Nick Read » Notebook

A Right Royal Wedding

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 07:07:56 +0000

What is the secret of the enduring popularity of the British monarchy? What curious alchemy is at work? I can understand why my father, the venerable Read, God rest his soul, was such a fervent monarchist. He was, as he frequently told us, one of Churchill’s few. He fought for King and country, though I doubt the King was that impressed when he wrote off three Hurricanes without even seeing the enemy. It’s enough to make a st-st-statesman st-st-stutter. But sixty years on, and a sequence of public relations disasters, the institution still has the power to generate a sense of awe and respect. It’s not so much what the Royals do - and the chief characters in this enduring soap opera certainly do a lot – it’s what they represent. The Windsors play an essential symbolic role for our nation. They create a collective sense of identity and continuity that we would never get from an ephemeral political leader. They embody consistency and a reaffirmation of traditional values of duty, loyalty, charity, family and community. The Queen is Commander in Chief of the armed forces and head of the Church of England and she brings a softer more human sense to both of those organisations. I once met Prince Charles and was impressed by the way he could work a room and how he raised self deprecation to the status of an art form.

Some say the mere existence of the Royal Family is an affront to democracy. Not a bit of it; they are its upholders. They curb the power of politicians by subsuming the cult of personality from leadership, providing an alternative focus of respect and idealisation that prevents our elected leaders becoming too big for their political boots. So the Royal Family prevent the creation of tyrants, just by being there. The Queen’s in her palace and all’s well with the world.

Next year, The Queen would have been on the throne for 60 years. She acceded in a different time; she has overseen the most amazing changes, not just in terms of historical events or our way of life, but more crucially in our attitudes to all the important things, family, marriage, religion, sexuality. She has stayed firm and uncompromising through it all. She is the same now as she was in 1952. She is the moral anchor for a nation, nay half a world, that has been buffeted by the winds of change. Not only that, but The Queen is latest in a long line that goes back to William the Conqueror; she embodies continuity, representing a historical notion of nationhood that goes back to the very beginning. I don’t know ho children understand history now, but when I was a boy, it all hinged around the Kings and Queens. Like the Observer’s Book of Birds or Ian Allen’s Great Western Railway locomotives (with its 30 Kings, 6000 to 6030), I knew the images of each King and the dates they ruled; I still do. Some knowledge never fades. Our national anthem is not about the power of the state, the revolution, or even the beauty of the country, it is about the monarch – as if The Queen (or King) is the essential symbol of nation and empire. ‘God Save The Queen’. Quite!

Saturday’s Guardian, an organ that hs never admired inherited privilege and power, was so critical of the whole Royal Wedding extravaganza, though they did approve of the royal minibus fleet; the need for cuts and all that! They reminded me of prison vans. In a sense, I suppose, they were.

But there is surely nothing like a Royal Wedding to reaffirm that sense of unity and commitment. In the Church of England, it seems, the beards always have the best words. It was the bald and bearded Bishop of London who emphasised the commitment of marriage (as opposed to just living together) as a potent symbol of unity and responsibility for family, society and the nation, while it was left up to that aging Welsh hippie, Rowan Williams to remind Kate of her responsibility to have a baby, preferably male.

The Germans may sneer at the English for their eccentric attachment to the Windsors, but had it not been for the last century’s two great German wars, they might have still been Saxe-Coburg-Gothas and William might have been assigned a German princess. It was the symbolic significance of the Royal Family, who refused to leave London even though the palace was bombed, as much as Churchill’s indomitable rhetoric that got us through the second war. The Germans began to recognise the flaws in their Fuhrer quite early on. Theirs was not a glorious endeavour; they couldn’t prevail. Our parent’s war had right on its side. So despite the familial dysfunction and the flurry of royal divorces, the Royal Family is nearly as popular now as it was in the 1950s. 80% of the population support it. Maybe it will be different when the Queen dies; there could be a backlash to King Charles and Queen Camilla. Could Kate Middleton will be the one to restore it; she has that quiet sense of dignity, that stability and composure, that regal quality that could capture the nation’s affection and identification.

