love me like your radio

I got some money for a new book in and bought a little radio to keep me company when writing. My friend Helen suggested one she had in cream(I have named hers Lady Cream) I bought it in red and named it Red George, and put him on my nightstand, an old school desk. It took some wobbling of his antenna before I had a clear sound from radio 3 and 4. Red George knows what I like: I turn him on in the morning to hear Stravinsky, and in the evening to hear a recitation of The Wasteland. I grew up listening to CBC radio, “Saturday afternoons at the opera” live from NYC. I remember hearing the announcement of Princess Diana’s death on the radio, as a small child. In the last couple of weeks, Red George makes me feel more connected to the world than social media and my oversharing no filter instagram does. The voices all sound close by, like there are little people inside it like a doll’s train station, and as I listen I visualise all the other people in Britain listening: in the bath, chopping in the kitchen, in a car, petting their cats.

Last weekend I went with a group of friends to Little Sparta which I was quite looking forward to. It cost 9 pounds to enter. The aesthetic stinks. There is a Boys Annual vibe to it all- grenades and machine guns carved in stone and metal, Ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions, a half sunk row boat and references to sailing, the “inland seas” or human made ponds have a swampy, sewer look to them, buzzing with flies. As we sat by one, eating our lunch, there was a loud burping/farting sound from a pipe pumping water into it. The pond led to a miniature aqueduct, and I couldn't help but imagine human feces flying down from it in a Rube Goldberg style, sniggering boarding school boys hiding behind trees.Indeed, a google of the founder, poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, reveals he went to boarding school. I thought of the Cyril Connolly quote about boarding schools.

“Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly..”

The connected ponds felt like a model of a digestive system.In the public bathroom was a warning not to drink the tap water, as it was the pond water. There was a garden with rotting, brown artichokes in it. There will many man cave sheds, filled with model ship kits and dusty boring looking books. The type of place for a smelly old man to bask in. There was a seedy little grotto, and straw house which I liked, with a bit of old shoe left in it, like someone had been eaten. At a pub after, we concluded the name should be changed to Little Farta. Of course, I won’t lie, I am jealous, I don’t own rural property on which to have a weird art garden. I have bags of broken crockery to make mosaics someday. In my fantasy Sparta garden I would have Niki de Saint Phalle-esque ladies, odd fluffy chicken breeds and many cats. Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, Jupiter Artland and even the Trinity star bank park, with tiny gnome doors on trees, have more charm than Little Sparta however. A more positive review of Little Sparta can be found at The Jaggy Thistle sub stack by Kenny Farquharson. I had a lovely day out, simply because visiting the British countryside is always wonderful. We saw horses, ostriches and strange almost Iron-Bru coloured sheep.

Little Sparta would certainly be enjoyed by Sir Clifford Chatterley. My flatmate and I are planning to watch all the film versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. So far we have watched the 2022 version (which is a little twee in its literary references- Mellors and Lady Chatterley read James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, while Clifford writes dull anti-modernist Tory aesthetic novels. that’s how the viewer is supposed to know the good guys from the bad guys. Though let’s be honest, a man who reads Joyce is probably better at going down on a woman than a man who reads Kipling ) and the 1993. We watched a film favourite of mine to contrast, the Ivory Merchant Howard’s End which deals in similar themes, of class love and connection.Interestingly, the 2022 Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a French production, with English actors. I love DH Lawrence, I read all his books as a teenager. I was entranced because he wrote about women as living, thinking and desiring beings. He seems unfashionable in Britain now, with his sincere, romantic eroticism. The sex scenes in both the 1993 and 2022 are joyous and sweet, a refreshing thing to see in our porny yet still prudish society. In a marvellously done speech by actor Emma Corrin, Lady Chatterley tells Clifford he only loves her the way he loves objects, like his radio.

( still from 1993 version of Sir Clifford. The same actor plays Charles Wilcox in Howard’s End, and in contrast with those two boors, Maurice in the film Maurice.)

This weekend, I visited the abbey hill artists colony, and bought a wonderful print by Hamish Kallin, just below.

I also attended a reading by friend Neil Scott for Crumbles journey. In his reading he encouraged us to do “ego psychogeography” of walking between places with personal association. I am trying to plan mine in Edinburgh.