31 July, 2007

To Date?

Close beside the pride of modern man there stands his ironic view of himself—his awareness that he has to live in an historicizing, as it were a twilight mood, and his fear that his youthful hopes and energy will not survive into the future.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873.
London is filled with a beautiful architecture—but like all architecture, it is resistant to man. The yuppies and immigrants go about their everyday lives, eyes closed, ears full of the latest noise, never looking up. Even those who, like me, keep their eyes intent upon the built environment, are pushed back, not by its ugliness, but by its lack of meaning. Red brick, yellow brick, brown brick, grey brick—plaster, white and cream—glass, a little oak, a little stone—concrete, slate, plastic, tin, terracotta, pebble-dash, painted porch-tiles, many quite elegant—but all blank, remorseless, and quite empty of signs. I stare and stare, in an attempt to make sense of these objects: to make texts of them, texts with which to work, to communicate. Down Chichele Road there are the rudiments of signs: a plaster eagle perched atop a house (No. 15), and facing it a Neo-Gothic church made mosque with pea-green domes. Almost every terraced house has stereotyped designs, one or several, floral or abstract, carved into the brick, or moulded into the plaster, and flexwinged wyverns are common ornaments on the gabletops of the area.

But I want an architecture that can be made to ask questions—and these objects offer only the faintest and least interesting of enquiries.

One kind of architectural object, however, can be made to ask a number of highly worthwhile questions—the datestone. Until recently the datestone was not even a category in my mental lexicon; I had never considered the things. But then, well, I got thinking.

I distinguish three related objects. Firstly, the datestone proper: a stone, brick, plaster chunk, wood panel or other object containing a date, with or without initials. The datestone marks the completion date of the building to which it is attached, or originally attached. Second, the false datestone: these look much like datestones, except that the date they show is not the date of the building's completion—generally it is the founding date of the company, or else the date of an earlier building on the same site. Third, the commemorative stone, which I will abbreviate to 'comstone': a large stone (or plaque) with a longer text, commemorating a contemporary or historical event, such as the foundation of a public building, casualties of war, and the like. It is usually, but not always, clear which is which, and there are a few border-cases. Here I am most interested in the genuine datestone, although I will show the others by contrast.


From what I can tell, little has been written on the datestone. The British Library has two works on the subject, both ramshackle productions by local historians: A. S. and E. Day's Datestones of Bradshaw and Harwood, and John B. Taylor's Stories in Stone: Datestones in Rossendale. The latter is hand-written. Neither contains anything of theoretical interest; instead they catalogue stones (with drawn reproductions) going back to the 17th century. There is no indication that certain periods of history have left us more stones than others. The same is true of this website, which catalogues datestones in Jersey.

But when I came to look for datestones myself, I found the distribution of dates to be strongly skewed—the overwhelming majority of stones are from about 1870 to 1910. This is perhaps even more remarkable for the fact that the stones can be found on buildings of all types, public and private, plain and ornate—as Taylor puts it, 'from mansion to hen-cote'.


