Here is a 'near impossible task' indeed - to identify 'the nation's favourite poem about the countryside'._02+JT.jpg)
The shop’s uniquely characterful frontage, strangely reminiscent of a Victorian funeral parlour, houses a fusty smelling interior that’s suspended in something of a time warp. Sepia photographs on anaglypta covered walls chart the history of the local area and five generations of the Child family. There are antique clocks, pieces of old fashioned tailoring memorabilia and original retro look books dotted around the the cosy waiting room. And, at the rear of the premises, is a rather starkly decorated workroom, furnished with little more than a cutting table, alongside a men’s changing room that’s a veritable curiosity in itself. This is much more a living museum of tailoring than a gentleman’s outfitters.
Philip explained the process of choosing a fabric and making a bespoke suit – plus the advantages of having a garment personally designed, not to show off the label, but to look and feel good. Here, everything is beautifully made and stitched by hand, using only the finest quality fabrics and real mother of pearl buttons. Suits are made up within seven to eight weeks – and, once a custom-made pattern has been created, future requirements can even be fulfilled by email.
The tailor has clients all over the world, including places as far flung as Alaska. What’s more Child and Sons can make virtually anything, from purple linen suits to tweed hacking jackets. They recently designed an outfit for an Imam, who wanted to feel at home in a Westernized business environment - so style details from traditional religious dress were adapted into a suit for him. The wedding market is also a substantial part of their business, and customers include a number of “significant businessmen, though not what you’d call celebrities”, says Child, “because they tend to go for the names” when shopping for clothes.
Expect to pay around £1200-£1500 for a bespoke suit – a lot less than in Savile Row, and worth it just to see this extraordinary shop and own a piece of quality British craftsmanship... Not forgetting the priceless stories you’ll hear from this traditional family tailors' remarkably long and fascinating history.
I started collecting stamps when I was ten years old, but had to give it up by the time I was twelve. In all the years since, I never thought of resuming the hobby. It left only one after-effect: I was unable to throw away an interesting-looking stamp. So, I kept saving odd stamps, all these years. I put them into random envelopes and never looked at them again.
Then, about a year-and-a-half ago, I met a bright little girl named Tammy, who asked me - somewhat timidly, but very resolutely - whether I received letters from foreign countries and, if I did, would I give her the stamps. I promised to send her my duplicates. She was eleven years old, and so intensely serious about her collection that she reminded me of myself at that age.
Once I started sorting out the stamps I had accumulated, I was hooked.
It was an astonishing experience to find my enthusiasm returning after more than fifty years, as if there had been no interruption. Only now the feeling had the eagerness of childhood combined with the full awareness, confidence and freedom of age.
My first step was to acquire a Minkus Master Global Stamp Album. In a year and a half, it has grown to four volumes, plus four special albums - and my collection is still growing, at an accelerating rate. No, I have not forgotten Tammy: I send her piles of duplicates every few months, and I feel very grateful to her.
In all those years, I had never found a remedy for mental fatigue. Now, if I feel tired after a whole day of writing, I spend an hour with my stamp albums and it makes me able to resume writing for the rest of the evening. A stamp album is a miraculous brain-restorer...
Stamp collecting is a hobby for busy, purposeful, ambitious people - because, in pattern, it has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world.
A career requires the ability to sustain a purpose over a long period of time, through many separate steps, choices, decisions, adding up to a steady progression toward a goal. Purposeful people cannot rest by doing nothing nor can they feel at home in the role of passive spectators. They seldom find pleasure in single occasions, such as a party or a show or even a vacation, a pleasure that ends right then and there, with no further consequences.
The minds of such people require continuity, integration, a sense of moving forward...
But - it is asked - why not collect cigar bands, or coins, or old porcelain? Why stamps?
Because stamps are the concrete, visible symbols of an enormous abstraction: of the communications net embracing the world.
While the world politicians are doing their best to split the globe apart by means of iron curtains and brute force, the world postal services are demonstrating - in their quiet, unobtrusive way - what is required to bring mankind closer together: a specific purpose cooperatively carried out, serving individual goals and needs. It is the voices of individual men that stamps carry around the globe; it is individual men that need a postal service; kings, dictators and other rulers do not work by mail. In this sense, stamps are the world's ambassadors of good will.
...A huge photograph of a painting by the nineteenth-century French Salon painter Bouguereau was pasted on one wall, showing a crowd of naked nymphs, all identical, perfectly shaped, white-skinned, and of ideal nubility. This stupefying work of painstaking bad taste and technical skill amused Michael greatly; but it would be hypocritical to say that he – or any other man – did not enjoy looking at it.
"With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat," Rees said. "It's this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic. For me, it's almost a point of pride that I would be slower than an electric pencil sharpener."
