Paradice's Only Map

Prompted by a small mention in Saturday's Guardian Review, I've just been re-reading, slowly and carefully (and with great joy), Andrew Marvell's long poem Upon Appleton House. And remembering again just how calming, complex and exotic it is. To understand how a poem, even a long one, can be all of those things, you have to read it, I'm afraid. It is self-reflective, witty, conscious and aware, setting out how to live correctly (if you are very rich), and within 'measure'.

In Robert Markley's words "...Nun Appleton can be identified with an ideal realm that, in a postlapsarian world, can take shape only as the imaginary projection from - and onto- a fallen nature." (From an essay called "Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone’: Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ and the contradictions of ‘nature’" in The Country and the City Revisted). But that really focuses too much perhaps on the last, longer section in the woods of the estate.

The chief conceit of the poem is not original with Marvell - that the house and estate of a person indicate the quality of his mind and morality. Lord Fairfax the parliamentarian general famously retired in 1650 - resigning in opposition to the Council of State's decision to invade Scotland. The poem is a pangyric to Fairfax, and uses the description of the house and gardens to praise him, his ancestors and his daughter (Marvell was her tutor at the time).

Go and read it now. Please.

Black Willow

I have been reliably informed (by someone who was told by someone who seemed to be an expert and was leading a tour) that this tree on Peckham Rye is a lonely black willow, or Salix Nigra. It is a lonely tree (sometimes called an orphan), because there are no other black willows near it, and hence it cannot breed and make little ones. Also, I gather it would need damper ground for any seeds to grow and fruit and stuff than it currently has - the Peck no longer keeps this end of the Rye damp and boggy as it presumably once did.

It is still a marvellous and statuesque, mature tree. I recommend it heartily. (Can you do that with a tree?)

Those who are interested will find it on the path across the Rye from the bottom of Barry Road (by The Clock House pub) that leads up to the cafe.

Yesterday in the garden

So, it being a sunny spring day yesterday and us beginning to start Easter holidays, I wandered into the garden to take some photogaphs. I've presented these as small, but the some of the higher-res images look quite attractive to my aesthetically-challenged sensibilities...

Kitto Road: Early April

Around 8:50 in the morning on a damp early April day. These show the trees in the grounds of St Catherine's church:





On the other side of the road is Telegraph Hill Park (Lower Park):







And for the record I tried to get Google Street View to embed at this point as they have shot roughly the same spot - but this is all I could make work on Google's Blog software:
View Larger Map

Copying...

So.

I've just had my eldest boy introduce me to Tom Lehrer's Lobachevsky - which I first heard, thanks to Neil Frowe, in 1976, in Collingwood.

But they both took just the same amount of pleasure in sharing it with me. And both enjoyed singing along (or was that me?).

What Neil couldn't know of (he only had the records) was the YouTube video of Tom Lehrer teaching Maths (derivation) to a tune from Princess Ida.

Oh, yes, he also couldn't introduce that song to me in 1976 'cos it hadn't happened at that point. It came from the '80s. Causality is a bitch.

Anyway, despite loving my eldest, I have to put on record: "One man deserves the credit...."

Guardian letter column

So.

The Guardian is having a silly discussion in its letters column about whether the Quick Crossword, or, indeed, Arucaria, is becoming easier. We've had a sensible note about how the Monday cryptic is always a little easier, and altogether, not a lot of sense from the other correspondents.

I started to write to the paper about how I used to do the Quick on the P12 between Nunhead and Peckham Rye, but nowadays I can't always finish it before bedtime. Is this just age? And then I thought about how I am doing more of each Cryptic, whatever day it is.

Which means it isn't (necessarily) that I'm getting more senile.

And when I started the letter I had 2 clues unsolved in the Quick (2 out of 24 or 1/12) and one in the Cryptic (1/29), and as a result I was going to have a rant about the statistics.

But by the time I had finished drafting the letter I'd solved them all - so it all just made me seem smug. So I deleted it.

And anyway, none of the letters, written or considered, really touched on the puns, poetry or sheer joy of Arucaria's crosswords. The pleasure of solving.

So I had another reason not to send it in.

Finally, and for the record, I should just register that yesterday's absolutely lovely cryptic was as much fun as Arucaria's 50th celebration crossword last year.

Today's Crossword

First of April, April Fool's day. So the Guardian Crossword included clues to San Serriffe, Spaghetti Tree, Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, Panorama, General Pica, and so forth.

Marvellous, of course, but it relied heavily on a certain cultural background and knowledge going back nearly fifty years. I suspect that a lot of cryptic crosswords do, to some extent or another. Today's was just very noticeable.