Sunday 2nd September
Shoreditch, Spring 2007
Saturday 1st September
Obituary Watch: Alberto de Lacerda
Habitués of SW3 and SW10 cannot have failed to have seen Alberto de Lacerda: latterly a small, hobbling, tramp-like old man, with two horns of white hair and noble brow and nose, ceaselessly flitting from one venue to the next, wearing a battered black parka, whatever the heat, and clutching a crumpled white supermarket bag bursting with newspapers, books and sundries.
How impressions can deceive. Lacerda was a member of one of the three oldest families of the peninsula, kings and cardinals among his ancestors. He was above all one of the finest poets of his generation.
His one-bedroom flat in Battersea became an extraordinary archive of his life and times but by depressing turns unvisitable, irreparable and eventually, by common standards, uninhabitable.
Plus: he never married...
Friday 31st August
Tower Hill, Winter 2007
Thursday 30th August
My mother, 81 and widowed for 12 years, is lame, near-sighted, psoriatic and deaf, and apart from a residual compulsion to lament her elder daughter's unfeminine appearance, has largely reverted in old age to a state of Blakean innocence and moral simplicity...
And she can still plunge a knife - without warning - deep into onešs narcissistic wounds.
Not long ago, apropos of nothing, she took mournful pleasure in observing that with my whimsical new blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney.
But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN?
B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal.
Then everything lands on our table in a steaming, salsa-drenched pile: guacamole, sour cream and chicken tostadas in huge encephalitic, butterfly-shaped tortillas - nacho chips on steroids - and a tumbler-sized margarita for me, even though it's only 11 a.m. Yummyburgers!
Amusing as it is, there is another level of enjoyment to be had from Terry Castle's recent account of what she - and her aged Mum, and her enigmatic girlfriend - did on her holidays.
You'll need to read the whole thing to see it but the style of the piece is notably chatty, and replete with stylistic tricks that we're not accustomed to seeing in print, let alone in the high-minded pages of the London Review of Books.
Occasional italics? - she has them (in spades). Capital letters for emphasis? Check. Significant others referred to purely as an initial? 'B' is present throughout. Obscure (and possibly entirely invented) Latin tags? 'Camera abbandonata' anyone?
In fact, the further you read on through her entertaining 'diary', you more you realise it reads like nothing so much as an extremely long blog entry.
So it comes as no particular surprise to discover, tagged onto the end of the piece, a note that "Terry Castle lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford...She has a blog at terry-castle-blog.blogspot.com"
Until that is, you decide to check out the blog...
Wednesday 29th August
Kew Gardens, Spring 2007
Tuesday 28th August
The late lamented W F Deedes always had a twinkle in his eye so I think it's safe to assume - loyal employee though he was - that he was often more than a little amused by the foibles of the newspaper he worked for, chief amongst them being a predeliction for scandalised, detailed, coverage of sexual perversity amongst the upper classes.
So, if he's looking down over his glasses from up above, I hope he'll forgive me mentioning the unfortunate caption to his photograph that appeared in the Daily Telegraph last week: Lord Deedes: died in harness
Monday 27th August
Piccadilly, Summer 2007
......previous week
