Bettany Hughes
I've been watching a new series by Bettany Hughes on the three key BCE philosophers whose thoughts still resonate today. First was The Buddha, who taught us that "it changes" and if we can accept impermanence, maybe we can begin to rid ourselves of the attachments to things which hold us. I am surrounded by stiff which, I know, holds me back - it takes up a lot of time living in clutter (oh, actually it's quite tidy clutter, but it clutters up my mind and my time as well as my space) and when I vow to get rid of it, I always modify to 'some' of it, and when I start, the amount going out lessens - although I do move it around and create the impression that I have shed more than I really have. Stuff holds so many memories - peoiple, places, times good, or times bad - and when we let them go, or when I let them go, it feels like I am letting the memories go. Because although the memories are all stored in the massive repository inside my head, it's only when I find a snapshot, or a bus ticket, or a doll without her head, or a hair-grip, or a button badge, or a CD, or a theatre programme, that a huge amount of data pours into my conscious mind and I can feel the weather on a particular day 16 years ago, taste the food, hear the voice I haven't heard for 10 years, hold the hand I thought I'd never release, feel the lips and tongue brushing my own! For every single object I possess is a desktop shortcut to all of that and more. It's just that they take up so much room and I don't have enough room for them and ME!
Kurt Schwitters Hanover Merz-Bau held thousands of these objects and I've been promising myself a trip to Ambleside to see the last one he created,
Which is nothing to with Bettany. The second programme was about Socrates and the future of Democracy, born in the Athens of his lifetime, being particularly under threat in the collision between the Greek people, their Government and the European Union, Monetary Fun, and Banks, makes a reflection on his life, teachings and method of enquiry quite apposite. And next Wednesday, Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu) promises to be just as interesting and enlightening.
 
I know some of my friends think my pleasure in Bettany Hughes has as much to do with her ample bosom as her historical expositions, but that is just partially true. I can shut my eyes and just listen to her programmes - unless they are on the radio when I can keep my eyes open - and get enjoyment, instruction and illumination, without filling my eyes with her bosom. But what is wrong with admiring Bettany Hughes for herself as well as for her research and her writing, I ask. And I say - Nothing! 

Sherlock Holmes

When I left my very first job, with a publishing house in London, my leaving present was a two-volume set of The Complete Sherlock Holmes; and, as I discovered in the pub after my last day at work, the reason was that the colleague who had been empowered to choose the gift, had felt that I reminded him of Irene Adler! He was unable to be clearer than that - he couldn't tell me how, or in what ways, I reminded him of Irene Adler. It was simply, for him, a staement of fact. Now, for my part, I don't see any similarity between myself and Irene Adler, who has been portrayed on television

and in films by a number of leading actresses, but I don't imagine that my colleague at the time was necessarily thinking visually - although as a Graphic Designer, he may well have been; anyway, just for amusement - or as Graham Greene bracketed a number of his books, as beingr Entertainments - I looked out my copy of The Short Stories and started, it is the first in the book, with Conan Doyle's introduction of Miss Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia; even though I have read all of the storiew in the two volumes a number of times, there is always something familiar and comforting in settling down with them - whether they are read sequentially or at random, I feel that the character of Holmes as portrayed by Dr Watson, is so much a part of my own childhood , that it is like meeting an old friend after a period of separation.
I felt something akin to this when I read Julian Barnes' Arthur and George which features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; he was an extremely complex character - probably far more so than his own Sherlock Holmes - and Barnes' book, which is based on The Great Wyrley Ouirages of 1903. There was a short television dramatisation broadcast earlier this year, with Martin Clunes as Conan Doyle.
And I poarticularly remember as a schoolgirl being enthralled by his Napoleonic series, featuring the dashing, gallane, heroic Brigadier Gerard; I did go through a rather odd period of wanting to be a man, but not just any man, a French Hussar - and I wore my jackets and coats in their style - not perhaps very proper for a well-bred Edinburgh lassie and confirming to the adults in the family that I was a bit of a Tom Boy.

But back to Irene Adler: She has been believed to have been based upon Lily Langtry - popularly known as The Jersey Lily from her childhood in Jersey, in the Channel Islands. She became a popular actress, had several husbands and many lovers and was mistress to several Royal persons. I do remember reading a long time ago that Oscar Wilde was infatuated with her and once spent a night sleeping on her London doorstep in hopes of meeting her in the morning (or parhaps being admitted during the night) - ah, such is adoration.