I cannot claim a rigorous or systematic methodology for collecting the stones. I looked for them carefully on various walks, mostly in London—Cricklewood (where I live), Willesden, West Hampstead, Belsize Park, Hammersmith, Camden Town, Great Portland Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, the Strand, Fleet Street, Holborn and the Inns of Court—as well as a couple of trips to Nottingham and York. Here is a list of the 92 genuine datestones I have found so far, with images from a digital camera. Nottingham stones are marked with an N, York with a Y; the rest are from London.
1682, 1748, 1759, 1789, 1800, 1810Y, 1860, 1860N, 1865, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1876Na, 1876Nb, 1877, 1878a, 1878b, 1879, 1881, 1883a, 1883b, 1884a, 1884b, 1884c, 1885, 1887, 1888a, 1888b, 1889a, 1889b, 1890a, 1890b, 1891, 1892a, 1892b, 1892c, 1894a, 1894b, 1895, 1895Y, 1896a, 1896b, 1897a, 1897b, 1897c, 1897N, 1898, 1899a, 1899b, 1900, 1901, 1901N, 1902a, 1902b, 1903a, 1903b, 1903c, 1903Ya, 1903Yb, 1904a, 1904b, 1904c, 1904Y, 1905a, 1905b, 1905c, 1905d, 1905e, 1906, 1906Y, 1907Y, 1908Y, 1909, 1910a, 1910b, 1914, 1924, 1930, 1930Y, 1952, 1957a, 1957b, 1960, 1962, 1969, 1972, 1979, 1983, 1996, 2000
Several of these are problem cases. In bold are free-standing objects with dates—plaques, a lamp-post (1902a), a glass awning (1874—from the Criterion Restaurant; I believe this is original, and thus a genuine 'datestone', but I could be wrong). In italics is a curious subclass of datestone (1789 may not be in this group): these are all located around the Inns of Court, and all feature a date with a triangular series of initials, most with 'T' at the apex. Notably, they go back much earlier, and continue late. These stones closely resemble 'marriage stones', which function as a record of marriage, the initials being those of the husband and wife. As far as I am aware, my sole example of the latter is 1810Y. However, because of the concentration of the stones in italics around the Inns, I am confident that their initials are in fact those of heads of chambers. What the 'T' indicates I do not know, but as 1957b and 1960 (both from Gray's Inn) clearly demonstrate, the practice still continues today.

It is worth noting that a datestone is not always a reliable indicator of the age of the building to which it is attached; both Taylor and the Days mention that stones can be incorporated into later buildings:
The datestones on a few buildings seem contrary to what the architecture would suggest and may have been incorporated from an earlier structure, which may or may not have been on the same site.
If the datestone cannot reliably attest the date of a building, it is usually reliable on its own date. However, there are exceptions—false datestones, for instance this double stone, from an old Prudential office in Nottingham. Its date of 1848 is in fact the date of the company's founding, and the building itself is considerably later, an excellent example of High Victorian Gothic, designed in terracotta by Alfred Waterhouse during the 1890s. Another example is this, which unless I am radically mistaken about Georgian aesthetics, is not from 1829, but rather commemorates the founding of King's College London. Often false datestones are combined with real ones—the latter being the restoration date, or else the two stones showing an anniversary commemoration, as here.

This is a chart of the frequency distribution of our 92 genuine stones:

Datestones become increasingly common during the period 1860-1910, and then rapidly fall off; a disproportionate number of those before and after this period are in the 'Inns' subclass discussed above. Comstones, on the other hand, are found throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, although I have not counted them with the same energy and interest as the datestones.


The question is, then: why should the period 1870-1910 present such a strong concentration of datestones? It will be quickly observed that there simply are a lot of buildings from this period—thus the Days: 'Nineteenth-century datestones are linked with the great explosion of population in the Bolton district when expansion took place by building mainly terraced housing along the main roads of the area'. But we observe in return that the architecture of English cities is highly eclectic, and that plenty of buildings remain from all periods of the last three centuries, despite Paul Thompson's claim that the 'medieval and Georgian architecture which now survives is no more than a winning fragment'. The distribution is just too skewed, even taking into account the unsystematic collection of my data—a deeper reason must be sought.

