Costume parade after completing ‘Armageddon’ in 49.18 minutes

11 February 2024
Do not be put off trying an ‘Escape Room’ because you fear claustrophobia: you aren’t actually locked into it, you simply have to solve a series of problems (often involving locks) in order to complete a narrative within a set time and thereby regain your ‘freedom’.

Yesterday Sam2 gave me for my birthday an hour in one in Cambridge with the rest of the family. We were ‘locked’ in a very realistic space station whose task was to stop an approaching asteroid from annihilating Earth (‘Armageddon’). We had to work out in an hour how, in the absence of the incapacitated crew, to put the correct information into a large control panel that would enable us to fire a missile at the asteroid and destroy it.

To get the information, you had to notice everything around you very quickly and work out how it might be connected. Lateral thinking. Rather arithmetical at times. The four of us noted different things, then pooled our information to solve one puzzle after another. Being a family, we found working as a team easier than we had expected. At times you bounce along, at others you are stumped. We were doing very well until the last clue needed to fire the missile. It seemed that we had exhausted everything. I had noticed a tiny symbol inside a letter on a notice board that we hadn’t used. I kept coming back to it, but concluded each time that it was irrelevant. With time running out, we had to phone the games master for a clue. It turned out that the ‘symbol’ depicted the workings of an unassuming item in the room, which we had all thought was simply functional and not part of the puzzles. When we interacted with it, we could see the digits on its components that we needed to fire the missile.

Truly, I haven’t enjoyed a game so much in ages!

24 February
On Twitter a sickening video, probably taken by a drone, of a large bird of prey feeding off the neck and brain of a dead Russian soldier.

An acquaintance’s Russian friend writes: ‘Our life more and more resembles living on a desert island. Railway communications with Europe have been suspended and now the Post has announced that it’s not accepting items for abroad. There are fewer and fewer air services, and very few airline desks open in Moscow. The sanctions are impacting more and more on people’s everyday lives.’

Russians also seem increasingly insulted by the cynicism of the ‘election’. The murder of Navalnyi (a catacomb Christian) was obviously a brutal desperate measure. On television, even Putin cronies like Medvedev and Peskov are beginning to sound and look desperate.

3 March
We are now two months behind with producing my book of stories The White Bow:Ghoune, which Sam&Sam were to bring out this spring. There are all kinds of extraneous reasons for this, but the main one is that I started writing the penultimate story intending it to be 10,000 words and it is expanding towards 25,000. It could easily be made into a short novel, but I shall never go there. It’s subtitled ‘A science fiction’ and the scientific dimension, I must admit, took longer to research than I was expecting. It concerns the scents that male butterflies shower the females with during courtship. These can be smelt by humans, whereas the scents produced by the female butterflies to direct males cannot. The male of the continental Cleopatra Brimstone, for instance, scatters a scent described in a classic publication of 1945 as ‘rich and powerful, freesia’. I remember a hyperactive little colony of Green-Veined White butterflies when I was a boy that smelt subtly of lemon (1945: ‘lemon verbena’), but I did not know at the time what produced it.

Male of the Cleopatra (Gonepteryx cleopatra)

10 March
I finished the first draft of my translation of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ on 3 February and have been fiddling with it ever since. It’s time now to leave it alone…until the next time. I think I have rendered the Alcaic metre as closely as I can in English. The metre will certainly have a weird effect on some readers. But that all goes with the other-worldly, some might say ‘mad’, sense of the poem. The most unsatisfactory part of the version (for me) is that I have had very slightly to pad it with adjectives because German nouns tend to contain more syllables than English ones, leaving feet to fill. The choice of these monosyllabic English adjectives has been agonising. On the other hand, adjectives are one of the English language’s most natural strengths, so I don’t think they stick out in the translation; which I entitle ‘Susette speaks’. I will post an image of it on 15 April.

15 March
I am going through my library trying to create a bit of space here and there for new books. This morning I came upon three by a Russian prose writer whom I will not name, but who was born in 1937 and regarded in the late Soviet period as highly original, off piste and somehow dissidental. One of them, a collection of short stories, was given to me in Moscow in 1970 by a very literate Russian friend, and I understood that the book was much sought after. The second is an offprint of a long short story published in 1988 and inscribed to me by the author on his visit to Cambridge that year. The last is his first long novel, nicely published in Russia the following year (350 pages plus 50 pages of self-commentary), which caused a stir amongst Russianists so I thought I should buy it.

The sad fact is, I have tried to read these works on at least four separate occasions over the years, but never been able to get further than the first few pages. Let me leave that fact there. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. What sticks in my mind about this author is the day — I see from his lengthy inscription that it was 19 July 1988 — that I spent taking him round Cambridge at the request of the British Council. I showed him places associated with famous Russian cultural figures, such as Newnham College where Turgenev met women undergraduates, the Senate House where Tchaikovsky received an honorary degree, the sports shop in Trinity Street above which Nabokov lived as an undergraduate, then I suppose we had lunch somewhere, although I can’t remember it, and in the afternoon he had a mission: to go to the Singer Sewing and Knitting Centre in Cambridge and buy for £130 a sophisticated sewing machine. We did this. He paid in cash and took the machine away with him, first to London then to the USSR. However, he was so well informed about the export sale of British sewing machines that he knew he could claim back the VAT on it (£20) if he filled out a special form in the shop, with his Moscow address, passport number etc, which he did. Obviously, there was no feasible means of Singer refunding him in Moscow, so the ruse was for me to give him the £20 there and then and Singer to pay me the refund by cheque later, which they did.

As it happened, I did not have an extra £20 in my wallet, so before accompanying the writer and his sewing machine to Cambridge station we went to an ATM that had recently been installed in a wall off the market. The writer had never seen such a device before and hung back warily when I went over to it. ‘What,’ he exclaimed, ‘do you mean to say people can just take money straight out of a wall?!’ ‘Well,’ I replied as I got the cash out, ‘you do have to have it there in the first place! One day, perhaps Russia will have them.’ ‘No it won’t!’ he thundered at me with sudden vehemence. ‘Russia will have a path of its own! It will always do things its own way, not imitate you in the West’. It turned into a veritable tirade. I must admit I was slightly shocked, and I remember blaming myself for making such an unguarded comment. But in retrospect I shouldn’t have been shocked. This man was a Russian ‘intellectual’ through and through, almost a parody of one in his extreme literary cleverness, and time has shown that ‘scratch a Russian intellectual and you find a Great Russian nationalist underneath’ (to paraphrase V.I. Ul’ianov).

23 March

Russian icon, 16th century

My favourite icon subject is The Myrrh-Bearing Women. This was the second earliest depiction of the Resurrection, but it became superseded by the apocryphal subject Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. Note that in the example above, the resurrected Christ is not present in the background as the ‘gardener’; he’s not there at all. In his place is a terrifying archway, with a symbolic city above it. Both archways are mouths of Hell. The angel in the foreground, the empty tomb and the haloed women are the strongest possible opposites to that nothingness and death, hence they embody the triumph of the Resurrection. For us, perhaps, it is too easy not to realise that this icon works through visual counterpoint.

Happy Easter!

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.