. Played at Eton College every St. Andrew's Day. Note the slim physiques, proper haircuts (minus facial hair), and bone structure of the young chaps at play. I can imagine some of Evelyn Waugh's contemporaries amongst the spectators.

American Patriot

I like to imagine this angry young American is wearing a pair of black longwing brogues, perhaps from Alden, J.Press, or J.Crew. The specs and short-sleeve dress shirt, of course, I can do without, and so can you. However, it is what appears to be an Americanised version of the OE tie that would cause me to cross the street to avoid running into this irritated fellow. It's simply not on.

The Matador

The Four Yorkshiremen

The Four Yorkshiremen, with Harry Enfield, Alan Rickman, Eddie Izzard, and Vic Reeves. I watch this video regularly and it never fails to crack me up. If you don't understand it, you can be forgiven. If you do and you still fail (or refuse) to emit at least a chuckle, then you are beyond saving. Classic. Enjoy.

Tintin et moi (Hergé documentary)

"This drawing is printed in my consciousness" (5:06) 6/8
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Kerouac (en français)

Black Tie Affair

Tonight I co-hosted an investment seminar at a local beach resort. It was a casual event. I wore a lightweight Paul Stuart tweed coat in a tan and green check pattern, charcoal worsted trousers, black tassel loafers, ecru OCBD from Brooks Brothers, and a black knit tie. I normally don't wear knit ties, much less one in black, but I thought it was a subtle enough acknowledgement of the significance of the day. In other words, my very own black badge of resistance. I held court admirably, I think, as a mass of retirees, local executives, and business owners pressed upon me their concerns for the future. If one looked closely, one could see real fear in their eyes. It would have been quite a sobering experience, I imagine, if I had not downed so many whiskeys.

Born Mufti: George Adamson

The photograph (left) depicts George Adamson (1906-1989), the renowned East African game ranger, conservationist, author, and film maker. Born in India and educated at public school in England, at age 18 he went to British East Africa (Kenya) to work on a coffee plantation. After trying various professions, he settled on a career as a game warden with the Kenya Game Department. He retired in 1961 to a reserve to care for his growing collection of lions. His life with these animals resulted in, amongst others, the well-known movie Born Free. Adamson was assassinated by Somali bandits in 1989. In the illustration he is depicted wearing what appears to be a tweed jacket in a tickweave pattern, a shirt with a spread collar, grey flannel trousers, and the tie of the East African Wildlife Society. If a rugged chap who spends his life in the bush with lions can look presentable, surely we can too. What is our excuse?

pensées corsaires

"Les actions les plus efficaces, c'est-à-dire les actions d'avant-garde, ne furent pas menées l'insigne à la boutonnière et le drapeau au vent, mais en civil. Pour prendre une image militaire, elles furent conçues comme des opérations de commando derrière les lignes, mais avec le soutien de la population. Quant à l'esprit et à la technique, leurs instigateurs furent les Robins des bois qui précédaient l'arrivée du Roi Richard.

L'idée doit donc être de susciter quelque chose qui soit en même temps possible et juste et aille dans le sens voulu, mais sans l'encadrer directement. En d'autres termes, si l'on essaie d'être une avant-garde politique et sociale et non des chefs de bandes, des marchands de votes ou les roitelets mendiants de ceux-ci, on ne doit pas s'occuper des retours immédiats, de l'utilité directe, de la gestion personnelle de ce que l'on suscite. On doit agir, un point c'est tout. Et on doit le faire bien, autrement c'est inutile."

Gabriele Adinolfi, Pensées corsaires: abécédaire de lutte et de victoire (Les Editions du Lore, 2008)

Club Colours

The Bloody White Baron

Head Dress (Amazing Baby)

Video removed.

This is what I am listening to now.