As I walked about London, and thought about London, I noticed that the problem of datestones seemed to become in my mind a much greater problem, of history and its architecture. And a casual remark in the Days' book provides a further clue: 'Datestones add much of interest to the visual apperance of a building, and when in the original setting, place the building firmly in the historical period.' (Italics mine.) When I polled friends, most murmured something vague about the late Victorians being conscious of progress and destiny—particularly sensitive to their own place in history. I emailed an eminent scholar, who replied:
I think that generally the Victorian period was a time of pride and money, and of 'the invention of tradition' (book by Hobsbawm and Ranger) and therefore they were both more conscious of such niceties and more able to afford it. . . In modern times we are generally less interested in identifying ourselves with buildings and they are often made by developers more interested in money than pride.
Most modern developers are concerned with cost-efficiency, and would disdain the datestone as purely ornamental; the comstone, on the other hand, is an imposition from the trustees and benefactors of the building, who wish to commemorate an historic occasion. In other words, certain events are considered significant enough to memorialise, and so are certain buildings as public functions (library, school, council block)—but not architecture itself. This is what is meant, I think, by the claim that our architects have less 'pride' in their work: they are not allowed to give it an intrinsic historical significance.

Why is this? History, as we popularly conceive it, and as it is currently made, describes the State and its subsidiaries, even down to local councils and the petty officials and society-folk who lay comstones. The buildings we choose to make historical, by giving them a date, are thus the buildings that serve a purpose in the framework of the State.

The old datestones, on the other hand, are the equivalent of dates in colophons, or on paintings and picture-frames—they denote the building as a work of art, as a piece of architecture, and as such, part of a history—a history not of the State, or even of society, but of aesthetic achievement.

The craze for datestones in 1870-1910 does not represent a sense of national pride—it has nothing to do with civics, with the public sphere. If it did, we should expect to see datestones on monumental civic achievements—on the glorious and baroque façades of Regent Street, or earlier, on all the triumphal Nash buildings in the centre of the city. But there are none. In fact there seems to be no correlation between the possession of a datestone and the grandeur or civic importance of a building. Some important works have them, others do not—and those that do often use Roman numerals, such as 1800 (Royal College of Surgeons), or at least stately lettering, as in 1877 (Belsize Park Town Hall). Most datestones, on the contrary, are private statements, soft and elegant signatures, equivalent to the dateless monograms also occasionally found through London.


Nietzsche, in the work quoted above, finds freedom in the escape from history, or at least in the mastery of it. I, however, am more sympathetic to Gadamer, who sees liberty in history: the man who would oppress a nation cuts its people loose from their own history, unmooring man from himself, and gives them another history, or even a myth. To sign one's work in stone is to add one's name, however small, to a distinguished list, and to become part of a history. Thus too the marriage stones, with which wed couples solidify and manifest their commitment in the face of history. History is solidity.

Sketched above is a narrative that can be read into the facts of the datestones as we have them. It may be utterly fanciful, or it may yet contain some truths worth sifting. We have yet to determine (if indeed we are on some semblance of the correct track) why the period 1870-1910 should have conceived of its architecture in these historical terms. Perhaps we might invoke the rapid growth of the architectural profession, which 'increased more than tenfold between 1820 and 1870'. Certainly we will want to talk about the changing clients; John Betjeman, in his 1972 Pictorial History of English Architecture, informs us that 'The people who paid for buildings at the beginning of the age of electricity and the internal combustion engine were different from the mid-Victorians'. (And his remark that today's architects are 'brought up in a generation whose romance is to be found in a future which does not exist, rather than the past', while describing the flight from stylistic historicism, applies equally to the decline of historical consciousness, and hence of datestones.)

But at least we have begun to press those damned stones—we have at least spurred them to talk, to ask questions—and so we have not succumbed to that effacement of our history, for which our masters so devoutly wish.

29 July, 2007


A train. It is night. There is a sudden noise outside.

Boy: Is that funder an' lightning?

Father: No.

(Pause. Noise again.)

Boy: Is that funder an' lightning?

Father: I told you, no it isn't.

(Pause. Noise again.)

Boy: That's funder an' lightning!

Father rolls his eyes: Is it?


Boy: No.

Father: Well then.

No budding Caesar, then.

