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I've hesitated before re-reading the Jungle Books. They meant so much to me when I was a kid- and I was afraid the magic wouldn't hold- but this is Kipling- and I needn't have worried.

I started with "The Undertakers" which has an elderly crocodile reminiscing about the joys of eating people and concludes with a British engineer blasting him to bits with an elephant gun and his "friends" the stork and the hyena eating what is left of him. "Listen with Mother" it ain't. I remember finding it difficult to understand- because it hints and alludes and never explains- but not turning a hair at its horror. We go wrong when we try to protect kids from the grim and ghastly because there's nothing they like more....

The Mowgli stories are the heart of the matter. As Edward Shanks wrote in 1940 (thanks to the Kipling Society for the quote) "Kipling has the myth-making genius. It is rare in modern literature but it is a sign of greatness whenever it occurs...." They're not all equally good- and sometimes stray a little too close to allegory and the pedagogical- but all carry that mythic charge. How I deplore what Disney did to them!

I've just read an article by Alan Hollinghurst in which he admits to being 70. And there I was I thinking of him as one of the literary world's bright young things. It took me a little aback.

Not a bright young thing at all but a literary lion nearing the end of his career- a member of my own generation.

So who are the bright young things?

I run through the contemporary writers I've read and like- or at least have read about and think I might like- and almost all of them are clocking on a bit (I can think of one exception.) This also takes me aback.

Do bright young things still publish novels or are they all working in television?

Or am I just hopelessly out of touch?

I now know how to perform CPR.

If you don't crack a few ribs you ain't doing it right.

And since a person who needs CPR is officially classed as dead you can't hurt them- or lay yourself open to prosecution. If you smash 'em up you've only damaged a corpse and if you bring 'em back to life (which is statistically unlikely) you'll have done a great and wonderful thing.

Dawn got this guy from a local company to come and give us instruction. He had us practising on Resusci Anne dolls- which have faces modelled on this long-dead lady- L'Inconnue de Seine- and thereby hangs a tale.

L'inconnue_de_la_Seine_(masque_mortuaire).jpeg

L'inconnue_de_la_Seine_(masque_mortuaire).jpeg

The legend goes that L'Inconnue was fished out of the river Seine c.1880- and the pathologist was so taken with her beauty that he made a death mask and someone else made copies for sale and the thing went viral- and no decadent poet or artist of the turn of the century would have been seen dead without a version of the lady hanging on his wall. Experts now doubt her origin story- because drowned bodies bloat- but the rest is perfectly true.

And she's still with us. And serving humanity nearly 150 years after her death. You couldn't make it up. Or you could but no-one would believe you.....

resusi anne close.jpeg

We went back to Bates's Farm and the bluebell woods. Anemones reduced to stragglers but the bluebells at their peak. To be honest I thought they were a bit disappointing this year; perhaps they haven't had enough rain. There's a charity bookshop at the farm- and I bought a copy of the Bab Ballads. This is a book I used to own but got rid of in some earlier winnowing of my library.

Earler we ate at the Long Man in Wilmington. Just as good as last time. Some of the seating comes out of Berwick church. Pews. And on the backs of them, regularly spaced, little plaques with the names of members of the Bloomsbury Group- who used to congragate at the Bell's house just up the road. I drew my fellow diners attention to this but I don't think they were as interested as I was. Can you not see the assembled Bloomsberries seated in their pews listening to a sermon, standing to sing a hymn- Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster? No, pehaps not....

I wonder if they drank at the Long Man- or The Black Horse Hotel as it was back then? Were they pubby types? I reckon I can see E,M. Forster sinking a pint more readily than I can see him siitting under a sermon. One could probably find out. Those lives are terribly well documented. But I doubt that I'll bother. I've searched my heart and find that I don't greatly love any of them.

The May is out- just in advance of the beginning of the month for which it is named. I know nothing more glorious. I love cherry blossom, but I love hawthorn just as much, perhaps even more because it has an outlaw vibe. Cherry is domestic, hawthorn is wild. Traditionally you don't bring it into the house. It's a fairy tree. Hurt it and it'll hurt back- or perhaps the offended fairies will. It carries knives.....

And where there's a lot of it there's this heady, heavy scent. It's not a pretty scent. Walter de la Mare has a poem entitled "The hawthorn hath a deathly smell"- which is probably a quote from some profoundly obscure 17th century author. Some people hate it. The flowers release a chemical called trimethylamine- which is also released by decaying flesh....

