St Teilo, Llandeilo Fawr

      Tuesday we visited Moelfryn, a garden high on a Carmarthenshire hill side, open to the public as part of the wonderful National Gardens Scheme, and it was an absolute treat.  Eccentric and delightful. 

     From there we headed into Landeilo for lunch - least said about that the better.  The parish church being open I took the opportunity to take some photos for the blog.  Apart from the austere, Late Medieval w tower the body of the church is wholly 19th century, the work of the ubiquitous Sir George Gilbert Scott.  In a story that one feels could rival Gabriel Chevalier's 'Clochemerle', Scott was called into design the church after a competition to design a church for under £3,000 fell apart.  In the end the church cost nearly double Scott's original estimate of £2,500.

     The site however, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, is much, much older.  The site dates back to the 'Dark Ages' and St Teilo.  I'd like to think that the large churchyard (sliced in two since the early 19th century (?)) replicates the shape of St Teilo's original monastic foundation.  Wishful thinking on my part.  In the huge retaining wall along n side of Church St is what is known as St Teilo's Baptistery; a cave like space - probably not that old in the scheme of things - where water gushes out of a pipe and a gated passage leads mysteriously deep into the hill.  It was looking all spick and span on Tuesday, when on previous visits there were vases of flowers etc.

     The style of Scott's church is Cambridge Camden Society approved Middle Pointed.  Dark, massive like a cast iron safe.  Formidable, even unfriendly in places.  The east end in particular has a metallic quality I think this down to the masonry.  The walls are of rubble masonry - to match the tower, no doubt.  'The Buildings of Wales' just says that the church is of 'hard grey limestone', but looking at the multiple buttress set-offs it's hard not think that these, at least, are of a different, lighter, close-grained stone, and have probably been cut by machine, as is the church's most extraordinary feature: a huge batter of perfectly cut blocks at the e end of the n aisle, that is half roof and half buttress.  Elemental, industrial-age Gothic. It could almost be the work of a 'Rogue Architect' such as Samuel Saunders Teulon.  You know, I'm not sure it will ever weather into mellowness.
     The interior - aisle-less chancel, nave with n aisle and s transept - is big and barn like.  No money for refinements.  In recent years the church has been subdivided.  It hasn't helped.  Some of the detailing is plain awful.  Not much in the way of furnishings except some memorials in the chancel.  The churchyard, being in Wales, has a range of forceful Victorian gravestones.  Obelisks, spires and the like.

'No Country for Old Men' by Cormac McCarthy

      'That is no country for old men'.... so begins one of W B Yeats most famous poems, 'Sailing to Byzantium'.  The country in question here, in this potent novel, is southern Texas on the Mexico border; part of what is often referred to as 'flyover country' that great hinterland of the United States between the east and west coasts, 'that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night', and a place that Cormac McCarthy has visited before in his novels.  It is also his own country for, although born on the East Coast, the majority of his childhood and adolescence was lived in Tennessee.  He is a writer who has only really entered my field of few in the last few years, and this is the first novel of his that I have read.

     'No country for Old Men' is a three way tussle between the Ed Tom Bell the sheriff, Llewelyn Moss the petty criminal, and the psychotic Anton Chirgurh, the hired killer.  The novel opens with the discovery of a sprawl of corpses and abandoned vehicles in the desert.  Moss has stumbled upon some sort altercation between drugs gangs, or some such.  And among the dead and the dying he makes a further discovery, one that drives the narrative.  That fight in the desert is never fully explained, for this is a lean, tense novel, sparse in the way that Jean Pierre Melville's cinematic masterpiece 'Le Cercle Rouge' is sparse. (sparse of punctuation too) Information is withheld from the reader.  In one sense it doesn't matter, the novel is not about Mexican drug cartels as such but a personal conflict between three men. A concentrated affair, that is part thriller, part Western and part meditation.  The result of this economy of information, however, is that the reader is left wandering through, what I can only describe as, a nocturnal battlefield.  A novel of darkness and fire.  And one I would recommend.

'Conversation pieces of memorable quality': The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial

     So late this afternoon my timeline on Twitter has been mildly a-flutter with images of the five final 'concept designs' in the competition to design a fitting memorial for the Late Queen.  It is now time for a public consultation.  I'm not quite sure how this is to work out: we are given a limited number of visuals from which to make our choice and we are also told the 'winning' design may be altered/refined in the next stage of the design process - they are merely 'Early Proposed Design Concepts' remember, so it's all a bit vague.*  There is a real possibility then that the public will not get what it 'voted' for.  It's all a bit of swizz really.  A Potemkin exercise.

     'The memorial,' we are told, 'is envisioned to be a new national landmark of outstanding quality...'  That remains to be seen.  The proposals range from the flat-out bizarre to the mediocre.  So far, at least, what seems to be attracted people's favourable attention is the image from the Foster + Partners submission of the their proposed treatment of the equestrian statue of the Queen, that would standing on the s side of the Mall opposite Marlborough Gate.  A remarkably classical design for Foster, hitherto the epitome of sleek, anonymous Modernism.

     The five finalists (each receiving an honorarium of £50,000) are (as presented on the Malcolm Reading Consultants** website - they are handling the public consultation): Foster + Partners, Heatherwick Studio, J&L Gibbons, Tom Stuart Smith, and finally WilkinsonEyre.  And while I have some sympathy for anyone who entered this competition as the 'brief' is exhausting, contradictory and in parts mutually exclusive, I have to say I find none of the five very inspiring.  Perhaps they have been set up to fail.  Some, however, are more bathetic than others i.e. Heatherwick Studio and Tom Stuart-Smith. That said the Heatherwick proposal is, at least, visually cohesive; the other proposals tend to visually incoherent with a little bit of this here and a little bit of that there - there is, for instance, that ridiculous flame sculpture in the Foster proposal.  I am reminded of the scatter gun aesthetics of the coronation. Is this really to be the aesthetic identity of the new reign? Is this really the best we can do?