25 July, 2007

Africa disappears

The black Africa of tribal dances, of swollen breasts offered to the glory of nature, survives only on movie sets. According to Sergio Rossi, that is. He's narrating a scene in the middle of Africa Addio (1966), the notorious documentary allegedly about the decolonization of Africa. (Mencius put me onto it two months ago. I responded with Salo—but Salo isn't online. Africa Addio was, until recently.) Rossi is talking in his stern, deadpan Italian, over a shot of a Zulu village and its dancers, and a white crew is filming them all. 'Come on, come on, more action!' the director shouts. Rossi continues—
Today, Zulu maidens come out of the academy, speak excellent English, and receive union wages for putting on nylon underwear and dancing the dance of their grandmothers. During their breaks, the ancient rhythm of the tom-tom gives them a few variations on the theme.
The Zulus rush into a mud hut and pull out a piano. A drum-kit and saxophone materialise out of nowhere:

Reality has been suspended, and mingles freely with fantasy. It hardly matters. Africa Addio compels belief by the sheer force of its imagery—and that's art, isn't it? Truth is grounded in the past, in expectation: it is a historical phenomenon. But Africa Addio flattens the past into a single moment of presence, feigning history—Zulus pretending to be savages for the camera, offering their swollen breasts and 'dancing the dance of their grandmothers'. And so it goes on:
The African female has discovered that she is a woman, and is beginning to behave as such. She wants to be modern because she feels the past is against her. . .
Africa Addio is about the disownment of the past, about a moment in which man revolts against tradition and authority in the most violent way imaginable. The film is flush with images of mutiny, murder, slaughter, dismemberment (a pile of severed hands), execution—possibly staged—drowning, explosions, and so on. Animals come in for their share of brutality. Natives fix a rope between jeeps and cut down fleeing wildlife; they chase around a mother elephant until she is too exhausted to protect her young; the camera pans for minutes over fields strewn with the skeletons of slain game. Old foxhunters have no foxes to hunt, so instead they hunt a man running with a piece of meat on a string. Thus there is always the suggestion of the pretend and the fantastic. In one scene a wounded zebra is airlifted into the sunset:

This is the Addio vision of what happened when the whites left the savages to their own devices. One reviewer, while admitting that the film is a 'masterpiece', calls it 'morally disgusting, despicably racist and consistently reprehensible'. Roger Ebert, that bastion of mediocrity, labels it 'brutal, dishonest, racist'. Sound familiar? Perhaps any cultural product that elicits such howls of moral outrage is worth taking seriously.

. . . When she was naked, she had two mammary glands. Now that she's clothed, she has two breasts. She does not want to display herself. She wants to be looked at, to make you guess what's under her alluring clothes. Naked she was prey, like a black female. Clothed she is a tyrant, like a white woman. Africa covers itself consciously, and all wrapped up in the veils of its consciousness, Africa disappears.
The dark continent has eaten of the apple, and lost all her innocence. She has transformed from an animal, part of the natural world, into a human, who triumphs over nature. She has become ironic, a fit subject—or object—for the ironising eye of documentary, casting away, in its lumen siccum, the rich shadows of the past. Hence she simultaneously 'wants to be looked at', and 'disappears'. It is the same in Sudan—
In the southern regions of Sudan, thousands of pairs of underwear, all one size, are distributed to the tribes in the interior by the "Legion of Decency". Among all things to hide, underwear covers what's most urgent. That's enough to decently begin to march toward the conquest of further dignity.
That last sentence, unless you're not concentrating, possesses a beautiful little irony. The narration accompanies a vision of naked locals lining up to receive white pants, yet another surrealist juxtaposition of raw and cooked:


All lies, of course—all lies and fabrications. But is Africa Addio not an allegory for itself? It is a rebellion of the documentary against its own form, a disownment of the past. It rejects the criteria of truth and accuracy: it is a triumph of rhetoric over logic, and so enacts the changes in intellectual fashion of the mid-60s. It is a lament for past values, whether real or imagined, but at the same time it is complicit in their demise. Africa, in Africa Addio, is not naked, but she pretends to be naked, and invites the gaze with astonishing images.