We had a great deal of hawthorn on the farm. The picture at the top of this post was taken there. When we moved to Eastbourne it was one of my priorities that we should plant a hawthorn in the garden.....

I gave up on mainstream media a while back.

And now I follow alternative media.

The shows pop up in my YouTube feed.

(Did you notice where Russell Brand became a born-again Christian? And how he now punctuates his schtick with pious ejaculations?)

But increasingly I'm thinking "Now which of you can I trust?" and "What's your agenda?" and "Why do I care about the doings of the power elites anyway?"

And this image comes into my mind of a person crossing a vast churned up field, every step laborious, the mud sticking to their boots....

"it's called The Religious Society of Friends" says Ailz.

"I prefer Society of Friends," I reply firmly.

And that's what I will call it in anything I say or write. That word "religious" ever so slightly gives me the creeps.

As do words like "God", "worship", "prayer".

Which puts me in line with Tony Biggin, the composer, who gave us a very good talk on Non-theism yesterday.

He identifies as a "bad Quaker". If anyone thinks of marketing T shirts with that on the front I'll buy one.

After the Meeting we took Rosamund home to Polegate and then we kept on driving.....

The pub at Wilmington is called The Long Man, referencing the chalk-cut hill figure it sits beneath. We went there a couple of times before Covid when it was called The Giant's Rest.; it was good then and it's good now. There are prints by Eric Ravilious on the wall. This is a storied land....

And here's the garden as viewed from a first floor window. A bit rough and ready but that was always the plan....

This is the house and garden as they were in early April 2022- shortly after we moved in.

And here is what you see if you try to take a picture from roughly the same spot in late April 2025.

The gorse which was one of our first plantings has filled its niche just as intended.

Move to the left a bit and you see we do still have a lawn, but it has been encroached upon.

I don't hate grass but I don't want it to be anything more than punctation between the shrubs and trees. Who really needs large green spaces unless a game of tennis or croquet is envisaged?

This seems to be the only portrait of Charlotte Corday done from life.

At her trial she noticed that up in the gallery a young man was sketching her- and asked the favour of the court that in the short time that elapsed between trial and execution he should be allowed to come to her prison cell and finish his work. And so it transpired that she spent her last few hours having her portrait painted.

She took herself very seriously.

But then they all did. She and Marat both believed you could change the world by killing people. Victim and murderer- like two peas in a pod.

The portraitist Jean-Jacques Hauer is known for nothing else. He was employed at the Theatre Francais, which presumably means he was a scene painter. He hasn't given us a great work of art but he has captured something. This is a real person, not the "angel of assassination" she became to a heroine worshipping posterity....

A couple of local by-elections are happening in May and roads in the wards affected (not ours) are sprouting bright orange signs (the same signs as in the general election) that say Lib-Dems Winning Here. My dreaming self reacted by designing an AI poster in support of our MP, Josh Babarinde, featuring him as an adorable, furry raccoon delivering a speech in the parliament of the animals and another, highlighting his opposition to sexual exploitation, which was alarmingly obscene.

Rumour reverberates, bouncing off walls, that there's a video doing the rounds that our current PM would like to see suppressed. There's a still image in the media which shows two unidentifiable human beings in an embrace which If it's not a fake it might as well be, because it reveals nothing. Kissing you best bro is not illegal but taking a lot of money from him and not declaring it could be fatal to a Prime Minister. No-one would be greatly sorry if Keir Starmer had to resign- yet another in the line of terrible Prime Ministers that we've sweated under since the beginning of the century.

Meanwhile, over in revolutionary France, no-one can get a grip on the tiller. Jacobins are killing Girondins and vice versa, our best general has defected to the Austrians, the provinces are sending out counter-revolutionary armies and Jean-Paul Marat- that courageous and fearsomely consistent man- has just been stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday. Carlyle has an identifying epithet for all his chief players and the one he has pinned on Marat's lapel is "squalid". Now I admire Marat to the point of loving him and if he went on a bit about murdering his enemies he was merely being more forthright than politicians commonly are. All politicians above a certain level practice or condone murder and Marat- bless his memory- was no hypocrite.

When I was talking about Jacques-Louis David a while back I skirted around his Marat picture but I can restrain myself no longer. Here it is- in all its simplicity and concentrated emotion- a pieta for the modern age......

Incidentally, reading about the ungovernable state revolutionary France got itself into has greatly increased my respect and admiration for Napoleon....

Picture Diary 89.

i. You will find we do things a little differently here....

