Rose Reflections by BL1961
Yes, The Misadventures of Moppet got its thousandth hit today! And I’m delighted, especially considering the blog is less than one month old.
Unfortunately I haven’t a prize to offer the thousandth visitor, like a week in Portofino, or a helium balloon. But here are some flowers for all of you, to say thank you so much for stopping by.
The Persephone Bookshop in Kensington Church Street, by this lyre lark
Persephone are not just a bookshop. They are a publisher of, to quote the website:
neglected classics by C20th (mostly women) writers. Each one in our collection of 86 books is intelligent, thought-provoking and beautifully written.
The 20 of those 86 which I have personally read certainly fit that description. It would be impossible to pick a favourite, so here are my top three: Monica Dickens’ Mariana, a romantic and funny coming-of-age story, Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady, about a family of Victorian girls struggling to find either a husband or a purpose in life, and Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street, about much the same thing forty years on.
On to the new releases. Persephone #85 is Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages. It’s my favourite of Whipple’s books, which are insightful, entertaining and brilliantly observed. This one, first published in 1930, is the story of a shopgirl, Jane, who wants her own shop. Jane is talented, determined and resourceful, and you just know she is going to end up with a retail empire to rival Emma Harte’s in A Woman of Substance. But along the way she struggles to reconcile her career and her love life and to make her own way in a male-dominated, snobbish world.
Persephone #86 is To Bed With Grand Music, by Marghanita Laski, published in 1946 under a pseudonym (Sarah Russell) for reasons that will become obvious. Marghanita Laski was a novelist, journalist and critic, but all you really need to know about her is that she wrote a wonderful parody of the repetitive how-to-please-a-man advice then and now to be found in women’s magazines. There’s one line I just have to quote:
Men are impressed by mink – but then, so are you.
Deborah, the heroine of To Bed With Grand Music, is the epitome of the mink-wearing man-pleaser. When her husband goes to war she is adamant that she will be faithful to him even though he says he can’t promise the same. Once he is out of the way, she keeps her vow for about five minutes. Deborah is a snob, a social climber, a bad daughter and a worse mother, a serial adulteress who abandons her country’s service in order to live like a wartime Belle de Jour. And I loved every minute of reading about her.
Photo by scribbletaylor
Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament
The decoration in the Houses of Parliament is colour-coded: the Queen’s space is blue, the Lords are red, the Commons are green. The Lords Chamber survived the Second World War, so it is older than the Commons. This photo was taken facing the end with the throne, where the Queen sits to read her speech when she opens Parliament. The little red curtain that runs along the bottom of the gallery balcony was put there at the request of Queen Victoria, who was tired of the peers being distracted from her speech by the sight of ladies’ ankles.
The combination of high-tech and heraldry is a little strange and it’s also strange to think that the effigies of the signatories of Magna Carta no longer look down on their descendants, many of whom lost the right to their seat in the Lords in 1999. More recently (October 2009) the Law Lords have been evicted: they will no longer sit as peers in the House of Lords, instead continuing to hear appeals in Britain’s new Supreme Court. This amounts to a crucial separation between judiciary and legislature, a reform of huge symbolic and constitutional significance, so it was pleasant to see it proceeding discreetly and without much of a fuss. Since then I have been interested to discover that the Supreme Court is decorated with glass panels etched with lines from Magna Carta. We caught a glimpse of a framed copy of that very document on the way to the Lords. I don’t think though that it can have been one of the four surviving 1215 copies as it seems they are held elsewhere.
Next: the cosy Commons Chamber
Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament
St Stephen’s Hall is on the site of St Stephen’s Chapel, where the royal family worshipped when they were staying at Westminster. In 1550 it was converted to a debating chamber for the House of Commons, who sat facing each other in the choir stalls. This rather makeshift arrangement obviously suited them, as three more chambers and 450 years later they are still doing exactly the same thing.
As the guide was talking I was standing quite close to the statues in the niches on the right hand side of the archway as pictured here, and suddenly I realised who I was looking at: King John. Above him you can see Queen Berengaria of Navarre. On the left hand side are Eleanor of Aquitaine and above her, Henry II.
Next: Queen Victoria’s colour coded modesty curtain, and a glimpse of Magna Carta. Oh, and the separation of the judiciary and the legislature
Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament
Westminster Hall was completed for William Rufus in 1099, so this year it celebrates its 910th birthday. It survived the two fires and has been the setting for numerous royal events – every coronation feast from Richard I in 1189 to George IV in 1832, the trials of Anne Boleyn and Charles I, and the lying in state of kings and queens, most recently (2002) HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. At the time I wanted to go because it’s not the sort of thing you see every day, but the four-mile queue put me off.
My first impression of the hall was that it was big. The second was that it was intensely atmospheric – you really sense the weight of the past here, and it feels quite different from the rest of the palace. The third was that it was absolutely freezing cold. It was quite a cold day – in fact I’ve lost one of my gloves and this was the day I gave in and bought a new pair because my hands were so cold – but it seemed even colder in that hall. I couldn’t see any fireplaces. Possibly they would have brought in braziers in the Middle Ages?
The hall was designed as living space – until the reign of Henry VIII, who moved to Whitehall, monarchs lived at the Palace of Westminster.
Next: how a chapel became a debating chamber
Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament. Accession number WOA 1978
Today I went on a tour of the Houses of Parliament. As they’re currently preparing for the State Opening of Parliament (Wednesday 18 November 2009) the Robing Room, which the Queen will use on the day, was not open to the public. But I did get to see Westminster Hall, St Stephen’s Hall, the Lords Chamber and the Commons Chamber. More about that later, but first, how the Houses of Parliament came to catch on fire.
Up until 1826, the Exchequer, which was housed in the Palace of Westminster, was recording its income with tally sticks. Tally sticks are pieces of wood with notches carved into them to represent a payment – the higher the payment, the bigger the notch. The stick was then split in two to provide payer and payee with a receipt. In 1826 the government decided to upgrade its technology, and was left with two cartloads of redundant tally sticks. On 16 October 1834 the Clerk of Works decided to burn them in stoves in the basement of the House of Lords. With the result you can see above.
Most of the buildings on the site were destroyed in the fire. They were rebuilt in the Gothic style over more than thirty years, at a cost of more than £2 million. In May 1941, incendiary bombs fell on the Commons Chamber and burnt it down again. Undaunted, Winston Churchill ordered it rebuilt exactly as it was before.
Find out more: online
Next: shivering in the nine-hundred-year-old Great Hall