Friday’s Royal Wedding is a symbol of hope, hope for William and Kate of course, but also for the rest of us, though the cynics will remind us we’ve been here before. 30 years ago, Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. A fairy tale wedding, they called it, but it was more like one of Grimm’s. Charles and Camilla were still exchanging tokens of their affection up until the eve of the wedding. But apparently Prince Philip had insisted Charles choose a virgin and an aristocrat. There were not that many around. So Diana, the nineteen year old insecure daughter of a dysfunctional family, was selected for sacrifice. They hardly knew each other. It was less of a romance and more an arrangement to secure the dynasty. The runes were not good and it ended in tragedy. Kate and William are so different. Theirs’ is a love match, they met at university 10 years ago, they are the same age, they were friends before they became lovers, they have lived together. They are like us, they laugh and joke at the same things and they renew our belief in love and family at a time when cynicism is considered clever.

The are a repository of hope. We can only wish them well.

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Intimations of Hope

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:49:33 +0000

The idealistic Konstantin, humiliated by his famous mother, the actress Irina Arkidina, his play publicly dismissed as ridiculous, tries to shoot himself but instead shoots a seagull and presents the corpse to Nina, the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, whom he adores. Nina is disturbed and disgusted, but shows it to the sinister Trigorin, a famous writer and house guest, who notes down the metaphor for future use. Nina is in thrall to Trigorin. She sees in him an opportunity to escape the cage of the family estate and take flight as an actress. She follows Trigorin to Moscow, becomes pregnant and is rejected by the writer who is being kept by Irina. The baby dies, her family lock their gates against her, and she is transformed into the kind of tragic heroine that the painter, George Frederick Watts depicted in his allegorical studies of hope and poverty. She becomes the seagull.

Watts had taken as his child bride the teenage actress, Ellen Terry, in order to protect her from the same fate, or so the story goes. The marriage failed. It was supposedly never consummated. According to the amusing fiction by Lynne Truss, Watts just wasn’t interested in her that way. Released from Watts’ protection, Ellen soared upwards to become the most famous actress of her generation.

The Seagull possesses the usual Chekhovian themes; the country house, a self indulgent Russian bourgeoisie, decadent, bored and in decline, the threatening clouds of the oncoming revolution And the actors have the same familiar roles, the ageing actress and matriarch playing to the balcony while the theatre crumbles around her, the elderly and ailing uncle, the owner of the estate, representing old Russia about to vanish forever, the frustrated and bullish farm manager, fed up with the old ways and wanting progress, the desperate young author, the naive and fragile girl, and the doctor, perhaps Chekhov himself, a reflective observer, not entirely engaging with it all. Soon all will be scattered. Seen from this perspective, the seagull presents a broader perspective on the oncoming crisis, a fragile but beautiful way of life soon to be chopped down like The Cherry Orchard. Of course, the characters seem hysterical and self centred, they are all in love with love as a form of escape, the end of their world is coming; what else can they do? It wouldn’t be theatre if they all behaved sensibly and worked together.

The Seagull is currently playing at the Arcola Theatre in Stoke Newington; not an area I know well but accessible via the London Overground. The theatre is a converted warehouse. The set and seating are rough and ready but the cast and direction is as accomplished as many productions you might see in the West End. Geraldine James plays the actress and matriarch. The doctor is played by Roger Lloyd Peck, recently seconded from the Dibley parish council. Chekhov billed the play as a comedy but nobody in Stoke Newington was laughing.

The Watts Gallery opened at Compton on the North Downs outside Guildford on June 18^th. It is said to be the only major gallery in the country devoted to a single artist. Watts was immensely popular in his heyday; two rooms were devoted to his paintings in the newly opened Tate Gallery at Millbank but the fashion for Victorian art changed and by the nineteen fifties you could pick up his paintings for less than a hundred pounds. His museum at Compton fell into disrepair but was rescued by coming second in the BBC’s Restoration programme and then getting a 4 million pound lottery grant. Watts’ paintings are not exactly cheerful. The most famous are allegories of themes like hope, poverty and despair. They are sombre and intense; Watts saw his mission to produce work that encourage young people to think about moral issues.