     Reading the blurb I am struck with just how complex and bureaucratic the whole design process is.***  Each design team has to have a whole phalanx of consultants. I can't help but see this as a projection of a lack of cultural confidence.  All that is needed really is an excellent piece of sculpture of the Late Queen, preferably equestrian, on a suitable plinth.  It isn't rocket science. The rest including, all the bridges**** and the landscaping, the places of reflection, and the cod symbolism is essentially superfluous.  And judging my the response on Twitter/X this afternoon I am not alone in thinking this. 

   'Envisioned', I ask you.

     (07.06.25  Reread Stephen Bayley's essay for 'The Critic' this afternoon.  He rightly says that the 'compulsory' platitudes viz inclusion etc. should be dropped.  Cassandra like he also evokes the spectre of a previous royal memorial, and to be honest one I had forgotten about, the truly dreadful Queen Elizabeth Gate, in London's Hyde Park.  Let it be a warning to us all.)

*  For instance, what will happen two those twin gates to St James's Park that stand on The Mall opposite to Marlborough Gate?  They are very French and were likely designed by Sir Aston Webb (and made by the Bromsgrove Guild) as part of his redesign of the Mall as part of the Victoria Memorial.)

**  I wonder how much they will be paid for there efforts.

***  This isn't an isolated example.  Watching the BBC coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show I was surprised at how prescriptive and bureaucratic the process has become for those designing one of the main show gardens.  The risk in all of this is that designers will eventually walk away.

****  Two of the proposed bridges actually have names: from Foster 'The Bridge of Unity' and from Heatherwick 'The Togetherness Bridge'.  Not sure which is the more ghastly. 

Own work: Three monoprints

 

     Three prints to share with you.   All are augmented monoprints.  I did them some time ago, and have come back to them in the last day or so.  Distance has enabled me to re-assess them and perhaps they are not without some merit.  The first two are on photocopy paper, the third on watercolour paper.  The first has been worked on in ink & oil pastel, the second in biro & oil pastel and the third ink, watercolour & oil pastel.

Sir John Ninian Comper V:

     'Oh, No!  Not more about bloody Ely cathedral!  Hasn't he done it to death?' I hear you all cry.  Well, tough! says I.  This is just a short post on the work of Sir J N Comper (beloved of this parish) in the cathedral.  In the 1930s Comper was commissioned to decorate the fantastical chantry chapel of Bishop West, and so bring it back into liturgical use for the first time since the Reformation.  Comper provided  stained glass, and an 'English Altar', reredos, and altar hangings, all in his late 'Unity by Inclusion' style.  I think the stained glass and the riddel posts (which are of wrought iron) etc are superb, as are the altar hangings, but the reredos sadly is not.  It is too weak for its position, not being strong enough to withstand the visual onslaught of a large e window.  Something sculptural would have been better, perhaps.  Pevsner disliked it, and I have to agree.

Love, whose month is ever May: Poetry and Prose for May Day

May by John Clare (1793-1864)

Come queen of months in company

Wi all thy merry minstrelsy
The restless cuckoo absent long
And twittering swallows chimney song
And hedge row crickets notes that run
From every bank that fronts the sun

And swarthy bees about the grass

That stops wi every bloom they pass

Fantasticks by Nicholas Breton (1545/52 -1623/5)

     It is now May, and the sweetness of the air refresheth every spirit: the sunny beams give forth fair blossoms, and the dripping clouds water Flora's great garden....

     It is the month wherein Nature hath her fill of mirth, and the sense are filled with delights.  I conclude it is from the Heavens a grace, and to the earth a gladness.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

A Survey of London by John Stow

     In the Month of May, namely on May-day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would walk into the sweet meadows and green woods, there to rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of birds.....I find also in the month of May, the citizens of London of all estates, lightly in every parish, or sometimes two or three parishes joining together had their several mayings, and did fetch in May-poles, with divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris dancers, and other devices, for pastime all the day long; and toward the evening they had stage plays, and bonfires in the streets.

The Driving Boy by John Clare (1793-1864)

 The driving boy beside his team

Will oer the may month beauty dream

And cock his hat and turn his eye

On flower and tree and deepning skye

And oft bursts loud in fits of song

And whistles as he reels along

Crack[ing] his whip in starts of joy

A happy dirty driving boy

When will my May come? by Richard Barnfield (1574-1627)

When will my May come, that I may embrace thee?

When will the hower be of my soules joying?

If thou wilt come and dwell with me at home,

My sheepcote shall be strowed with new greene rushes

Weele haunt the trembling prickets as they rome

About the fields, along the hauthorne bushes;

I have a pie-bald curre to hunt the hare,

So we will live with daintie forrest fare.

And when it pleaseth thee to walke abroad

Abroad into the fields to take fresh ayre,

The meades with Floras treasure should be strowde,

The mantled meaddowes, and the fields so fayre.

And by a silver well with golden sands

Ile sit me downe, and wash thine ivory hands.

But it thou wilt not pittie my complaint,

My teares, nor vowes, nor oathes, made to thy beautie:

What shall I do but languish, die, or faint,

Since thou dost scorne my teares, and my soules duetie:

And teares contemned, vowes and oaths must faile,

And where teares cannot, nothing can prevaile.

When will my May come, that I may embrace thee?