Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Peter for Putin

Whenever a note arrives in the inbox saying 'Congratulations, Peter', I push control-delete before you (or anyone else) can say Acapulco Lottery.

So, I imagine, do you. Though some recipients, I suppose, must reply more positively to the scams of 'unclaimed legacies' and 'locked away Liberian millions' that flood the Web. Or they wouldn't be there.

But this latest 'Congratulations Peter' escaped.

'TLS Editor Predicted 'Time Person of the Year' Last Month, Congratulations Peter' ran the note.

How could I delete that?

Praise for prophetic power is praise indeed.

It made me feel I'd chosen Vladimir Putin personally for this great American honour.

And it's true - well, true that I predicted it.

Drunken Boats

Just occasionally, in a life full of words, there are words that you think you should have heard before, known before, felt before.

If you're editor of the TLS ( OK, no 'ifs'), you think (I think) you (I) should even have published them before.

Alan Jenkins has an office next to mine at the TLS. As it happens, we are moving offices tomorrow and we shall be a few feet further apart. But that is of no consequence bar being true of the here and now.

He has been with the paper much longer than I - though we arrived among the glass and grey slabs of 200ish Gray's Inn Road at about the same time in 1981, I to The Times, he to the literary cousin we both share now. He is a poet.

We share a love and care for the TLS - and another care, for rivers, The Thames for me, for him other rivers I think, though perhaps the Thames too.

I've known for some time that  he was writing a poem, maybe more than one poem, about boats and water.

We spoke about Pope's Windsor Forest a while ago and about the Moselle of the Latin poet Ausonius, about which I know a little and from which Pope borrowed a few Thames lines.

His new little book, Drunken Boats, has already been published and purchasable for a few weeks. Our diarist JC, not one to promote a colleague's book beyond its merit (that is not how we do things here) has already praised its renderings of Rimbaud (above), an achievement that is beyond this classicist's power to judge.

My own copy, purchased from Sylph Editions, arrived only this morning, battered somewhat by the weight of Christmas cards around it.

The opening poem, Salt, has occupied me for all this evening of that arrival day.

I'm not going to quote from it. There is strict injunction against doing that without permission. And this is a blog. And speed is all.

I'm not going to 'close read' or criticise it in some other way which many in the TLS family could better do.

I'm not going to imagine how Alan will receive these words. I'd never write half a line about him if I did that.

I'll just say that it has been a wonderful evening with the poem so present, the water so present and with the absent poet seeming so present.

TLS rules discourage us from publishing in our paper what is already available to be read and bought.

So buying and reading is all I can encourage anyone to do.   

Woof, woof, it's the spirit of Prime Ministers past

Much appalled amusement here this morning about the personal appearance by Tony Blair in the White House Christmas TV show.

In case you have missed it, our former Prime Minister appears in the daydreams of Barney, one of the presidential Scotch terriers who want to be Junior Park Rangers.

Yes.

That is exactly what he does

His big line.

Wait for it.

"Congratulations Barney and Miss Beazley on becoming Junior Park Rangers. Well done.
As someone born in Edinburgh, Scotland, it's always good to see the Scots doing well.

What happens next?

'Barney looks at the camera, tilts his head and a "boing" sound effect is heard. Barney's daydream ends and he's sitting with Miss Beazley on Mrs Bush's lap in front of the Christmas tree in the Blue Room" - or so says the direct-this-yourself-at-home note on the First Website.

Someone said it reminded them of an Aesop's Fable and could I remember which?

I couldn't. I was thinking more about our about spirits of Christmas past than of past Prime Ministers. Join our holiday Dickens debate while it's still fresh.

OK. wasn't there that French surreal movie, the one in which one  poodle appears in another poodle's nightmare - and they all go mad?

I have no idea. Sounds too good to be true.

There is definitely a Sam Shephard play of the early seventies in which a man begins with prophetic dreams of winning race horses, declines into dreaming the winners at dog tracks and finally turns into a dog himself.

But that's not quite right either.

