Further relfexions on the weather....

In short, every summer one lives in a state of mutiny and murmur, and I have found the reason: it is because we will affect to have a summer, and we have no title to any such thing. Our poets learnt their trade of the Romans, and so adopted the terms of their masters. They talk of shady groves, purling streams, and cooling breezes, and we get sore throats and agues with attempting to realize these visions.

Master Damon writes a song, and invites Miss Chloe to enjoy the cool of the evening, and the deuce a bit have we of any such thing as a cool evening. Zephyr is a northeast wind, that makes Damon button up to the chin, and pinches Chloe's nose till it is red and blue; and then they cry, this is a bad summer! as if we ever had any other.

The best sun we have is made of Newcastle coal, and I am determined never to reckon upon any other. We ruin ourselves with inviting over foreign trees and make our houses clamber up hills to look at prospects. How our ancestors would laugh at us, who knew there was no being comfortable, unless you had a high hill before your nose, and a thick warm wood at your back! Taste is too freezing a commodity for us, and, depend upon it, will go out of fashion again.
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Excerpt from Letter to George Montagu, Esq. by Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, June 15, 1768.

I recently finished reading a volume of Walpole's letters that I came across in a secondhand bookshop in Galway. Ever the historical Romantic, things like this work for me. In an anthropological sense, I love to see examples of how societies gone by had mundane connexions with our own - including the weather. 6 years ago I studied Roman Satire and it's not totally easing reading but more than anything it gave me a sense of how like 21stC society, Roman society was. The poems talk of taking the piss out of men who wore their togas an inch too short; reminisce on a peaceful life in the country to get away from the traffic and rudeness of the city; slag off foodie show-offs and slutty women, etc.

I'm tempted to visit Strawberry Hill. It's only 7 miles from Heathrow and a do-able day trip.

The 'x's are a little in Joke to myself, they remind me of studying 18thC British Philosophy. Back then the English Language not only had fancy Spelling with x-es but they also used capitalised Nouns like in German and to Me it looked absolutely fabulous. A friend pointed out to me once that in modern day English the only pronouns capitalised are Him and I: does this mean English speakers believe they are on a par with God? (I could talk linguistics forever).

Anyway, I digress too much on my pseudo-intellectual rant. I get that way sometimes. But as you know I'm a lover of cultures past and present and I love witnessing the rare merging of the two; like in Harry Mount's book about Latin, when he explains the phrase 'ipso facto' using a quote from Ben Stiller in Dodgeball - classic, in every sense of the word.