Dr. Johnson's Bark

"I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark."

Samuel Johnson

Boss Trad: Alden Aficionado

Like shit-faced gatecrashers at your hot girlfriend's 21st birthday bash, certain life changes have in recent months impressed themselves upon me in a most untoward manner. I have written about some of them here.

Through it all, I need hardly tell you, I have maintained a stiff upper. I have pursued an unwavering course of acquiescence and non-sobriety with admirable persistence. It is our duty to accept our fate calmly and without rancor. We should embrace life as it really is--not as we wish it to be. Easier said than done, I realise, but it is a metric by which I have always discerned friend from foe.

Still, the worm does turn and one's fortitude is rewarded in the end. As you have probably heard by now, changes are afoot on the job front: I recently affiliated my firm with a large private bank, with a local office. The bank was keen to acquire access to hedge fund and private equity clients and willing to pay a pretty penny. And I was keen to collect a nice pile of dosh, as vulgar as that may sound to some.

One of the pleasantly surprising aspects of this new partnership is that one of the senior private bankers is a full-blooded Brooks Brothers aficionado, a veritable walking Ben Silver advertisement. He is a staunch trad for whom donning pin-striped suits, Alden tasseled loafers, BB OCBDs, horn-rimmed specs, grey flannels, and Alden cordovan loafers, seems to be second nature. Like all sound men, he has a predilection for Alden loafers, judging by how frequently he wears them in the office. He also wears them with his suits. Anyway, sensitivities prevent me from providing more details, as you can understand, but I interpret it as a good omen. We shall see.

I am fortunate then to be surrounded by sensible and well-dressed professionals. And just in time, as I have been craving a change of landscape. Events of the last few months have caused me to reassess priorities and to determine what is truly important in life, such as classic clothing and fine shoes. Because unlike your hot 21-year old girlfriend, your Alden loafers were created with a long-term relationship in mind. Allocate your affections accordingly.

Ted and Ralph (The Fast Show)

Suit You Sir ! (The Fast Show)

When thinking about the 1990s, I reckon there were three things, culturally-speaking of course, that got me through the decade: 1) alcohol, 2) Britpop, 3) alcohol, and 4) The Fast Show. These are two of my favourites from The Fast Show, for sartorial-minded readers:

Groundstroke

Do you play tennis? I do. Or at least, I did. In my youth I was club champion in my age group. My height and reach gave me an advantage. I wore a white Lacoste polo shirt, white shorts, and white tennis shoes. During the winter season I played under heated tents. In my mid-teens however I switched to squash, which, as you know, is an entirely different game. More on squash later.

In recent years in Southern California I have again taken up tennis. It is a sociable sport conducive to professional networking. Unlike golf, which in my opinion is for dead men walking, tennis actually demands a measure of physical fitness and mental alertness. Neglected middle-aged women desiring romance, I find, are particuarly drawn to tennis.

During a recent match I sustained a knee injury and damaged eye. I was sent to the doctor. In the course of the examination they measured my blood pressure. Not good. The doctor came in to see me.

"I don't want to scare you," he began--which had the immediate effect of scaring me--"but you have extremely elevated blood pressure. In fact you're in the top 5%."

Holy shit, I thought. "What does that mean?"

"It means you could drop dead at any minute, from a stroke," he explained.

That was all I needed to hear. Time to regroup. Drastic action is required. Long luncheons and cocktail hours, I am afraid to report, shall have to be curtailed. And alcohol and tobacco are to be rationed under emergency wartime conditions. I will continue going to the gym and participating in various games and physical activities, including tennis.

If I should collapse on the court, do make sure I expire in the arms of a beautiful woman.

White Car in Germany (The Associates)

Top Lads

Brideshead Revealed: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

Sloane Rangers Awake!

The era of the Sloane Ranger now seems as distant as the Fifties
By Peter Whittle
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Amazing as it may seem, it was 28 years ago today that Prince Charles was exchanging vows with Lady Diana Spencer. There were a fair number of parties going on that day. Suppose William and Kate were doing the same thing today. Would we be rolling out the barrel?

That time seems as distant as the 50s. And there was also something very distinct, culturally, about the early 1980s. In his book The Triumph of the Political Class, Peter Oborne referred to Charles and Diana’s wedding as the centrepiece of a shortlived counterblast by an old Establishment which was soon to collapse. The Empire Strikes Back, if you like.

That same year, 1981, a large part of the country was in thrall to that lavish saga of doomed aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, which was showing on ITV - yes, astonishingly, ITV. In the cinema, Chariots of Fire and its tale of gentlemen runners competing for King and Country was a home-grown hit which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. In the pop charts, the new romantic Prince Charming himself, Adam Ant, was standing and delivering, a celebration of the traditional British penchant for dressing up and eccentricity.

Peter York and Ann Barr published The Sloane Ranger Handbook and had a massive bestseller. A sub-division, known as the ‘Young Fogeys’, made a brief appearance. Jeremy Hackett realised there was quite a market in clothes of the tweed and four-button cuff variety and so started a little sceond-hand shop selling them on the Kings Road. The ‘Season’ had a major revival, and with it reappeared black tie and ballgowns.

So what was it all about? Not, as yet, Thatcherism; in 1981 the ‘loadsa-money’ city yuppy had yet to make an appearance on the scene. With its strong aristocratic and nostalgic aesthetic, the cultural scene of that year could hardly be seen as a celebration of a new competitiveness and entrepreneurialism. It was instead perhaps a reaction to the grim uniformity and utilitarianism of the 70s, the nihilism of punk, and the general ropey, dingy quality of public life. We were looking upwards at the aristocracy, and backwards at our past.