2. Chalk

3.Downtime at the HQ of the Galactic Federation

4. Bzzzzz

5. Addressing the Galactic Federation

6. Such a pity.....

I have new specs.

I've worn varifocals for a couple of years and find I would prefer not to. These new specs are long distance only- and for close-up work I'll use one of several old pairs I have lying around.

I like it when people are pictured against book shelves- and always try to read the spines of the books. I remember an archdeacon once saying that the bookshelves of the clergy he visited told him at a glance exactly when his host had stopped thinking. By the evidence on show here I stopped thinking in the 1920s when the most recent of these books- A.A. Milne's Christopher Robin poems (snuggled up to Walt Whitman)- were first published

Do you like my model of "The Flying Scotsman? £1.00 from the shop at the Recycling Centre (Tip Shop).

The cover picture on that book I dreamed about looked a lot like this.....

I have a cold. I was coughing so irrepressibly that I spent the night downstairs in a chair. Among the dreams that drifted by was one about a book called Baptist Church 1882. It was ghost story set in Australia. and the pity is I never got to read it.

According to the Venerable Bede (but no-one else) Easter is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre- who had a whole month, roughly corresponding to our April, dedicated to her ceremonies and festivals. Scholars have debated whether she actually existed or whether Bede made her up, but- according to wikipedia- the modern consensus is that she was a real thing- and related to other goddesses of the Indo-European family.

If she existed the assumption has to be that she was a goddess of dawn, Spring, new beginnings, flowers- and all that kind of thing. A Maiden goddess/new mother. Perhaps even a Virgin Mother.....

Here she is in an illustration by the German artist Johannes Gehrts

And suddenly it's quiet.

In the closing minutes of the visit we remembered we had a bubble gun.

Prior to that we'd been watching a kiddies' video that would have had Salvador Dali going, "Too much, man."

Also a video about baby ducks hosted by a screechy woman.

Bowie is particularly keen on ducks....

Best night's sleep in ages. That's what having grandchildren around will do for you.

You get to our age, says Ailz, and you're weary. It's not sleepiness. You might feel like you could sleep for a thousand years but actually you can't. Rather it's a weariness of body and mind that comes from having knocked around the world for so long. Seen it all, done it all.....

But, I add, if you have kids milling about your ankles you can push the weariness away.

It has been whispered that I might want to become chaplain to the Quaker care home in Polegate. No, no, no, no, no......

I went to an eye test yesterday. I like eye tests. I like the machines they make you look into; they put me in mind of the end of pier peep shows of my youth. And I like the sense of achievement I get form being able to read even the very small print.

Afterwards we went for lunch with Edna and Miriam at La Locanda del Duca- slap-up Italian joint in the town centre. And then to their place to bask in the sun. They're good mates. It's a novelty for us to have good mates who live locally.

My daughter and her family are coming to stay over the Easter weekend. That's two adults, three children and the silliest dog in the whole wide world.....

Here, have a picture of an Easter bunny....

Why did my mother make a pottery figure of St Dunstan for my friend Stephen?

Because she was learning to pot and wanted a project and he owned a house that backed onto St Dunstan's churchyard in Canterbury. It was a happy conjunction.

As I said in an earlier post I believe he still has that house. I don't know for certain because it's been a long time since we were last in touch. Friendships peter out- or at least the outward expression of them does- but as Yeats said of his friendhip with that rather wonderful, rather silly man McGregor Mathers, "Friendship never ends."

He and I had a project to make a collection of verse epitaphs from churchyards in Kent. That's how I spent much of my free time as a student, hunting for epitaphs (I like to think I'm more fun now)- and my chief memory of St Dunstans is of the two of us grubbing around an 18th century headstone at night, trying to decipher the epitaph by candlelight. It's a memory I don't altogether trust. Did we really do that or just think about doing it? At the distance of over half a century I can't be sure.

St Dunstans is an old church- but not a particularly attractive one. It figures twice in the history of these islands. Firstly because it was where Henry II changed out of his finery into sackcloth in preparation for making his pentential pilgrimage to the shrine of his erstwhile friend Thomas Becket and secondly because Thomas More's daughter, Margaret Roper, interred her father's head there after rescuing it from its spike on London Bridge. Two St Thomases, how neat! The last time the Roper vault was opened, in 1978 the careful archaeologists noted a niche in the wall, sealed with an iron grille- which they didn't force- containing the rotted fragments of a human skull.

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The Jungle Books

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The May Is Out

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Picture Diary 89

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