19 July, 2007



Harnais de Gueule.

Pour le sacrifice des magnigoules gastrolatres à leur
Dieu Ventripotent.

‘A l’entrée du
premier service,
la royne prit, en guise
de pillules qui sen-
tent si bon pour soy
desgraisser l’estomac
une cuillerée de pe-

Soupe Petasinne.
De Pasque de Soles.
Des Ambares de Mer.
Des Ballivarnes en Paste,
Des Conquiguoles Savoreuses.
Des Coquemares à la Vinaigrette.
Les quatre quartiers du Mouton que porta Hellé et
Frixus au destroit de Propontide
Le Boeuf Apis de Memphis en Egypt que reffussa
la pitance de la main de Germanicus Cezar.
Les cramastères du Toreau tant aymé de Pasiphé.
Longes de Veau routy, sinapisées de pouldre zinziberine.
Oysons couvez par la digne oye limatique, laquelle
par son chant saulva la Rocque Tarpée.
La foye de l'ourse Calixto.
De la friande vestampenarderie.
De la gallimaffrée a l'estifignade.
Des moque croquettes.
Brededins-brededas glacés.
Le tout associé de brevaige sempiternel de
Vin de Chinon.

‘Les vezes, bouzines et cornemuses sonnerent harmonieusement
et leur furent les viandes apportees.’

‘Et la ne considerons l’harmonie des contrehastiers,
la temperature des potages, l’ordre du service de vin?’






17 July, 2007

Dead flies

In the 1440s, Poggio Bracciolini, one of the great humanists of the early Italian Renaissance—the age of Valla, Guarino and Niccoli—compiled a book of jests, which he called Facetiae. The jests of the Renaissance were the same as the fabliaux of the Middle Ages—in this field there was much more continuity than innovation, and the jests remained hugely popular throughout Europe, from Chaucer and Boccaccio, through Poggio, to Till Eulenspiegel and An Hundred Merrye Tales. The 19th of Poggio's facetiae runs as follows:
A beaker of wine was once brought to an Englishman at a banquet, and all present took their wine from it. And while the Englishman was putting it to his lips, he saw a dead fly in it, which he took out. Then, after having taken his drink, he replaced the dead fly in the wine. Asked why he did this, he replied: "I, personally, do not like flies in my wine, but how am I to know if some of you do not like them?"
We can read this story in two ways. Does the Englishman lack common sense, or is he witty, ironical and idiosyncratic? There are no clues in the telling; and it is this compressed ambiguity that lends the story its particular piquancy. I, of course, read it in a favourable light. My Englishman—by which I mean, me—is ironical and idiosyncratic. He is difficult, rebarbative, satirical; he is the man to whom Hitler referred in conversation in 1941, a rare moment of praise:
They have an unexampled cheek, these English! It doesn't prevent me from admiring them. In this sphere, they still have a lot to teach us.
It pleases me to think that these two Continentals never knew quite where they stood with the Englishman: they could never quite gauge his sincerity or irony. And here arises the spring of English comedy—the eternal ambivalence, the making of humour from discomfort, social awkwardness, and even unexpected aggression. Perhaps it is Poggio, and not Chaucer or other native purveyors of occasional and conventional bawdiness, who gives us our first taste of what I think of as the genius of English humour.


Tonight, Mrs. Roth and I attended a show—Simon Munnery's warm-up for his forthcoming stint at the Edinburgh Festival. Munnery, to me, is the perfect English comedian—discomfort, awkwardness, and unexpected aggression are all there intact. He has the talent of making his audience laugh with shock and embarrassment, as well as in sympathy. One anecdote in his free-associative stream recounted the decision to buy up a stack of Daily Mails from a newsagent, and consign the lot to a recycling-bin—a little act of local heroism. As a titter and muffled cheer went up from the audience—young, bohemian, leftist—Munnery snarled, 'It'll be the Guardian next time'. The audience roared: they had been nailed, numbered, and they were delighted.

