Gee. You. Why?

If, like me, you live with the constant anxiety that you’re snookering your brain with booze, you’ll have a sick shiver hearing this extract from a letter from Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West – his wife – in 1950:

I dined with Guy Burgess. Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is! Guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now his is just an imitation (and a pretty bad one) of what he once was. Not that he was actually drunk yesterday. He was just soaked and silly. I felt angry about it.

Guy Burgess spied for the KGB before, during and after WWII. At the time of Nicolson’s letter, he was one year pre-defection to Russia and about a decade pre-death. He was, around this time, living in the US with Kim Philby, who was forced to babysit him on account of his propensity to disgrace himself at every opportunity:

“Darling. Please. Really.”

I am ardently fascinated by Guy Burgess. A little bit I love him. It’s that chutpah, and the idealism. Perhaps I shouldn’t feel like that; he was a traitor of course. But the Cambridge spy ring hated Hitler and loved the commies – and their ideological children were still alive and thriving well in to the 80s. I was one of them, in my childishly pretentious way. I bought Socialist Worker and tried to pretend I was working class. Then there’s his funnyness and gayness, of course – funny gay men go hand and hand with the womenfolk. And I get the thirst, the love of alcohol and drunkenness and silliness. What secrets he had, what motivation to get soused, to block and tackle the constant paranoid mummerings.

I think they need a new movie. Cambridge Spies wasn’t very good – too lovey & actory.

“This is the world in a vessel,” said Jonathan Williams of the British Museum.

oh wow oh wow oh wow. buried treasure.

David Whelan and his son Andrew, 51 and 35 respectively, were out metal detecting in a Harrowgate field in England. See, right there, drama and mystery. Even before we get to the buried treasure. David is only 16 years older than his son – was he a real dad to Andrew, or did they grow up together, with Andrew’s grandparents taking on a parenting role? Is he still with Andrew’s mum? Were father and son always close, or was metal-detecting a way of bonding, a throwaway suggestion from a burnt out social worker that they took seriously because they were stumped for anything else? If so, who initiated it – Andrew the genxer, searching for an activity that demands both silent concentration and comradely proximity? Or was it David, searching for a way to communicate something both simple and unspeakable – unthinkable to say it aloud! – to his first born boy?

Either way, in this Harrowgate field, they hit upon some lead casing. It was protecting something. “I just kept going and going. A ball of earth rolled out of the side of the hole and I could see a coin stuck in it. We dug the hole out. We crouched down on our hands and knees.”

They scratched underneath, and saw silver – a pot, dirty, but clearly something special – is that engraving? – and bits of silver and more coins poking out. “We were sat there shaking – it was unbelievable. We made sure we got everything out and then packed up for the day and went home to find out what to do with it. We told the antiquity authority and handed it over all intact.” An applaudable move – any further foraging at that stage would have hindered archeologists’ investigations about the pot’s provenance.

In fact, the pot is at least 1000 years old. It is engraved with deer and lions, and plated inside with pure gold. A French communion pot. And it was packed full – full! – of Viking loot – silver rings and gold armlets, brooches and dress ornaments. And coins! There are 600 coins, thieved or traded from Samarkand in central Asia, Afghanistan, Russia and north Africa, some of them never seen before. There was so much loot that, according to the British Museum’s Hayley Bullock, “if somebody asked me to fit it all back in now, I’m not sure I could.”

The very youngest of these coins – dated 927 AD, is the clue that unravels the story. The coin was minted by King Athelstan – the first “King of All Britain” who knew about alliances and swept though the country, challenging Viking power. It’s likely that the owner of the loot buried his treasure in the field as a safety deposit, expecting, one day, to return. He never made it.

The British Musuem will now value the treasure – expected to be well over £1,000,000. Then they have to buy it – the proceeds will be split between the Whelans and the owner of the land.

And my favourite part of this story is David Whelan’s response when asked what he was going to do with the money the two will recieve.

“We don’t need owt. We’ve got all we want. It’s a thing of dreams to find something like this. If we had found one coin we would have been over the moon.”

For video of the BBC’s story on the treasure, featuring David and Andrew Whelan, click here.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Stella Vine. Incredible, isn’t it? What a stunner he is. But why youthful, handsome Dorian, I wonder, and not his distasteful, ageing mask? I’ve got a crush on Stella. Were I to live in Oxford, I’d be hotfooting it to this exhibition.