Lynne Truss didn’t treat Watts kindly. In her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which described with humour the characters that circled the bard of Farringford, she portrayed him as self obsessed and sexually repressed. Who knows, if he had been more responsive to Ellen’s allures, she may never have felt the need to escape to the stage.

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In the Mind’s Eye

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:30:46 +0000

At the age of 14, Rene witnessed his mother, being pulled out of the river; her lower body was exposed and her nightdress was over her head concealing her face. Was it her, and if it wasn’t where had she gone, what had happened? But Rene never talked about it; he didn’t trust words. He just expressed it through the medium he had control of; painting. He was an artist philosopher. Perhaps all ‘creative’ artists are. What is art, if not visual metaphor?

Rene Magritte just took it further. His painterly skill allowed his imagination the freedom to use the image to describe the thought. His images express the way the mind connects ideas. They have a dream like quality because that’s how our mind sees things when we are not fixed by the consciousness of real time and space and the rules of language. So like dreams, his images break the rules, size is relative, shape distorted, there are impossible associations. In The Dominion of Light, he merges light and day, street lights illuminate a street against a bright afternoon sky, a bird flies over a dark sea, its shape filled in by a bright cloudy sky. A crescent moon is placed in painted in front of the dark tree, the artist creates the woman by painting her, the landscape on the canvas becomes the view, the window pane breaks up into pieces of the landscape viewed through it, a couple kiss with cloths over their heads, an act of intimacy between two people who are concealed from each other.

The theme of concealment dominates his work. He creates illusion by representation. Magritte liked a mystery, the anonymous detectives in bowler hats coming to arrest and assailant, the woman’s body on the operating table, the same bowler-hatted figures of differing sizes descending like rain in front of the buildings of his home town.

Magritte wasn’t so much looking for meaning, he was more interested in the process of how we represent ideas; he wanted to express ideas as he perceived them. Our mind, as the extension of the vast neuronal network that is our brain, makes connections between ideas and actions and feelings. Having conceived of a certain way of thinking, we return to it again and again, establishing neural connections like paths through the forest. But our mind’s reality makes connections which are impossible in the real world. Magritte shows us the way our mind thinks about things. So a pipe is not always a pipe but represents something much more potent, a carrot morphs into a bottle, a bird becomes part of the sky, clouds are like object and thoughts.

Magritte recognised how words condition our thought, fixing and channelling the meaning, so he experimented with different words for objects. Words tell us what an object is, but our mind sees other connotations. Poetry plays with this idea. It explores the power of words, but also their limitations. Freud and Jung explored the same territory in their papers on symbolism and dream, but at least Freud had the honesty to admit that ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’.

Magritte, The Pleasure Principle, is currently being exhibited at Tate Liverpool on Albert Dock.

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I believe in miracles

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:01:26 +0000

There was a kind of magic that earlier spring, under the Quantock ridge, where Hope Corner Lane crossed the Kingston Road.

If we left home early in the half light, before breakfast, the white owl would still be ghosting alongside the hedgerows on silent wings to take a last late vole to the shadow of the barn. And there in the garden of the big house, behind the wall, a fairy woodpecker, red head and ladder back would be fidgeting his way up the tall trees.

Alas, the house has been demolished; the barns pulled down, the birds gone, even the chinking of Corn Buntings in the fields. The spectral owl still hunts in the wildernesses, but the fairy woodpecker is a figment, an image torn from a book, a trace in the memory.

Fifty three more springs have passed. And then on Thursday, lying in sharvasana (the corpse posture) under the tall beeches on the Tumps, I heard a soft regular tapping, more like a snore or the purr of a contented cat, and a high pitched call repeated three times. I opened my eyes and caught a flutter as a tiny bird, no bigger than a sparrow but more fragile, moved to another dead limb and rattled a different pitch. I focussed; the same white stripes, the red cap, the cheek patches and I believed in miracles.

The Lesser Spotted Woodpecker has declined by more than 90% in the last fifty years in the UK and cross Europe. There are now fewer than 2000 pairs left in Britain. At least two pairs are present amid the deer and open woodland in Chatsworth Park. The British Trust for Ornithology identifies the possible reasons for its decline as competition with and predation by Great Spotted Woodpeckers, and reductions in small-diameter dead wood suitable for foraging, while the species’ large home ranges suggest that landscape-scale changes in woodland (loss of mature broadleaved woodland, losses of non-woodland trees such as elms, and woodland fragmentation) may also be important (Fuller et al. 2005).

