WONDERS ANCIENT AND MODERN
The English are an ingenious lot. These days, few people rely on craft skills for their existence; thumbs, developed by repeated use of mobile devices, are set to become more important digits than fingers. But we are hard-wired to admire ingenuity in others. This can be the ingenuity of the past, displayed, with brio, in the collections of Waddesdon Manor. I’m no less awed by the feats of our remote ancestors, wondering how they could possibly have raised Silbury Hill with only antlers to use as spades. Today, science provides us with some of the greatest wonders: the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place provides a hedge against the extinction of plant species around the world.
How amazing that after 900 years the Hospital of St Bartholomew, otherwise known as Barts, still fulfils the charitable purpose for which it was founded, on the same site, by a courtier turned monk in the reign of Henry II. Only, rather better, given advances in medical science: it is now a flagship of the National Health Service and one of the great teaching hospitals of the world. We can be proud of Barts.
We can be proud of the excellence of the Royal Opera House, whether opera is our bag or not: opera is hugely complicated, as well as costly, to stage well, and all the effort and expense will be wasted if it fails to deliver the emotional punch that audiences expect. Covent Garden productions are knockouts, more often than not. Around the corner from the Royal Opera House is Neal’s Yard Dairy, centre of the British cheese revival, which has defied all expectation by making a gastronomic desert bloom.
Market towns – even unsung ones such as Louth – continue to offer an ideal of civilised existence. Time present and time past are both present in Little Gidding, as they were for T S Eliot and Charles I. The red kite is a phoenix that has arisen from the ashes of local extinction to excite anyone who sees this massive bird (whose name, I now realise, has nothing to do with the kite shape of its tail feathers).
The Elgin Marbles, a dazzling human achievement, are displayed in the most appropriate possible setting for such a work: a museum that brings together the cultures of the world to enrich the meanings of its holdings and provide inspiration to the nearly seven million people who visit it for free each year.
These are things that bring about an unconditioned response. You see them, you cannot help feeling an emotion – or so it is with me. The ancient buildings that survive at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, the legacy of a medieval palace, are moving as well as beautiful; it is wonderful that they continue in their original uses. In their completely different ways, the Foundling Hospital and the Cabinet War Rooms contain objects that evoke great human dramas, on the small scale and on the epic. The London Library – please pause a minute while I genuflect before the wisdom that radiates not just from the rows of worn book spines but, yea, the metal floors that clank as readers walk over them, the leather armchairs in which readers have been known to fall asleep. The drone of the bumblebee brings with it deckchairs, Pimm’s, dahlias – all summer is contained within that Bombus buzz.
Buxton Opera House, like all Frank
Matcham’s many Edwardian theatres, lifts the spirits; as does, from sheer unexpectedness, the Halifax Piece Hall – Yorkshire’s Plaza Mayor. The BBC does its best to exasperate those who would be its friends; I object to the profligacy with which it pays for stars and entertainment that do not enrich the nation’s media diet and would be better broadcast by commercial stations.
Call me old-fashioned, but surely the BBC exists to plug the gaps that the commercial sector leaves unfilled. And yet the sound of a newsreader has the same effect as a British Airways pilot – unexcitable, unflappable, understated – and I breathe easily knowing a higher power is in control. However infuriating the organisation, you know, deep down, how much you would miss it.
Like the Queen, some things are just irreplaceable. They are truly crown jewels.
These things bring about an unconditioned response. You cannot help feeling an emotion