Parasites

Last week our first visit to Clandon, a National Trust place on the way to Guildford, since September 2008. A place notable as a good example of a Palladian house and as having a good field of daffodils in the spring. A first in that I do not remember when we last visited two stately homes in two days, this being the second.

Get there to find Palladio alive and well, but the daffodils not doing very well. A couple of weeks or so from being full out and, according to one of the gardeners, it being neither good ground for daffodils nor a good year. Lots of them coming up without flower buds, or blind in his jargon.

There had been a mature avenue running up more or less to the front door, but this was knocked over by the hurricane of the late eighties, and there is nothing much left of it now beyond a picture of glories past.

But the main hall, a double decker affair occupying the whole of the front middle of the house, survives with its extraordinary ceiling. A cut down version of those at the Norfolk palaces of the same era, Holkham and Houghton. Very grand rooms downstairs, not so grand rooms upstairs, with these last being home to an important collection of porcelain, including the monkeys mentioned at reference 1. I suppose part of the point of this kind of porcelain is that, like jewellery, it was an island of stability in a transient world full of death and decay. If you didn't drop it, it would last more or less for ever. But, as I explained to a shocked trusty, if it were mine I would flog it for the dosh.

I managed to shock another trusty by saying, when proudly told that they had spent £80,000 on restoring the curtains for a four poster bed, that had I known I would have cancelled my subscription (which is actually BH's). Far from clear to me that this was a good use of resources: would it not have been better spent on restoring the lost avenue? It certainly would have been for me. Back home we read in the book that the money (amount unspecified) had been supplied by (I think) the Wolfson Trust - which I suppose makes it OK. If the Wolfson Trust want to throw money at curtains, that is up to them. Perhaps their trust deeds say something about providing support to distressed seamstresses.

A well stocked library, including one of those doors built out of fake book backs. I suppose that in the days before the invention of television and tiring of endless, daughter-played sonatas (there was a old Broadwood in one of the rooms), one might have made real use of such a place. To the extent of dipping into the collected Goethe? Or was that just for show? Or perhaps bought up by the yard at a fire sale at some neighbouring pile.

Some very elaborate & very heavy furniture, including some from Gillow of Lancaster, a precursor of our own Waring & Gillow. And including a handsome mahogany sideboard with fine avian or perhaps reptilian feet, much like (in shape at least) those of our cast iron bath, now consigned to the back of the back garden and full of nettles & worse. Lots of pictures, including lots of portraits of ancestors. Some of which were interesting.

Some of the trustees were a bit loud and needed little or any poking to set them off. But one did feel a bit sorry for them: they were not in the first flush of youth and had to stand around in a cold building for hours at a time - and no trust-issue greatcoats like the trustees were given to wear at Hampton Court.

Quite a decent snack lunch in the rather handsome undercroft, mainly filled with massively arched brick piers holding the building up. Much like the crypt of a large church.

Good example of a Wellingtonia in the back garden, together with a Maori log cabin from New Zealand. I wondered, given all the fuss about a residential log cabin being erected in a back garden near us, how much fuss there would be if we tried for one of these. Would heritage trump change of use?

There was also a great deal of mistletoe and I was puzzled about its manner of propagation and growth, with the main stem of the mistletoe appearing to spring, fully formed, from its host branch. Back home, I read all about it in wikipedia. It seems the seeds of the mistletoe are sticky and if they are lucky they land on a branch of a suitable host. Then, if their luck holds and they are not eaten, they germinate, striking roots into the host branch. Slow growing at first, but after some years you might have a sphere of mistletoe going for it big time. We read also about the haustorium, through which the growing mistletoe is able to invade the tissue of the host, a rather more serious business than that of invading soft, inert soil. BH pointed out that our fascination with how this strange plant grew was clearly the same fascination which had resulted, over the millennia, with the plant's extensive folklore and more or less magical standing.

Getting home had been something of a trial in the afternoon rush hour and we learnt first hand of all the disruption being caused by the upgrading of the Malden Rushett junction. Going  home via Chessington North was somewhat tedious, nose to tail all the way to Hook Road Arena. But at least we learned of a car booter on Sunday, the first of the season.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=barley+stop+press.