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Gabrile Orozco; meaning out of chaos.

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:36:53 +0000

Gabriel Orozco is like his ball of plasticine, Yielding Stone 1992, rolling along, always on the move, always picking up new ideas, things from the streets, imprints, objects, impressions. He installs whatever he thinks is interesting, often distorting them to remove their utility, change their function, so that they engage more closely with the viewer as a work of art, a receptacle for meaning. In one installation (Lintels 2001), he gathered the plaques of felt from the filters of spin dryers, with their residues of hair, nails, grit and paper, and hung up on wires like washing lines. When this was exhibited in New York in November 2001, the ash coloured skins of lint with their message of the transience of human life, took on a poignant significance; something about the residues, the impermanence of life. In Carambola with pendulum 1996, he distorts the billiard table and suspends one ball on a wire so that it swings over the table. The players make up their own rules; hit the other white ball into the swinging red, strike the red so that it swings high over the edge of the table, position the other white ball so that it is in the path of the red. In Dial Tone, 1992, he slices the pages of the New York phone book and places the anonymous digits next to one another on a 10 metre roll of Japanese paper. It’s a measure of the city. In La DS, 1993, he cuts a Citroen car in three pieces, removes the central section and rebuilds the car in an aerodynamic form without an engine. It’s beautiful, creates an impression of a contender for the land speed record, but totally useless.

Orozco loves to play, to invent, he is fascinated by the meaning in everyday things, as a child would. While he was artist in residence in Berlin, he bought a yellow Schwalbe, a motor scooter, and then roamed the city looking for a partner, another yellow motor scooter, photographing the pair wherever they met (Until you find another yellow Schwalbe 1995). In a five star hotel in India, he was given three rolls of toilet paper, so he fixed them to the arms of the fan in his room, so that the paper streamed out with the rotation like pennants, and danced to it, Ventilator 1997.

Orozco explores the pattern of things, their organisation from chaos, their reordering into art. He collects the bits of blown out tires he finds at the side of the motorway and arranges them like black crocodiles on a white sheet of paper, Chicotes 2010. In Black Kites, he imposes order on death by inscribing a geometrical black and white grid on a human skull. As a child, he was obsessed with planetary motion, the orbits, ellipses, circles. This obsession appears in his work, in Samurai Tree and Atomist Series 2006 and Four Bicycles; there is always one direction 1994, in which he slots four bicycles together, so that the wheels rotate in different directions. It might be a comment on the ambivalence of life.

There is something touching and personal in Oroczo’s work, he is not afraid of expressing his childlike self, exposing his vulnerability. This is perhaps most movingly expressed in My hands are my heart, 1991, in which he shapes a lump of clay, of the same colour as his skin, with his hands then has this photographed against his chest, exposing, as it were, his heart.

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An Ideal Husband

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:26:06 +0000

So how should we regard the delectable Mrs Chevely, with her arch looks and glittering Lamia gown so wonderfully nuanced by Ms Bond? Lord Goring has no doubt.

‘She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?

Most pretty women do. But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks. Perhaps Mrs Chevely’s past is merely a slightly décolleté one, but they are extremely popular nowadays.’

So is she a clever but dangerous woman who lacks any scruples to get what she wants, an adventurer, a dangerous seductress, a victim?

‘Oh I should fancy Mrs Chevely is one of those very modern women who find a new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the park every afternoon at five-thirty.’

Bored, frustrated and manipulative, her intelligence and sexuality are but instruments in a game of power and influence. She seems so far into it that she has forgotten how to feel.

‘She wore far too much rouge last night, and not enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman.’

She blackmails Sir Robert Chiltern into protecting her investments by threatening to expose him. She has in her possession a letter proving that His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary kick started his career by selling secret government plans to a speculator.

‘I think that in life, in practical life, there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous; something about ambition that is always unscrupulous.’

But Sir Robert’s young wife, as beautiful as she is uncompromising, has put her husband on the fourth plinth, making it perfectly clear that her love for him is purely a projective identification of one with perfect morality.