There must be something somehwere like the 'Tony and Barney' show.

We don't like to think of unique horrors of art and politics at the TLS. There is always a precedent.

But maybe, just maybe, Tony Blair's final performance of 2007 is one that has genuinely never been seen or conceived before.

Read 'A Christmas Carol' with the TLS

Why did Scrooge become a miser? Can ghosts speak without a jaw?

Consider these and other often unanswered questions about A Christmas Carol in our interactive online guide to the greatest seasonal classic.

Dickens left alot of loose ends in his story.

Our TLS leader on this quest, the novelist and poet Will Eaves, explains why.

Join  him.

Ask questions of your own.

I'm sometimes asked if the TLS has a Christmas spirit at all.

We're not strong on holly or reindeer but yes we do.

This is it.

Doubting Thomas's oysters

Guests at the St Thomas’s Day dinner at New College, Oxford, get an appropriately academic analysis, along with the menu, about why they are there.

The college is 600 years old but its best-loved customs, like so many ‘olde’ British ways, owe more to the Victorians than to the life of mediaeval England.

This is an ‘oyster dinner’ and, until the railways connected Oxford to the coast, the man who ate oysters in Oxford was rarely wise.

The first recorded ‘oyster dinner’ at New College was in 1896, well into the railway age - when the speed of shellfish communication was almost as good as it is today.

But it is also St Thomas's dinner.

Why is there an oyster dinner for St Thomas? Did St Thomas like his oysters?

According to the menu note, we don’t even know which St Thomas the Victorians were thinking about when they planned our feast.

Eat the fox cub

A sympathetic friend in Australia reads my last post and says that there is a famous painting of avian  revenge against the beast  that last week stripped the windpipe of my garden swan.

The painting is of a scene adapted from Aesop's fables in which an eagle feeds a fox-cub to her young in retaliation for bird-catching abuse.

The artist is the seventeenth century writer and illustrator, Francis Barlow.

My  friend, like many others apparently, has the Barlow image on a modern mass-produced vase.

In the picture the fox tries to rescue her cub by setting fire to the tree where the eagle has its nest.

The eagle seems to have a satisfying determination to ignore the smoke and turn the fox into baby food regardless.

Which, to assuage my memory of the foxy murder by the Thames two weeks ago, is an excellent result.

Birds for Christmas

Ten days ago I woke at 6 am and saw a sleeping animal shape on the path by the river, big enough to be a deer but lying awkwardly like a round fur puddle.

Then half of it got up, a huge fox with a white-tipped tail, and then the other half, a paler vixen.

I returned to sleep, wondering for no good reason how such a fox would fare against the large flocks of swans which share these Thames banks.

A swan's wing is a better known weapon for we river-dwelling humans than is the fox.

It packs a heavy-feathered punch.

Hard to say how a clash would go, I decided.

Two hours and a walk to the waterside later, the reason for the beasts' sleeping and the human waking was clear.

My foxes had been resting from a dawn of clinical destruction.

A large swan, a favourite swan, had only a bloody windpipe where a foot-length of its neck had been.

Apart from that neat red blemish it was was untouched - dead, perfect, ready for fox breakfast. 

This worried me more than it should.

I'm not a natural countryman. Ridiculous as I seem to myself, I somehow think that beautiful swans and equally beautiful foxes should just get on.

Stupid but heck.

Yesterday a substantial and  impressive book arrived at the TLS which showed what should have happened.

'Birds' by Katrina Cook has the size and scale that the great collectors of bird paintings demanded in the past.

There is MacGillivray's Sandpiper, Audubon's Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Tunnicliffe's Song Thrush - in the sort of dimensions that their artists intended.

And on the opening double spread, 'The Threatened Swan' painted in 1650 by Jan Esselyn, reproduced very poorly above.

This magnificent creature was not going to be fox food.

Any beast with a white-tipped tail would have been beaten to retreat.

This book is going to stay open at these pages until the opposite reality has subsided.

At £50, in these Christmas present times, the perfect answer to other anxieties too.