grace and favour

Writing for The Calvert Journal, Dasha Shkurpela’s meditation on the Russian country cottage, the dacha, and its place in society and in cultural currency was a really enthralling essay to read—especially in contrast to the Brutalist, Communist architecture that seems to inform our ideas about the Soviet era and its antecedents.
These summer estates date back to czarist times and has in the terms etymology (from to give) its connotations of preference with the government—though those beneficiaries were expected to develop the allotment surrounding their gifted residents and were obliged to elevate the serfs that worked them. While the Soviet revolution sought to undo the landed gentry, the institution of the dacha remained—retaining it fealty as well. Distinguished figures called номенклату́ра (nomenklatura—Latin for a list of names, careerists) were bestowed with not necessarily cottages or manors but cooperatives to take under their patronage and beautify. Ownership of property (lots of land) was of course in principle forbidden but the buildings on it could be embellished, exchanged or sold by workers in the institution that managed the estate—leading to a litany of zoning laws that aimed to prevent these countryside get-away destinations anything more than a weekend haven—much like the German notion of having a Gartenstadt reservation inside urban areas where city-dwellers might be able to have a party shed and a small plot for vegetables. The society that was building these retreats as an escape from the industrialisation of the cities and what became of them after the collapse of the USSR bears out a lot to reflect on and is a lens that brings one’s relationship to space, creation and exchange into sharper focus.

incidental music

We enjoyed this appreciation of not only of the musical stylings of Edvard Grieg but how the snatches of sound and motifs have thoroughly inundated popular culture—resounding especially through the composer’s accompaniment to the stage play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, nearly on par with the Strum und Drang of Richard Wagner. Although one might not be able to name or attribute In the Hall of the Mountain King or Morning Mood (Morgenstemning—and we agree it’s funny to call any song a mood), all those works are instantly recognisable, evocative and indulgent.

4x4

demon-haunted world: the inscrutable internet of things conspires to keep us from knowing its secrets

box car: the machine-readable bar-code had its origins with freight trains

forge and foundry: the creation and destruction of one of the world’s loveliest typefaces, Doves Press

mechnotherapie: gym-culture in the late nineteenth century

strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is actually a pretty good basis for a system of government

Via Dave Log we learn that whilst trying to escape the oppressive heat vacationing in Cornwall, a young maiden named Matilda went wading in Dozmary Pool and recovered a four-foot long sword—the same place that tradition holds King Arthur returned his blade Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake after being mortally wounded and before being taken off to Avalon. Suspicions that the sword is not authentic and could perhaps be a film prop or a gift left in homage and probably does not confer regency has not detracted from the excitement of finding the artefact.

in-flight entertainment

Fascinatingly, we learn via Just a Car Guy, that the 1925 silent film “The Lost World,” featuring a cameo by its writer, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle—perhaps better known for his character Sherlock Holmes, was the first in-flight movie screened to commercial passengers in April of that year during a hop from London to Paris. An eccentric takes his team of explorers to search for a lost expedition through the Amazon rain forest to a remote plateau in Venezuela and encounter a sheltered population of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. As clever as this technically challenging act was and how we might take it for granted today, the fact that the reels were highly flammable nitrate carried aloft on a wooden-framed aircraft seemed particularly ill-advised stunt to assay. Luckily, nothing happened on this trip—otherwise, cinemas in the sky might have never taken off. And condemned to infamy, The Lost World might have not gone on to inspire King Kong and the Jurassic Park franchise.

little ben or gmt +1

With its bigger, more famous big brother having gone silent for the next few years, perhaps residents are paying more notice to the clock tower’s commemorative copy on a traffic island by Vauxhall Bridge near Victoria Station.
The cast iron replica was first built in 1892 and subsequently de-commissioned, re-commissioned and moved venues several times. A rather unsettling design choice—especially for an already harried commuter rush to catch a train connection—is that the time-piece is permanently set to Day-Light Savings Time, so that for five months out of the year, it’s displaying the wrong hour. The original thought behind this rather baffling decision seems lost, but is now explained as a gesture of Franco-British solidarity, with a rhyming couplet titled Apology for Summer Time: “My hands you may retard or may advance / My heart beats true for England as well as France,” a reference to how it shows the correct continental time when it behind domestically during the winter months.

daytrip: hochrhön

We had the chance to do a bit of local exploring near our home and we found the ruin (die Mauerschädel as it’s singularly known) of a fortified church built around the year 1000 and abandoned about three centuries later during the height of the plague (Pest) in the fields behind the village of Filke, the inter-German border separating Bavaria from East Germany once passing through the nave of the structure.
In the 1970s, the whole of the structure was ceded to Bavaria for security purposes. Though the outbreak of the plague is considered the likely culprit for its eventual abandonment, another anachronistic suggestion is that once bulwarks of the region, Filke and other surrounding settlements that essentially became ghost-towns before being eventually repopulated sacrificed themselves to the marauding tribes of the Huns, able to Christianise the scouting parties only to be later betrayed and massacred. A maiden in white is said to haunt the grounds, but that is a relatively recent embellishment.
Afterward, we took another detour to see some marshland in a nature reserve (the whole region is a nature reserve, really, but there are also specially designated areas that are protected from traffic and development) but the trails didn’t really get very near and the scrub separating it from the path was intimidating. H and I did however get the chance to explore the deep woodlands and encountered some deer that bounded past us before we could react.
More our pace, however, we found an assortment of mushrooms and toadstools that we resolved to learn about and come back to the clearing where they seemed to thrive.
The forest directly behind our house are baronial lands, still in the same family, and we wouldn’t want to be accused of poaching.