‘I remember having read somewhere that when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’

In so doing, her principles damage Sir Robert far more then the bribery and manipulation of Mrs Chevely could ever do.

‘And is Lady Chiltern as perfect as all that? What a pity!’

Sir Robert cannot face telling his wife the truth. He knows it would destroy their marriage. Mrs Chevely knows this and is prepared to destroy both his career and his marriage.

The fact is we all have our dark sides, the things we are ashamed of. It never does to have such high principles (one wonders what is being defended).

‘Well, the English can’t stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them.’

Lord Goring is the catalyst in Oscar Wilde’s wittily observed play (The Ideal Husband). He’s rather like Falstaff or the wise court jester, but in this case it is the dandy philosopher, brilliantly played by Eliot Cowan. He enters as a louche and dissolute character, but he understands the flaws of human nature; everybody is capable of doing wrong.

‘Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.’

Idealisation is a very fragile basis for marriage. Acceptance and forgiveness are more important. As Sir Robert complains:

‘Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We all have feet of clay; men as well as women, but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more for that reason. It the imperfect, not the perfect who have need of love.’

But is it that gender specific?

An Ideal Husband, probably Oscar Wilde’s best play, is currently at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand and stars Samantha Bond, Rachel Stirling and Eliot Cowan. It doesn’t deserve a half empty house.

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Diogenes in the Age of Reflection

Nick Read — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:42:23 +0000

‘You’re rather like Diogenes in his barrel’, David declared on his fourth visit to my little cottage in Edensor. Was that a compliment? Well, on the principle of the glass being half full, I decided that it was. I quite liked the idea of being perceived by the medical fraternity as a hermit, living the thoughtful life, so unworldly that I would ask the Dowager (the nearest we have here to Alexander the Great,) to get out of the sun. Though I did wonder if I have rather corrupted the ascetic image by becoming a bit too busy with politics and The Gut Trust.

We spent the first hour grumbling about how our regulated society was stifling research, inhibiting education, undermining government, taking away the art and enjoyment of life, but risk aversion was part of a cycle. In medicine, it was probably triggered by the dreadful revelations about Dr Harold Shipman; in economics, by the greed of the bankers.

A nervous society finds its ways of getting rid of those who will not conform to its stringent regulations. We are both reading The Hemlock Cup by Bettany Hughes. It’s about Socrates’ life, but takes as its starting point, his death. Accused of being a free thinker and corrupting the youth by speaking against the Gods, Socrates was condemned to take his own death by drinking a cup of hemlock. My old friend, Maurice, was incarcerated in a mental institution last year on the grounds that he was a danger to society. Always resentful of authority, Maurice was targeted by the police and neutralised. Even the spurious interpretation of a brain scan using nuclear magnetic resonance was used to reinforce the case against him.

David and I have reached an appropriate stage of seniority when we can with impunity comment on what we see as the failings of the medical establishment. But this privilege has been hard won. We are both first born and have both shouldered the burden of our parents’ ambitions for most of our lives. David commented that it was not until the age of fifty that he escaped the straitjacket imposed by a reputation in medical research and felt free to indulge his interest in philosophy. At around the same time, he became aware of his parents not just as projections of himself, mum and dad, but more objectively in the context of their own lives. My trajectory ran parallel to his. At 49, I started to retrain as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist and at 53 I retired and began writing my book. Perhaps this was our age of reflection, the time that we could at last be ourselves, rail about the restrictions bequeathed to us by our parents indulge in a more liberal intellectual life.

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Flu, and the yellow bird has flown

Nick Read — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:36:04 +0000

Sorry to moan, but I’ve got flu. At least that’s what I think I’ve got. It could be the return of the auld trubble – the malaria, but it doesn’t quite fit the pattern. I begin to feel wobbly and shivery about dusk every afternoon, not every other day like I did with malaria. My back and the muscles of my shoulders ache and I have a fairly superficial pain just above my nose where the sinuses are. I’m coughing thick yellow phlegm and expelling the same gunk through my nose. And I feel so tired I just can’t do any more. No, let’s call it flu. That’s what a lot of medicine is, after all, informed guesswork. And before you ask, I didn’t take up the government’s offer of a flu jab this winter.

