Tom Roper's Weblog

Juddmonte

210 Newbury: Regal Flush
245 Newbury: Cesare
320 Newbury: William Blake
335 Newmarket: Sphinx

Patrick Hamilton in the NYRB

Francine Prose reviews Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, The Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Square in the New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21437

The last word on striped ties...

...I promise. But here are those that lurk in my wardrobe:

From left to right, a pink and blue stripe from Hackett, sadly stained with coffee, an Old Persean tie, the next two, both from Hackett, are red on navy and a blue on yellow in linen; last of all, a Liberty tie. Liberty seem to have stopped making ties themselves. The last time I visited their shop, their own designs were nowhere to be seen.

American striped ties slant in the opposite direction. There are the bizarre traditions about old school ties; there used to be two versions, the crested one shown above and a plain one. It was considered more correct to war one in town and the other in the country, but I can't remember which. That admirable work, the Book of Public School Old Boys, University, Navy, Army, Air Force & Club Ties, London, Seeley Service, with an introudction by John Betjeman, may help. I have a copy in the garage.

Haydock, Ascot and Lingfield

200 Haydock: Blue Bajan
220 Ascot: South Cape
310 Lingfield: Alessandro Volta
345 Lingfield: Volta

Once more on striped ties

After posting my diatribe this morning, it occurred to me that readers might reasonably ask if striped ties may be found in my wardrobe. I have nothing to hide, indeed I once planned a blog devoted entirely to ties, with photographs, and daily posts showing that day's choice  accompanied by a full and frank disclosure of the reasons for my choice, accompanying shirt and suit, and so on. I have the following (photographs to follow):

Red and black diagonal striped tie from Hackett. Bought about ten years ago, slightly faux-regimental, but still good.

Blue diagonal striped tie from Liberty. Bought more recently. Good, but difficult to pair with shirts.

Old school tie: purple and white stripes on a navy ground, with pelicans. Rarely worn.

What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing

Alas, I have no column in Milady's Boudoir but I have noticed that every second tie-wearer sports something with diagonal stripes. In pastel shades, and with stripes of irregular thickness, these bear no relation to the school ties of old, such as the purple and black forced round my neck from 1966-73. I think them rather  hideous

Backward Glance at Brighton's Komedia

J'ai perdu mon Eurydice. I hesitate to put myself forward as Seaford's Ken Tynan, but the performance I saw in the Komedia Studio Bar on Sunday of multi story's Backward Glance deserves a review.

Multi story are two actors, Gill Nathanson and Bill Buffery, with an international reputation in fringe theatre. They offered last year's Brighton Fringe their Cassandra, and return to Greek myth this year with Backward Glance, a play based on Orpheus's loss of Eurydice and death at the hands of the Maenads. Transposing the story to the present, Orpheus and Eurydice are both writers in a vicious drunken relationship, Eurydice the more successful and famous of the two. After Eurydice's death, stung by a bee, Orpheus, drunk at his laptop, is interrogated by a journalist and a detective, and railed at by his mother-in-law. He cannot explain where he was or what he was doing at the time of his wife's death. The intrusions of police and press make the audience think of our mythologising of the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath relationship.

Backward Glance both gives new insights into the myth, a story I must have first read or heard as a small boy, and successfully links the two parts of the story, the descent into Hades to bring Eurydice back, and the wandering poet's later death. Gill and Bill offer deep and striking interpretations of the characters. The play runs for two more nights at Komedia, and then goes to Prague: http://www.komedia.co.uk/event.php?id=1232&dst=1210096801

Domain mapping

Regular readers, if there are any, may have noticed some unpleasantness here in recent days. That's not my blog reacting to the dire news of Boris Johnson's election as mayor of London, and his proposals to introduce fagging, flogging and roasting new boys over a slow fire to the capital; rather, I have been trying to implement domain mapping, so this blog shows at my domain of roper.org.uk, which I registered years ago, but have never used to any great extent. It should all be fixed now. If you read me in a newsreader, you probably didn't notice.

2000 Guineas

today's selections, all at Newmarket.
2.45: Harvest Queen
3.25: ink Khaldun
4.00: Gonki

Hollywood Librarian in London

There's a London showing of the Hollywood Librarian, organised by Cilip in London and SLA Europe: http://www.cilip.org.uk/branches/byregion/london/events/Hollywood_Librarian.htm

These metropolitan sophisticates have to be coaxed to the showing by the offer of a champagne draw. We needed no such inducements for the Sussex première in February.