Well, Brideshead came back last year, this time in a new cinema version, but proved dead on arrival. The New Sloane Ranger handbook was published too, and sunk without trace. Looking upwards now, there is hardly an aesthetic inspiration to be had in a class of disconnected Russian oligarchs. And for the young in particular, the past, which has been gradually erased from the popular imagaination, is no longer an option. As we stumble through this recession, and watch as the social fabric melts away, where do we avert our eyes this time?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterwhittle/100004961/the-era-of-the-sloane-ranger-now-seems-as-distant-as-the-fifties/


Sloane Rangers arise... quietly.
By Henry Cave Devine
Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Peter Whittle of The New Culture Forum has written a pointed and poignant submission to the Telegraph yesterday titled: "The era of the Sloane Rangers now seems as distant as the Fifties". I submit the following observations:

The numbers appear to have vastly dwindled with the passage of time as they grew older and blended into a world of books, gardens, children out in the world, smaller cars, activities less expensive and labour intensive than owning horses... and adapted quietly to a changed UK and world.

Their children inherited a less-secure existance (which they may be concerned about), and cocaine use along with binge drinking have grown and taken a painful toll. Many of their parents have passed to the next world taking dignity, WW II memories and Norland nannies with them, except the few that are now plain-clothes and non-Scottish, as have all but disappeared many of the valuable ceremonies such as lunch with wine at Boodle's or White's, CofE attendance and Barbour coat shopping as a rite of passage with lessons on ownership to follow.

But the SR's are out there, and where they have survived are still quietly congregating with friends and dogs, walking the paths through Surrey and Oxfordshire, Bombay Sapphire and the Macallan 18 on the sideboard with a few splits of soda and quinine water and an ice bucket slighly dented but well intact, and headscarfs to keep in the frizz and keep peeping eyes from viewing gray hair roots. And some are actually able to talk to their children about the mistakes they made and the time they wasted on events with nothing to show not even recountable memories.

SR's know not to raise their heads above the parapet in NuLabour's view and to keep their class quiet while others of lesser education and breeding but much more money give loud demonstrations of how "classy" money has made them when they unlike the SR's are clueless on anything having to do with dignity, family and how to mix a G&T to the right proportion before discussing the number of birds on the last walk-up.

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/henry_cave_devine/blog/2009/07/29/sloane_rangers_arise_quietly

It's Your Britain

Jeanne (Air et Françoise Hardy)

My father: in memoriam

My father died three weeks ago. He succumbed struggling with numerous complications after a three-month fight following open-heart surgery. At the end his body simply shut down. His final fading was accompanied by family members and a joint recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. When I touched his head and said: 'Go well father,' it was cold.

He was retired. Ten years ago he left as head of a Wall Street investment firm. After college he had risen from salesman to managing director in charge of business development. He also handled investor relations. He managed the New York headquarters as well as offices in London, Europe, and the Middle East. His success has been attributed to uncommon drive and talent, which he certainly had in abundance, but I suspect luck also played a part. As an ambitious, educated white man with connections starting out in the 1960s--before the era of racial quotas, feminism, and mass immigration--he would have been a total idiot not to have achieved something of note.

He was an extremely generous man with an abiding dedication to family. His was a lively spirit with a mischievous sense of humour. He was much given to practical jokes and pranks. His bad temper was notorious. Even now his former colleagues and subordinates talk about it.

My father and I never met. We were strangers. We were too different, with opposing views of life. He ridiculed my accent, combativeness, bookish inclinations, cultural interests, financial conservatism, and taste in girlfriends. Where my father was sociable always seeking a party, I was a loner most comfortable with two or three close friends. He was not an athlete by any means, though he was a sports addict, especially of football, including the Harvard-Yale game; indeed his example has led me to theorise that a man's athletic inaptitude is directly proportional to his enthusiasm for televised sporting events. He loved watching baseball, basketball, and football, none of which he could play, whereas I preferred rugby, tennis, squash, surfing, and polo. He was a decent tennis player and keen fisherman.

Partly for this reason, I believe, as well as a few others yet undiscussed here, today I have murder in my heart. It stays there like a mussel glued to wave-washed rocks. I attribute it in part to his neglect and pure bloody-mindedness. Over the years I have suppressed it by an irregular course of self-medication and isolation, the results of which, I suppose, can occasionally be seen here. But I am not one to blame others or to point fingers; they do the best they can and for that we must be grateful.

He was descended from an English Catholic family in the North of England whose roots can be traced back to the 11th C.. In his family tree can be found farmers, knightly landowners, Catholic and Anglican priests, and, in recent decades, classical musicians, portrait painters, and surgeons. His father—my grandfather—was an international oil company executive who arrived in the US via Toronto, Canada. His mother was a titled Baltic German, alcoholic, and drug addict.

The burial itself was an exercice in simplicity and grace, attended by about 25 family members and close friends on a sun-filled day overlooking the ocean. A Roman Catholic priest officiated, to the well-suppressed consternation, I am sure, of my WASP mother. The memorial service last week, attended by about 400 family and friends, also occurred without incident, though I was tempted to add a bit of colour; when the moment came, however, I did not act. I am not given to ornate displays of emotionalism. For my father I would much rather have liked a funeral pyre in the style of the Vikings, from whom our family is descended. For myself I prefer a simple grave in a plain field. Memorial rituals are for the benefit of the living as much as for the dead.

Every family is a ruin. It is left to the survivors, the living, the walking wounded, to pick our way through rotting legacies and crumbling memories as best we can. If we are fortunate enough we will have found in time a healing love, a blessed connectedness, that eases our God-provided mission.

Lutetia Dandy Club

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 !