Alice and Melbourne
I've been in Alice Springs for the past few days for work. Apart from the trips to and from the airport and a short guided tour of the Desert Park (where I took several blurry photos of rare native birds in flight because my colleagues did not appreciate the need to approach them slowly or silently) I was inside a hotel so my perceptions are necessarily impressionistic and may owe a lot to the postcards in the giftshops.
As everyone said, the landscape looked like a Fred Williams painting from the plane with orange plains rippling from horizon to horizon, occasionally blurred with purple smudges that turned out to be hills. The clouds and their shadows looked exceedingly picturesque against this background. From the ground, the landscape was flat and orange and then suddenly these ridges would rear up as if pushed from below. It was unexpectedly rainy and cold. I enjoyed it more when I was there on holdiays years ago on what was probably the most irritating family holiday of my life.
The work was meant to be a talkfest but it became surprisingly confrontational (which was why I had no time to leave the hotel and do anything, um, fun on my own). And then I had to come home straightaway and liberate the diabetic cat from the cattery because my Beloved is STILL away and work wouldn't pay for the cat's extortionate boarding fees. Needing two needles a day doubles the price.
On my return flight I took a quiet delight in being in the front of the plane while the most confrontational of the participants in the talkfest were in the back despite their greater seniority. About the only thing I can be happy about.
I've been reading a delightful biography of Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister to Queen Victoria and the guy Melbourne was named after (although this hasn't happened yet). It's by Lord David Cecil and it's the twentieth anniversary edition of a 1939 book. Lord David (or Cecil??) was a distinguished English professor at Oxford and Cambridge. He has this wonderfully rhetorical style that uses generalisations to describe his subject without burdening the reader with too many footnotes and details. His style does the reader the favour of apparently assuming that they know the facts that he is actually imparting. I feel flattered and entertained. And Melbourne was a really interesting man living in exciting times.
The book opens with a description of the grand mansions of the eighteenth century from which England was governed by the grand lords. He shows how these houses weren't in fact effete palaces like Versailles but the venues for domestic and national drama and, in the country, functioning rural estates providing the economic lifeblood of the nation until the industrial revolution brought prosperity to the middle classes. Lord Cecil is refreshingly frank about the intellectual laziness of the aristocracy raised in a delightful milieu that made thinking too hard seem vulgar. The young William Lamb (who became Lord Melbourne) was prevented by the Napoleonic Wars from having a Grand Tour and instead after some very pleasant years in Cambridge spent time styudying in Glasgow with some very tiresome hardworking northerners.
The domestic tragedy of his youth was his marriage to Caroline who nurtured a grand passion for Lord Byron. She christened him "bad, mad and dangerous to know" but in the end it was she who became quite mad. Their marriage starts off sounding like something written by Jane Austen and then quite Byronic, and then as if Emily Bronte was directing proceedings. Then Charlotte Bronte takes over as young William eventually turns into Mr Rochester and locks up his wife in the country house. Lord Cecil describes the various versions of who said what to whom. What comes through is the tremendous sadness for someone who had married for love dealing with a wife who became comepletely and unpredictably unbalanced in the days before psychiatry. And the only child they had was intellectually handicapped and could not be made fit for polite society even though William did his best to educate him.
Anyway apart from the salacious gossipy side, the book has a potted history of the political developments in Britain and it's very easy to read.
As everyone said, the landscape looked like a Fred Williams painting from the plane with orange plains rippling from horizon to horizon, occasionally blurred with purple smudges that turned out to be hills. The clouds and their shadows looked exceedingly picturesque against this background. From the ground, the landscape was flat and orange and then suddenly these ridges would rear up as if pushed from below. It was unexpectedly rainy and cold. I enjoyed it more when I was there on holdiays years ago on what was probably the most irritating family holiday of my life.
The work was meant to be a talkfest but it became surprisingly confrontational (which was why I had no time to leave the hotel and do anything, um, fun on my own). And then I had to come home straightaway and liberate the diabetic cat from the cattery because my Beloved is STILL away and work wouldn't pay for the cat's extortionate boarding fees. Needing two needles a day doubles the price.
On my return flight I took a quiet delight in being in the front of the plane while the most confrontational of the participants in the talkfest were in the back despite their greater seniority. About the only thing I can be happy about.
I've been reading a delightful biography of Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister to Queen Victoria and the guy Melbourne was named after (although this hasn't happened yet). It's by Lord David Cecil and it's the twentieth anniversary edition of a 1939 book. Lord David (or Cecil??) was a distinguished English professor at Oxford and Cambridge. He has this wonderfully rhetorical style that uses generalisations to describe his subject without burdening the reader with too many footnotes and details. His style does the reader the favour of apparently assuming that they know the facts that he is actually imparting. I feel flattered and entertained. And Melbourne was a really interesting man living in exciting times.
The book opens with a description of the grand mansions of the eighteenth century from which England was governed by the grand lords. He shows how these houses weren't in fact effete palaces like Versailles but the venues for domestic and national drama and, in the country, functioning rural estates providing the economic lifeblood of the nation until the industrial revolution brought prosperity to the middle classes. Lord Cecil is refreshingly frank about the intellectual laziness of the aristocracy raised in a delightful milieu that made thinking too hard seem vulgar. The young William Lamb (who became Lord Melbourne) was prevented by the Napoleonic Wars from having a Grand Tour and instead after some very pleasant years in Cambridge spent time styudying in Glasgow with some very tiresome hardworking northerners.
The domestic tragedy of his youth was his marriage to Caroline who nurtured a grand passion for Lord Byron. She christened him "bad, mad and dangerous to know" but in the end it was she who became quite mad. Their marriage starts off sounding like something written by Jane Austen and then quite Byronic, and then as if Emily Bronte was directing proceedings. Then Charlotte Bronte takes over as young William eventually turns into Mr Rochester and locks up his wife in the country house. Lord Cecil describes the various versions of who said what to whom. What comes through is the tremendous sadness for someone who had married for love dealing with a wife who became comepletely and unpredictably unbalanced in the days before psychiatry. And the only child they had was intellectually handicapped and could not be made fit for polite society even though William did his best to educate him.
Anyway apart from the salacious gossipy side, the book has a potted history of the political developments in Britain and it's very easy to read.
posted by Mary Bennet | 7:16 pm
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