This is how Rees' artisanal pencil sharpening works: You might send him your favorite pencil, but Rees more often selects and sharpens a classic No. 2 pencil for his clients, he promises, "carefully and lovingly." He slides the finished pencil's very sharp tip into a specially-sized segment of plastic tubing, then puts the whole pencil in a larger, firmer tube that looks like it belongs in a science experiment. Throw it at a wall, he says, and it won't break. The cost? $15.
[...]
So far, Rees is the leader in the field. "Nobody else is doing what I do," he said. "I guarantee an authentic interaction with your pencil. What mechanical pencil sharpener can say that? The X-ACTO XLR 1818? The Royal 16959T? Don't make me laugh."
"I'm going to have this nice, authentic, considered reaction with your pencil," Rees said. "I just want to treat it with respect..."
During the Reed Harvest, 1886 - Gordon Fraser Gallery Limited
My next click is the original 1611 version of the King James Bible. This isn't primarily for religious reasons - though I'm somewhere between being an agnostic and a very occasional communicant of the CofE (a distinction without a difference some would say). It's more because I love the language of the KJB and would find it tremendously satisfying to really immerse myself in it for a long time. This work (and its predecessors) is surely, along with Shakespeare, one of the foundations of English literature, especially its poetry. I'd like to see what would happen to my appreciation of language following such an immersion. It also happens to be very long and very complicated, both helpful in whiling away the hours.
Next, poems. I've gone for these as they can bear a lot of re-reading unlike the vast majority of novels, at least in my experience. There are a number of 'poem a day' sites around but I've gone for the Transport for London poetry archive, a sort of sidings for Poems on the Underground. It's suitably middlebrow and middle of the road; old favourites with a modest amount of the new or off-the-wall. Also I like the idea of being comforted by Poems on the Underground whilst in interminable transit. It's what they're for.
Dabbler Country is The Dabbler's outdoorsy column. 
map of london's smaller and 'lost' rivers. click to enlarge
The Tyburn outfall at Vauxhall Bridge, pic courtesy of The Londonist
Berkeley Square, as reimagined by Bowdidge
South Molton Street, by Bowdidge. Abandoned shopping trolleys and bags full of drowned puppies not pictured. 'We stayed at the Feathers Hôtel,' recorded a seasoned fellow-panellist, Lady Violet Bonham Carter. 'Ralph Wightman and Mrs Wightman rolled up later - & at dinner [ie before the programe] a new member of the Team - George Brown - Attlee-ite Labour who was Minister of Works... Everyone was agreeable to him - but he was obviously lacking in "touch" - or any kind of "amenity" or intercourse.' Then came the programme itself, as ever going out live: 'George Brown's "form" cld not I thought have been worse. He made 2 really "bad form" howlers - one a quite gratuitous & irrelevant insult to the Liberal Party - the other an allusion to my age!' The transcript reveals that his crack against the Liberals was that 'they hardly have any conference worthy of the name', while he did indeed make a jocose reference to Lady Violet's 'present age of 26 or thereabouts'. Yet more unpardonable was still to come. 'When we returned to the hôtel (our BBC hosts having left us) & we sat up talking he hectored & harangued us & addressed me repeatedly as "my dear Violet". I was frozen - but did not I fear freeze him. I have never before - in the course of an unsheltered life, spent among all sorts & conditions of men - met anyone so completely unhouse-trained'.
Written in a sort of code: the various euphemisms for vulgar; the circumflex in hotel, persisted with despite other abbreviations; the unspoken expectations of deference. The van driver's son from Southwark, however, proved resistant, even to being 'frozen'. In fact, rather than making 'howlers' I suspect he was deploying his own social chaff: 'my dear Violet' was surely no accident.
In any event, it can't be denied that she was on to something: the 'completely unhouse-trained' George Brown later became notorious for his drunkenness, volatile temperament and occasional brawls. Indeed, despite his reaching high office, he will surely be remembered more as the man who gave rise to the euphemistic phrase tired and emotional than for any political achievement (I was sad to discover, though, that the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lima incident was probably apocryphal.)The strange ways of internet commerce have meant that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. The Dabbler will be recommending some of the out-of-print, forgotten or neglected gems that can be yours, at the time of writing, for a penny.
Today, guest writer Jon Hotten recommends Jonathan Rendall's Twelve Grand [Yellow Jersey]
No-one’s ever written a perfect book have they? Jonathan Rendall hasn’t, but he’s written a couple of very good ones, and in improbable circumstances too. His first, a boxing memoir called This Bloody Mary Is The Last Thing I Own (a line spoken to him by a man in a bar in Las Vegas after a Frank Bruno fight), carries jacket blurbs from Tom Stoppard and Tom Wolfe, won the Somerset Maugham prize and is by some distance the best book about boxing I’ve read. His second, Twelve Grand, is finer still and to be frank, it’s a disgrace that you can buy it for 1p because Jonathan Rendall is an artist and 1p is no sort of a price for art.
