There's No Place Like Home: Student Rooms at Yale, 1870–1910

Saint-Exupery

"If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

The Wisdom of the Sands, Saint-Exupery

To Lose My Life (White Lies)

Do Weejuns Dream of Designer Feet?

The life of a columnist is never still and in recent weeks, as you may have heard, my social calendar has filled up with cocktail receptions, book signings, and jaunty outings to local cafes.

I am a sociable enough fellow, both genial and striking-looking, as you have probably sussed by now, but the happy-chappiness is punctuated by regular bouts of melancholia for which the best cure is solitary refinement. And cocktails. Nothing personal mind you, but my tolerance for most other people, I have discovered over the years, is directly proportional to cocktail intake.

Last week I went drinking with some chums. After work we filled the bankers’ bar in Aurelius Heights before onset of the astral clouds. A vintage cream motomaton parked outside glinting in the starshine attracted a group of females in cocktail dresses and silk arm warmers. Inside: the din of hoary pyschonauts, frothing-at-the-mouth in chalk-striped suit and chisel-toed kickers and calling for more oysters and Veuve Clicquot.

In a black Versace dress of fine Italian wool a cherry-minded bint revealed to me the extent of her loneliness. She had spent three years here on assignment from the bank, she said, and had made zero significant friends. Tilting back her well-coifed head, she took another sip of champagne. “I’m moving back home to Georgia,” she continued, her eyes widening. “I want to be near my family.”

The mood changed. A troop of razor-toothed Planetarians and their Tongan allies in t-shirt and baggy denim entered the place, gathering in the corner like a roiling stormhead of angry black and sipping cheap lager. Across our view with a loping ape gait moved chunky hoodie seething with criminal intent.

Violence is always a possibility, then as now. Due to rising anti-Weejun sentiment I sometimes keep in my Tweed jacket pocket a Teutonic dagger, which I now unsheathed and held by my side at thigh level, hoping the droids would get the message before I was forced to cut the wires. Violence works—contrary to what you may have heard. An act of violence against the robots is an act of liberation. Do not tell yourself otherwise.

There is special beauty in decline. As disintegration occurs essence is gradually exposed like old bones in an eroded sandbank. The return of the time of the Weejun is almost upon us. For myself I ask only for consistent supply of codeine and wine and books and the means with which to buy every now and then a pair of Alden tassel loafers, Brooks Brothers OCBDs, and a Southwick suit. Am I asking too much?

The days pass in pleasant routine. I spend much of my time in the science library of the Technical College conducting research, leafing through back issues and revisiting articles that caused so much controversy when first published, but now look jarringly prescient in their reasoning. For people like us, there is no peace, ever; it is our fate to lurch after shadows across long field. But there are moments, I will concede, when the situation is not as it appears and further action is required.

Dreamhome: Love is Our Resistance

The Mysterious Cities of Gold

Afternoon viewing in the early 1980s.

The Last Shore

The Modern World

On the Beautiful Blue Danube (Johann Strauss II)

Brooks Brothers: Clothes for the Yachtsman

On Stiffeners

Allow me a brief word on stiffeners. I am not referring to cocktails or Viagra, but to the slim metallic inserts in men's shirt collars. Collar stiffeners, or, as they are known in your country, collar stays. I mention them now because twice in the past fortnight I have been on the receiving end of puzzled inquiries into their use, if you can believe it. The first time a young banker asked me as we were riding the lift how I kept my shirt collars from curling. The query astounded me, but I was prepared as always with an authoritative-sounding explanation and referred him to the nearest men's shop for a pair of brass ones. Speaking of brass, recently over premium-strength cocktails a good chum expressed surprise at my use of brass stays, as his are plastic. I took them out for his inspection and they were passed around the group. Brass, I explained, is not the only option; collar stays are also available in sterling silver, gold, palladium, and titanium for the sporty set. Aristocratic bankers in Japan use razor-sharp bamboo stiffeners, whose fragility helps them maintain correct neck posture, avoiding sudden motions, when meeting with eminent clients. In the photo (above) you can see my pair of brass stiffeners lounging about in a box made of Russia calf recently acquired from Cleverley, along with a few trinkets for which I no longer have much use. In life as in love, it is important to keep not only a stiff upper lip, but a stiff collar as well.

Tartan Tuesday

Hackett Suit

Reds Don't Surf !