Halfway through the set, he did some character-skits. He paused to note a previous review: 'the change of character is little more than a change of hat'. 'Well,' he replied, 'this one is more than a change of hat—I'm taking my glasses off'. Munnery exuded all the charm of the half-organized and haphazard: he bumbled into each skit without apparent order, promised more minutes at the end, seemed to forget lines, but forgot them hilariously, remembered that this wasn't the last song, that's the next one, so actually we've got ten more minutes, so don't clap after this one, well you can clap if you want, but don't leave, because there's another one after it, and so on. He sings a song about his dad getting him out of bed in the morning—'although the cold hard world is on your side, mummy is on mine'—and does a poem about London. It takes two and a half hours to drive across London, he reasons, and you can fly to Rome in an hour and a quarter, which makes Rome a suburb of London. The city becomes a horrifying presence, absorbing people and other towns alike. (In a previous show he flashed up a map of Britain, marked 'Greater London'.) He does a skit with Dysmas and Gestas, rendered as crude drawings on a board with moveable eyes and mouths, and bickering pathetically in the wake of Christ's deposition. (What is it that draws the Englishman to comedify Calvary?) He pulls apart Springsteen and Lennon lyrics with a delighted contempt. He does a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, the story ending with an imagined roomful of people enthusiastically chanting 'Science!' at different pitches—and the narrative seems motivated by a surreal and inexplicable anger. The rhythm of Munnery's comedy has an unpredictable logic, and an unsettling insouciance. I could readily have imagined him challenging his audience on the possible appropriateness of dead flies in wine.

14 July, 2007

For Cerberus

For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lungs by corrosion; and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives.

— Lemuel Gulliver, Works, Vol. IV, Book III.
And so, too, every word we type is a diminution of our fingers by corrosion, and the vice of blogging, in truth, contributes if not to the shortening of life, at least to its squandering. Still—squander we must, squander we must.


Mencius is in favour—pardon, in favor—of abolishing universities: 'the university, which was established as a refuge whose purpose was to pursue truth without regard for the opinions of the world, has become a power center whose purpose is to impose its own opinions on the world. As such it has no more use for independent thought than a dog has for beets'. He further claims that 'universities are directly responsible for almost all the violence in the world today'. His post is full of stories about academic ill-practice. And so Mencius wants the 'Henry VIII treatment—unconditional abolition and confiscation'. And he's in good company, as his readers snap and bite with gusto at the dripping, dishevelled limbs of Academia.

One wonders, though—if this terrible plan were executed, if the universities were abolished and their inhabitants scattered to the winds—who would be left to defend the world against racism, sexism, and homophobia? Who would remain to combat the statist and imperialist marches of the Bush dynasty? Who would be there to show us the truth about Hegel (liberal), Shakespeare (subversive) or even Plutarch (bigot)? Who would be called upon to fill up television shows with their opinions on Seurat and/or Rodrigo Rato?

And moreover, what haven would there be for cloudminded codicophiles and functionshirkers like myself? The cold city does not beckon. The dim looming of pixels and cordless mouses, of bonds and pensions, conservative suits, readers of Alain de Botton—of a life without dust, vellum and hot air, without glorious idling—less glorious than of old, granted, but glorious a little nonetheless, and all at the expense of others—without impressionable acolytes to be scorned and inspired on alternate days, without that charming community of men and women who genuinely believe they're doing something useful, brings out the shudders in me, and all the terrors of tenure and theory and undergraduate apathy fade into utter insignificance by comparison.

05 July, 2007

The Lung Goodbye









Has this objection been floated in the tabloids?