I went to see the quack this morning. The snow had all but thawed, but the wet ice outside the surgery was treacherous. Was this an opportunist way of creating new business by a new entrepreneurial NHS? Anyway, Dr Watson agreed enthusiastically with my deductions and I now have a bottle or crimson and custard minibombs to assist my waving immune system, a caution against unwise excursions into the mountains and more concern that the stress may have aroused dormant histiocytes. I get the blood tests back tonight.

It’s amazing in a way how a non specific infection like flu can bring on the gamut of unexplained symptoms; the exhaustion, fatigue, depressing muscle ache, the anorexia and early satiety, the bowel aches and pains, shortness of breath, the lot. It’s like the virus switches on a non specific pattern of illness not unlike that induced by trauma, grief or disappointment, the chronic loss of hope that erodes life force. I didn’t hear from my daughters this Christmas. Maybe that’s what’s got to me

I came across a lovely few lines by Emily Dickinson on hope

Hope is that thing with feathers,

that perches in the soul,

and sings a song with no words

and doesn’t stop at all.

Only that particular yellow bird had gone off to feed in another garden.

Time to re-stock the feeders.

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Making sense of coastal erosion

Nick Read — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:29:09 +0000

The east coast of England is being washed away. Tidal currents sweeping down from the north are gradually eroding the coast from Flamborough Head south to Suffolk, moving shingle and silt down into long narrow spits as at Spurn Head and Orford Ness, collapsing the shingle banks in front of the wetland reserves of Cley and Minsmere and eroding the soft sandy cliffs of Dunwich. Accelerated by high tides and strong winds, the topography is changing. Acres of agricultural land are threatened along with scores of coastal communities.

To some extent, the erosion is predictable. Computer models can factor in tides, currents, geology, bathymetry, and they provide an rough idea, but what actually happens often depends on politics and local interests. As, my brother Simon, who is an artist interested in environmental issues, told me, ‘The situation is very different on the impoverished Holderness and Lincolnshire Coastline compared with the more affluent Suffolk Coast where there are major amenities like a nuclear power station, a world famous nature reserve and big coastal communities of Lowestoft, Southwold, Aldeburgh and Felixstowe.’ Down there, the coast is being protected by blocks of Norwegian granite and sand dredged up just off shore, but such measures are short term solutions. Over the longer term, usch measures are counterproductive. The granite blocks can sink and the tides find their way round the back of them while dredging offshore sandbanks can remove the first bulwark against erosion.

‘What the land means varies from place to place’, Simon explained. ‘Such meanings are political and local and their cumulative effect cannot be easily factored in. Decisions on whether to allow arable or to allow the river to break through to the sea (as at Aldeburgh) are often made by local councils without reference to the bigger picture. So what you can have is some local amenities protected, a golf club here, a ferry terminal there at the expense of desolation at bigger areas up and down the coast.’

As an artist without the restrictions of commerce and local politics, Simon is free to use his imagination to create what might happen in the future. He is not confined by the physical constructs of the computer modellers, he can bring in concepts of politics and meaning to gain a more realistic understanding of what might happen. It’s a chaotic system but like the weather, not entirely unpredictable.

Not for the first time, have I seen comparisons between what Simon is doing and what I am interested in. We think about things the same way. Most illness is more influenced by the meaning of what happens to an individual; diet, infection, gender, contamination may be able to be factored in but are only part of the story. For both coast and the disease host, you need to get up front and personal.

The image, Sand patterns, Isle of Eigg, by Dudley Williams was the winner of the classic view, adult class, in this years Landscape Photographer off the Year competition.

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Despatches from Derbyshire Ice Field (3)

Nick Read — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:37:38 +0000

0645 GMT 07/12/10

Successful expedition. Grytviken basking in balmy zero. Back on shelf at minus 14, well stocked with lamp oil, whalemeat, blubber, pickled cabbage and two bottles of aquavit!! Freezing fog. When we speak outside, the words stay in the air and hang around the tent. Voice message from Oates there last night. Unrepeatable, poor chap!

Capt.RF (Keep Dancing) Scott RN.

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