Where e're I roam, whatever realms to see,

The scent of daffodils remains for me one of the most evocative of smells: of Spring, the moment when the world greens again, the rain softens and washes the blossom. Personally, I have no problem with rain even on the morning of the first day of Spring in the Georgia mountains, though my fellow Southerners can find it quite worrisome. The smell of pines after rain, like the scent of daffodils and the reek of box hedges baking in the sun are gatekeepers at the parking-lots of memory.

Daffodils, like hyacinths, have a scent into which faces should be plunged, all mucous membranes aflutter, guzzling the deliciousness of it all. Lilies, those air-fresheners of the 19th century funeral parlor, their scent occupying the borderland between scent and stink, on the other hand need, to be sipped rather than slurped.

So, where e're I roam, whatever realms to see, my intention was not to write a howdy-do to Spring, but return to writing what has become an honor-roll of those decorators, long-gone, I began to call the Lost Generation. Seemingly, true to my zodiac sign - crab-wise - I have done so by finding a building, the Gate of Honour in one of the two books I bought last week.

Initially, it was not the photo that caught my eye, it is simply one of over 600 illustrations from Mark Girouard's Elizabethan Architecture, but the text introducing it. The phrase ... temple and balustrade are elided ... indeed, the word elided it was, that excited me. What it is that makes individual words, these compounds of thought and intonation, words such as elided, quite so alluring is not really that important: what is important, is that despite the history, the architect, the location, on turning turn the page to the Gate of Honour and on reading that it was at the end of a symbolic route followed by students at Caius College, Cambridge: a route beginning with the Gate of Humility, continuing through the Gate of Virtue and Wisdom and ending at the Gate of Honour, I knew I had found the symbolic, if not actual, title for my roll of honor.

Photo copyright Martin Charles, from Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540 -1640, Mark Girouard, Yale University Press 2009.

"Marvellously revising at the beauty

of the Chappel, greatly praised it, above all others within her realm."


This sentence about Queen Elizabeth I caught my eye as I flicked through the book, as well it might, for there's something inordinately glittering about the language of the 16th century and language, glittering or otherwise, is something that has eluded me these past couple of weeks. If I didn't know better, I'd say I've had bloggers block - an oddly exhausting state of mind and fearsome loss of faculty.


I seemed to be doing well with my research into the Lost Generation then, one morning, I did not want to communicate - I'd had enough and was worn out. The subject matter was fascinating to me and continues to be but there I was, here I am, squatting back on my mental haunches with back to the wall, awaiting the day when I resume the, for me, important task of bringing these men to mind.



Thus, in my self-reproachful state, I ordered two books that were delivered today: two books, one, a veritable tome, so heavy it needs to be read from a lectern and the other lambently brilliant as befits is subject. To say I'm thrilled is an understatement.





Neither, alas, can be read whilst one is soaking in a bubble bath, nor should they be placed by the sink to be read in snatches between strokes of a razor - the usual fate of the New Yorker which has a daily migration schedule from nightstand to vanity and back again to whichever side of the bed is not, perchance, reading a trashy detective/vampire/inner-landscape-twaddle/Japanese fashion magazine/whatever. But, I digress. They are books that will afford me so much pleasure and I hope time to assimilate and tick over in such a way that my blogger's block may gently be breached.


The Chappel Queen Elizabeth praised was that of King's College, Cambridge or, more formally, The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge - one of the glories of English Perpendicular Architecture.

Photo of chapel from http://www.cambridge2000.com/index.html
Book images from Amazon.com