Newsletter 29 (9 October 2015)
I haven’t left myself room for one of my self-indulgent lucubrations, which is in a way fortunate, as I haven’t found two ideas to rub together that might have made enough heat to fill up a page. I thought I might write about the exacting indignities of old age, perhaps with some tenuous connection to paintings, but this was too depressing. Then I wanted to discuss Walter Pater’s controversial ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, and his view that forming habits represents failure in life, but this also threatened to turn into a reflection on growing older, and it didn’t quite gel either. A story on the BBC website caught my eye, about an unexpected relationship between the Po valley and the Punjab. It offered an example of successful immigration and integration, narrowly focussed, but a counter-balance to the pictures of shiploads of refugees landing on the islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria, as all over the Mediterranean, which have occupied the papers all summer. But I had nothing of my own to add to this article, which I do recommend to you: Google ‘The Sikhs who saved Parmesan’, if you have the time and are near a computer. So I’m afraid this newsletter is bereft of additional commentary, and perhaps the better for that. Nothing to report on ankles, anyway.