02 July, 2007

The Large Glass


— Merry Christmas, replies Gawain, with a twinkle. We're on swift halves in St. Stephen's Tavern, just across from the Houses of Parliament, as a brief refreshment before continuing on to Westminster Cathedral. Gawain has been enjoying himself immensely—educating me on Cosimo Tura and Cima da Conegliano at the National, and before that reminiscing of his adventures in intimate Lisbon fado bars as we stroll down from Kensington to Trafalgar Square. Gawain is enthusiastic about everything, which makes the showing off of one's beloved city an even greater pleasure. And so we bond immediately. Much later, over several pints of Pride, he confides that he has never before spent twelve hours straight with another man—only with women. Good gracious—I've popped his amicitial cherry—withdrawn his homme du milieu!


We have seen Westminster Cathedral, where Gawain got particularly excited by a squamatic ceiling of golden tesserae; we are walking, beneath a bright grey sky, along Horseferry Road, down to the old river, rolling in glutinous ignorance of all the developments on this side and on that—towards the Blackfriars drinking-house, with its own marble fixtures and squamatic vaults, where we are due to meet my wife, and quaff several pints of Pride—

— How are we going to write about this? he asks. Gawain's English, allegedly acquired during teenage years, is terrifyingly idiomatic. He wants to do the 'man thing' of roughing each other up—locker-room towel-beatings, only with words. He wants me to laugh at his glabrity, his approaching senescence, his 'feel-good' blogging, perhaps—anything. (This is the truth about Sir Gawain—as far from chivalric delicacy as might be imagined. Here is a man so much more fascinated by women than by men, and yet wholly in his element with me, as if he has been too long deprived of serious male company. He speaks with great fondness of his old friends among the kshatriya Rajput.) I say I'll write something sentimental. He insists I leave a note at the end that it's all bullshit. Should I?


Gawain is constantly changing his glasses, but he cannot hide a very robust gaze, eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase. You do not see this at all in his picture, where with artful hands he masks the true shape of his physiognomy. Mrs. Roth remarks, too, that he is much more handsome in person. He is worried about his age, but there is no age at all in his eyes, and when he opens his mouth, his galvanized chatter operates just like the motion of his pupils, full of life.

Three fine black crows in silhouette, on the surface of a most beautiful inro, in a dark corner of the Japanese room on the first floor of the Victoria and Albert Museum, remind Gawain of the three ages of man. (He is preparing a post—I must not give away too much.) What happens when a man evolves? What does he lose, sacrifice, and in search or hope of what?

There are implicit themes in our interactions, alluded to, but never smothered with language. We are both struggling to get our bearings to one another, but there is no timidity, no caution or reserve—more of a sizing-up, like the noisy tuning of an orchestra, or the gestural jabs of boxers as they begin to square in the ring. The instruments, and the pugilists, are at ease with each other: they are playful and relaxed. We do not hesitate to touch each other, and when we part after the first day he kisses me roughly, abrading me with stubble, like my father used to do when I was little. But here is no paternalism. This is a question of age. My youth keeps cropping up in conversation, a leitmotif. He says that the Varieties reveal the interests of a younger man, not yet weathered by life. It is not an insult, though if I were insecure I might take it for one. He says I am lucky not to have experienced all the miseries that come with being in the world. I reply that it is the hardest thing of all for me not to be ashamed of my own youth. He feels old, and is gloomily resigned to a future when younger women have no longer any interest in him. That time has not arrived yet—he knows it. He is fascinated by the thought of a late Titian crippled by age, unable to paint, trading on name alone—important perhaps, but no longer capable of beauty.

Age is something that hangs over us both, a gentle and ambiguous threat, or at least a mild uncertainty, holding us together in opposition—an Ionic sort of bond. Never have I met a man so aggressively intelligent, and moreover so remarkable in character, for whom I feel so much warmth, and so little competition. It is the chemistry for a most perfect affection.

Note: a third-party account of our trip to the V&A by the accomplished sculptor Robert Mileham, whose quiet charm was quite the foil for Gawain; alas, our time together was far shorter, and future visits will, I trust, provide increasingly greater returns. Chris Miller comments, wittily. And finally Gawain himself.