Miscellany

Small things occur to me from time to time. I had not really noticed or used the word miscellany, until I read about the English 19th century lord, Marmaduke or somesuch, who maintained an entire subsidiary and substantial family of children born to his various mistresses – and that they were referred to in polite society as Marmaduke’s Miscellany.

.........................

A NZ Herald reporter, telling us about the trashing of a $4 million Queenstown mansion by its tenants, writes that “the secluded property... overlooks Coronet Peak”. Yeah, right...

It reminded me of the deliberate gaffe in the song Wunderbar, in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate:

Gazing down on the Jungfrau
From our secret chalet for two,
Let us drink, Liebchen mein, in the moonlight benign,
To the joy of our dream come true.

Given that the Jungfrau is the highest mountain in Europe, it must be some chalet.

...........................

Mary and I took the TransAlpine train from Christchurch to Greymouth, stayed there for a couple of days, and then returned the same way. It’s a grand journey, just over 4 hours each way through the plains and the alps. But what a third-rate typical Kiwi tourism disaster! The train has a buffet arrangement with the usual cardboard food items, and booze, but no dining facilities. I was impressed with the number of people who, faced with a few hours of sitting still and other forms of tedium, as it seemed to them, filled up the space with eating and drinking. Some people on the end of a meat pie are not a pretty sight.

The piped-in commentary along the way is “Kiwi Basic” – a series of silly stories and jokes read from a script. Much of this vernacular is clearly incomprehensible to American and Asian travellers. You get the same lame and tame jokes on the way back. No serious facts lucidly presented about the amazing geology of the landscape, or the forests or the flora and fauna. We were given some comment on the impressive engineering of the Otira Tunnel, but even that could have been done much better.

...........................

I am ploughing through Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel, Wolf Hall – a story of Thomas Cromwell. It’s 650 pages of florid dialogue, most of it singularly unlikely. And the writer has such an irritating style... The pronoun “he”, it finally dawns on you, is always Thomas Cromwell, and yet the story really contrives to be told in the 1st person. Both Cromwell and Wolsey, whom I always regarded as more or less monsters, are depicted as kindly, avuncular religious devotees, passionately concerned for truth and the law, who just happen also to arrange disappearances, torture and executions. Henry is unconvincing. Cranmer... You ask yourself, if such people were fluent in several languages as well as Latin and Greek, to say nothing of mathematics, how come they lived like cavemen among each other? The greed, the paranoia, the cruelty. The women... And how come that man Cranmer ever got to produce the sublime Book of Common Prayer?

You know that when one of those Tudor blokes, habitually wading through mud and blood, disease and danger, and vast social inequities, actually complains about the smell of the privies that day, they must have been apocalyptically bad.