A Tribute To Our Troops: Rhodesian Forces

Coming to a Western country near you...

California Girlz

Stand by the JAMS

Chatwin OCBD

Wind From The Carolinas (Robert Wilder)

Wind from the Carolinas is a novel by Robert Wilder based on the true history of a family throughout the 1800s. It is the story of the Camerons, an aristocratic Tory clan who fled the South in the wake of the American Revolution to rebuild their baronial plantations and recapture their lost fortune in the turbulent, windswept Bahama islands.

Harbour Island Bahamas

Von Bülow Style

In London I lived across the street and frequently spotted him peddling a bicycle through Onslow Gardens and along the Brompton Road. He wore a brown trilby, light mac, and brown brogues. I've not seen the film--in fact have no desire to do so--and have no opinion on the matter. But I will say, anyone who is the target of slippery Ivy League-trained American lawyers can not be an altogether bad chap. I raise my glass of wine to the rakes, cads, and corsairs of the modern world.

Confessions of a Young WASP

The Runagates Club (John Buchan)

"A London dining-club is a curious organism, for it combines great tenacity of life with a chameleon-like tendency to change its colour. A club which begins as a haunt of roysterers may end as a blameless academic fraternity; another, which at the start is a meeting-place of the intelligent, becomes in the progress of time a select coterie of sportsmen. So it has been with the institution of which I am the chronicler. It has changed its name and is now the Thursday Club, and the number of permissible members has been increased. Its dinners are admirable; conversation at its board is dignified and a little serious; it has enlarged its interests, and would not now refuse a Lord Chancellor or a Bishop.

But in its infancy it was different. Founded just after the close of the War by a few people who had been leading queer lives and wanted to keep together, it was a gathering of youngish men who met only for reminiscences and relaxation. It was officially limited to fifteen members--fifteen, because a dozen was dull, thirteen was unlucky, and fourteen had in those days an unpleasing flavour of President Wilson and his points. At first, until Burminster took it in hand, the food and wine were execrable; hence the name of the Runagates Club, given it by Lamancha from the verse in the 68th Psalm: "He letteth the runagates continue in scarceness."

But all defects in the fare were atoned for by the talk, which, like that of Praed's Vicar,

"slipped from politics to puns,
And passed from Mahomet to Moses."

You could never tell what topic would engage the company, and no topic was left unadorned, for I do not suppose there has ever been a group with such varied experiences and attainments. Each man was in his own way an expert, but, while knowledge might be specialised, the life of each had been preposterously varied. The War had flattened out grooves and set every man adventuring. So the lawyer and the financier were also soldiers; the Greek scholar had captained a Bedawin tribe; the traveller had dabbled in secret service; the journalist had commanded a battalion; the historian had been mate on a novel kind of tramp; the ornithologist had watched more perilous things than birds; the politician had handled a rougher humanity than an English electorate. Some of the members, like Lord Lamancha, Sir Edward Leithen and Sir Arthur Warcliff, were familiar to the public; others were known only to narrow circles; but at the Runagates Club they were of one family and totem, like old schoolfellows.

Good talk is not for reproduction in cold print. But at those early dinners there were reminiscences which may well be rescued from oblivion, for all were story-tellers on occasion. Indeed, it became the fashion once a month for a member to entertain the company with a more or less complete narrative. From these I have made a selection which I now set forth."

Preface to The Runagates Club, John Buchan (1928)

Christ Church Beagles 1937

Famous Rugby Jerseys

G&T

The shock of stock market volatility in recent weeks has led to brief periods of detachment and absent-mindedness, much more so than usual. A result of which, errors have been committed. I reveal one here. In the accompanying photographic image (at port), young Digby, a Hermann's Tortoise (Testudo hermanni hercegovinensis) from the mountains of eastern Croatia, is shown leaving the scene of a spilled cocktail in great haste. Normally he is a cheerful enough fellow, friendly, tranquil, and dignant, if at times given to an aristocratic haughtiness that is typical of his race, who likes nothing more than to sunbathe by the pool whilst tucking into Caesar salad. But in this case, the look on his face is one of extreme displeasure and one can only imagine his mood.

Brooks Brothers Crew 1931

On the Marble Cliffs (Ernst Jünger)

The Barclay

Brideshead Revisited: Always Summer

"If only it could be like this always--always alone, always summer, the fruit always ripe, and Aloysius always in a good temper."