Philobiblon

Imagine an alternative history – a great game for a wet winter’s afternoon. The battle of Waterloo turns out the other way, and today in London breakfast means a croissant and an espresso, and all of its women can tie a scarf just so.

Hard to see? Well yes. But had that come to pass, it would have been one of Napoleon’s generals, most likely, living in the house that was called No 1 London, which still today guards the entrance to the formal parts of Westminster.

Instead, of course, Apsley House became the home of the Duke of Wellington – the designer of that famous boot, among his other claims to fame.

But this is not a military museum; you won’t feel like you’re playing war games. The house has been restored to much the state that it was in when Wellington lived there in splendour in the years after Waterloo, a life that embraced both celebration and disappointment.

The former is best represented by the painting in the entry hall of the grand dinner, held every year on the anniversary of Waterloo (June 18), to which scores of his officers were invited. The latter is represented in the scores of political caricatures mocking Wellington the Prime Minister who chose to during his term of office to live here, rather than move to the humbler quarters of Downing Street.

For here was not just a spectacular house, but the fittings and furnishings donated by the grateful crowned heads of Europe – many of whom owed their status to Waterloo. That means it could hardly be grander, for the crowned heads had a taste for luxury, if not a sense of taste. READ MORE

Miss Williams Wynn, having surveyed the theatre of her day, is now turning her attention to reviewing religion with much the same approach. She’s writing about the celebrated preacher of her day, the Scottish Rev Edward Irvine, who attracted crowds of the great and good to his church in Hatton Garden.

She speaks on the first visit, after hearing him speak for 20 minutes …

Then he told us that the intention of the following discourse would be to show from the page of history what man had been through all ages, in all countries, without the light of revealed religion. My brother whispered me, ‘We have been twenty-three minutes at it, and now the sermon is to begin.’ I felt exactly with him, and yet after this expression, I can” fairly and truly say that the hour which followed appeared to me very short, though my attention was on the full stretch during the whole time.

But such is the nature of fame – I haven’t been able to find one reference to the reverend on the web.

Perhaps Homo sapiens should be renamed Homo destructis – the species that will destroy itself and its world:

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44 x 1018 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota”. In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

Of course we do also think about this, and study, so maybe it should be H. destructis sapiens – so we’ve just found what may be a new mammal on Borneo. But of course it is endangered – in large part by new palm oil plantation that the article above exposes.
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And – surprise, surprise – Condoleezza Rice’s statement about all those mysterious US flights containing “non-people” doesn’t mean much at all.

The story of the awful family Christmas has become a cultural staple – to be heard in every office, school and cafe in the land – so to really make an impact you either have to tell it really well, or make the tales really extreme.

With The Super Slash Naughty XXXmas Story at Wilton’s Music Hall, Russell Barr has gone for the second option. I’m not going to tell the worst of them, for you might be eating, and they are certainly enough to turn any stomach. Audience reaction was distinctive – the nervous guffaw, followed by the sharply indrawn breath that says: “Really, they’re not … Oh my God, they are.”

Which is a bit of a pity, since behind the stunts is a rather fine, well-drawn comedy. The gay nephew Doddie (played by Barr), has been forced to come home for Christmas with his utterly un-PC, weird and self-centred Aunt Shona. (She’s wonderfully played by Joanna Scanlan, and it is worth the price of the ticket just to see her performance.) Also in the party is the Delia Smith-quoting child Alistair, beautifully hammed up, in the best possible sense, by Lisa Hammond. READ MORE

From today, gay and lesbian couples in Britain are able to enter a civil partnership that is marriage in all but name. (Although the first ceremonies won’t be until December 21, due to the notice period.)

Personally, I don’t entirely get why anyone would want to get married – it is an institution and who wants to live in an institution, as they say – but it is certainly an advance towards a civilised society that one form of discrimination over sexuality should be removed. And the accompanying pension, inheritance and related rights are certainly appropriate.

This advance is a sign of the essentially civilised nature of British society – the admirable near-abolition of religion from public life, combined with an embrace of eccentricity and difference observable for centuries.

It is representative of the best of British, and the reasons why I’ve chosen to make my life here.

On another side of the issue, an excellent piece in The Times today recommends raising the legal age for marriage to 18. It looks particularly at the problem of forced marriages in minority communities, but then broadens out:

A girl of 17 is not considered mature enough to vote, to order a pint of beer or to enter into any legally binding contract. So she finds herself in the position where she cannot buy a washing machine on the never-never, but with Daddy’s say-so she can sign the papers that commit her to a marriage intended to last for the rest of her life. How absurd is that?

After reading this piece on DVD giveaways in this morning’s Guardian, I have to wonder whether the newspaper industry knows that it is speeding its own extinction?

How much are newspapers spending? Licences range from £50,000 per film to £200,000 for top line Oscar-winning films such as The Last Emperor. Then paying for replication costs between 18p and 20p per unit. Total costs when TV advertising is added (as it always is) mount up to between £750,000 and £1.2m for a single DVD. And if you sell 200,000 extra copies to people beyond those who buy the paper anyway, that is £4 per new reader – and remember these are “readers”, who have no loyalty.

And where does this money come from, I’d ask in addition? Largely from cutting the quality of the core product – journalism.

And imagine you are a customer of any sort of business that starts to offer you a regular “bonus”. Won’t you come to expect it, and be angry if it is removed?