Twelve Grand began as a stunt book. Rachel Cugnoni, the publisher at Random House’s sports imprint Yellow Jersey, wanted to give a writer an advance in the form of stake money for gambling. The proviso was that the entire sum, the Twelve Grand of Rendall’s title (yes, twelve grand is the sort of money they give you – a bloody scandal, isn’t it, considering the work they’re asking for…), had to be gambled and the narrative of the bets turned into a book. If the writer stayed ahead, they kept the winnings; if they lost, then the book must still be delivered.
Rendall realizes immediately that a) he is not the first writer that Rachel has contacted, and b) that the offer is a sucker bet in itself. So he does what any proper writer would do in the circumstances: he takes the money and writes whatever he wants, which in this case is a lovely, melancholic, autobiographical novel based around a flailing, boozy writer trying to capture some of the self-destructive beauty of a gambler’s life.
Twelve Grand is a mood piece; it has to be, because it covers a lot of ground. Early on, he visits a short-lived theme park built by Noel Edmonds; later he’s in Mexico and Vegas at the scenes of old sins and old affairs. You need great control of tone and form to hold elements like that together cohesively. As for the money, well he can’t get rid of it quickly enough. There’s a tremendous little scene where he buys a new suit from the backroom of a shop, and another as he lies to Rachel about the bets he’s supposedly placed. In the beautifully realised and downbeat ending, he catches perfectly the gambler’s real psyche – the one that non-punters just don’t get – when he wins big on a Lennox Lewis fight and is repulsed by the rolls of notes in his pockets. The narrative voice becomes more and more spare as his state of mind slips and splays, but you’ll be right there with him as it does.
Jon is the author of The Years of the Locust and Muscle, and is also the proprietor of the web's finest cricket blog.
The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile. The cottage lay at the country end of it, a tiny sandstone mansion with a steep narrow garden descending to a stretch of river, and they sat in the cluttered kitchen on wheelback chairs, surrounded by washing-up and vaguely votive bric-a-brac: a cracked ceramic plaque of the Virgin Mary from Lourdes; a disintegrating rush cross jammed behind the cooker; a child’s paper mobile of angels rotating in the draught; a photograph of Ronald Knox. While they talked, filthy grandchildren wandered in and stared at them before tall mothers swept them off. It was a household in permanent and benevolent disorder, pervaded by the gentle thrill of religious persecution. A white morning sun was poking through the Bath mist. There was a sound of slow water dripping in the gutters.
For those who enjoy news about the relationship between monkeys and flying squirrels, and also good uses of the words ‘might’, ‘possible’, ‘insights’ and ‘important’ in the field of evolutionary psychology, this story will be most welcome. (My emboldening.)
Researchers have observed small monkeys called Japanese macaques going bananas at the sight of a flying squirrel...This riled-up response is probably just a false alarm, with the monkeys mistaking the squirrel for a predatory bird. On the other hand, male macaques – some of whom give chase and even attack a harmless rodent – might be trying to impress females in their troop.
Although this tough-guy motive was not proved in a new study, "it is possible that adult or sub-adult male monkeys may be 'showing off' their fitness" as potential mates, said Kenji Onishi, an assistant professor of behavioral sciences at Osaka University and lead author of the paper being published in the current issue of the journal Primate Research.
Biologists and psychologists have long studied macaques' complex social interactions for insights into human evolution and behavior.
However, much remains unknown about how macaques get along (or not) with other creatures. Better documentation of such encounters could reveal more about macaque societies as well as that of our shared primate forebears.
"Human evolution occurred alongside primate evolution from a common mammalian ancestor," Onishi told LiveScience. "Therefore, it is important to learn the evolution of primates in understanding the previous steps in human evolution."
During the 1980s, my mother [Lydia Brusseel] wrote a memoir of her teenage years in Belgium during World War Two. The first version was written in longhand, and then she bought a typewriter, typed it up, and made copies for her children. As far as I know, she never submitted it for publication. The other day, my brother had a bright idea. Why don’t we publish it on the internet?, he suggested. Although it is not written in diary format, I added my tuppenceworth to the effect that it would lend itself to appearing as a blog...
My young brother was in charge of the dog on a leash. We, the older children carried bags with all the food and drink we could muster together. On the handle of the pram hung wet nappies to dry, washed at the last minute. We must have looked a most bizarre group of travellers. I guess we had walked about half way to the main highway when the baby started to cry. The mother was distressed and insisted we all stop, so she could feed the baby.
Our little dog had never run very far from home, after going a little further the poor wretch was probably tired, hot and thirsty and had a fit, foaming at the mouth and rolling his eyes. My little brother had hysterics, upset at seeing his pet like this.
Dabbler Country will be another recurring feature on the site, as our intrepid dabblers - headed by the web's leading nature-noter Nige - venture into the Great Outdoors.