In other news, everything about this story fascinates me. I want to make a telemovie of it.

The Guardian, Wednesday July 4, 2007
by Helen Pidd

He was the eccentric German aristocrat with a penchant for fishnet stockings and lederhosen whose debauched parties had twice ended in death.

The first time was at Oxford University in 1989, when the daughter of a Conservative minister overdosed in his bed. The second was last year, when a man plunged 60ft to the ground from the roof terrace of the 44-year-old count’s luxury apartment in Chelsea, west London.

This week, a third and final tragedy struck Gottfried Alexander von Bismarck – his body was discovered by paramedics at his flat.

The great-great-grandson of the Iron Chancellor, who united 19th century Germany, had apparently died of a heroin overdose.

The paramedics had been called in by an estate agent who had the keys to sell the property; it is understood he had been asked by a member of the count’s family to look round because of their concern that they had been unable to raise him for several days.

Reports suggested drugs paraphernalia were found near the body. A Met spokeswoman last night would not say whether the police were treating the death as suspicious. Results of a postmortem are expected today.

The life of the flamboyant count – full name Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen – was marked by the highest highs and the lowest lows, often one directly following the other. At Oxford he was notorious for wild parties at which severed pigs’ heads were served and guests toasted each other in blood, while he played host dressed in fishnet stockings or lederhosen.

In 1989, at a party in the student count’s rooms at Christ Church College to celebrate the end of exams, Olivia Channon, daughter of the millionaire trade minister Paul Channon, was found dead in his bed.

She had died due to respiratory failure caused by an overdose of heroin and drink. Although von Bismarck always claimed he had not seen Ms Channon “chasing the dragon”, heating heroin on silver foil and inhaling the fumes – and was never implicated in her death other than to be charged separately for possessing drugs – the incident haunted him for the remainder of his life.

In 1991 he said: “There are still people who will not speak to my parents because of it, who said to my mother, ‘What a rotten son you have, he has disgraced the name of Bismarck’.”

After time in rehab, then a spell back in Germany working as an actor, and in a job helping firms in the former GDR on the road to privatisation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he resettled in London some years ago.

He kept out of the headlines until last August, when a man fell from the roof terrace of his London home during a wild party. Anthony Casey, 38, had a “substantial” amount of cocaine in his body when he plunged 60ft, an inquest heard in October. Mr Casey had been feeling unwell when he asked the count for the key to the roof terrace.

The coroner, Paul Knapman, said that a room in the flat contained what most people would consider “unusual” and “bizarre” items, including buckets of sex toys, a butane gas canister and a box of dozens of syringes.

He added: “In common parlance, in the early hours of the morning, there was a gay orgy going on.” Dr Knapman recorded a verdict of misadventure.

Hedonism ran in the von Bismarck family. His great-great-grandfather was made prime minister of Prussia in 1862, and is credited with engineering modern Germany by defeating France in 1870-71 and uniting the various German states into an empire. He also loved food and drink and was a famed raconteur at parties.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Some “useful” title’s in the quest for elegant usage

I found a whole lot of lovely websites devoted to English errors today. My favourites:

Common errors in English

EARTH, MOON
Soil is lower-case “earth.” And in most uses even the planet itself remains humbly in lower-case letters: “peace on earth.” But in astronomical contexts, the Earth comes into its own with a proud initial capital, and in science fiction it drops the introductory article and becomes “Earth,” just like Mars and Venus. A similar pattern applies to Earth’s satellite: “shine on, harvest moon,” but “from the Earth to the Moon.” Because other planets also have moons, it never loses its article.

The Apostrophe Protection Society

The Gallery Of “Misused” Quotation Marks

At Baylor University, home of the Baylor Bears and one or two Branch Davidians, I found a throw rug that alerted people to the following:

“You’re in” Bear Country

It baffles me to this day. Is it an obscure form of second person, like the vosotros tense? A pun on “urine” perhaps?

Cranach

Cranach floors me. His women all look about 16. Look at Eve here, for example. She’s looks way too young for Adam, who bears a similarity to the Joy of Sex model.

Should you live in London, you can go see Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery until 23 September. Soviet spy Anthony Blunt was the director at Courtauld for years.

Venus looks amused by Cupid’s distress.

Lucretia looks despairing enough to do herself in, but her body doens’t look violated enough for my liking.

But I love Cranach. There were two Cranachs, father and son. This one is Cranach the elder.

Smokin’

My favourite part – and there’s a few – of the government’s new laws banning smoking in pubs and clubs is that they came in to force on 1 July. The very dead of winter. No balmy alfresco durries on gossipy city balconies for you, smokers: you’ll be freezing your butts off outside, noses pressed against icy windows, glumly wiping away the condensation to better make out the open fires and hot toddies inside. It’s a neat plan, and my money says ex-smokers are behind it. Because the take-home message for those who smoke is clear. We hate you.

Smokers now have two options. You stay a smoker, or you can use the new restrictions to propel yourself in to the superior plane of the ex-smoker. Them’s my people. (You’ll never, by the way, be a non-smoker – those benign, rational, dullish fuddy-duddies don’t understand that cigarettes will stay front and centre whether you smoke or not.) Now, you might imagine giving up smoking is about patches and hypnotherapy and avoiding trigger situations. It’s not. It’s about learning to hate and hector. Learning to detest the act of smoking. As an ex-smoker, you will need to rant. Self-righteously.

To stoke the fires of your hatred, you must first saturate yourself in foulness of the habit you’re about to relinquish. So let’s start with some home truths. Firstly, you stink. Unless you’re smoking in my face – which you often do – it’s not a contained stink that wafts past Pepe Le Peu-style, but a general whiffy infusion that stains you like a kind of rank tea. Your clothes stink and your hair, and so, faintly, does your skin. If you’re single, that’s why. (Or it could be your sick-making habit of sprinkling beer into a full ashtray to put out its tiny embers.) By they way, don’t bother sniffing your clothes to locate the stink: you’re immune to it.

You also make us stink. You swell our dry-cleaning bills, while never offering to pay them. Leaving your presence is superseded by a heavy session of scrubbing our skin till it’s raw and bleeding. And if you’re not stinking us up, you’ve racked off outside for a fag and left us sitting alone like a Nigel. Or worse, talked us into an outside table on the bitterest of Melbourne afternoons. See how smoking is lose-lose. But being an ex-smoker is one grumpy win after another.

While we’re on it, smoking is not, as a friend of mine claims, “European”. Ladies, you do not look like Keira Knightly; gentlemen, you are either too young, or too old, to look cool. When you cluster outside your office you are not trading secrets or bonding in ways that non-smokers don’t understand. On the contrary, back in our warm and freshly scented surrounds we’re making exciting professional and social plans that exclude you. Also, you know how you keep claiming you quit and you haven’t really started again, but maybe you’ll just have one? It’s boring. And you know how you leave us to discover butts in our garden after dinner parties? It’s gross. And you know how you wake up in the middle of the night convinced that the dull ache in your chest is lung cancer? It is.

Being a smoker makes you rude and inconsiderate in ways that will amaze you after you give up. Recently, I saw someone light up at a dinner table while my friend, sitting right next to her, was still eating. My friend gagged, and couldn’t finish her meal, while the smoker puffed away oblivious, bless her fatty-deposited heart. Last winter, in a non-smoking bar, another friend asked if she could borrow my gorgeous, woollen, fake-fur-trimmed, bespoke winter coat to keep warm in while she fagged away outside. The sad thing is, I let her.

Finally – and perhaps this is the most difficult to accept – smoking is no rebellion. It is a bleak, wretched acquiescence to that most clichéd of diabolical beasts: the tobacco company. And that’s before you surrender, if you’re as stupid as I, to the drug company, which will replace your durry addiction with a gum or patch addiction, for reasons far more to do with fear than therapy. (For four years, I consumed nicotine gum so far over the recommended dose that, when I finally confessed to my doctor, she immediately ordered a cardiogram.) Truth is, you don’t need a replacement. You just need to stop. Smoking is making you old, and ugly, and rapidly, irretrievably dead.

Research shows that smoking restrictions do help smokers give up. Frankly, we don’t have enough – for reasons best classified as political correctness gone crazy, smokers are still allowed to light up in their own homes. I’m going to work on that. Until then, I urge you to join the ranks of self-righteous, irritating know-it-alls. But if you do choose to keep smoking, may this winter be glacial. Shiver in your jocks.