Clarets to see in the summer

This April was indeed the cruellest month, at least for those of us banged up in cities. From the country came reports of overflowing asparagus beds, the elfin splendour of the bluebell woods, precocious roses: the drinking of rosé, in England, at Easter. Now that we have the prospect of an end to the most onerous restrictions, what is going to happen to the weather? The British approach summer in the same way as the English approach cricket: with mistrust. Glorious days may occur, but there is no faith that they will endure. English cricket and the British climate could share a motto: sic transit.

Yet there are ways of coping with April’s taunting sunshine. The great Falkland used to say that he pitied unlearned men on a rainy day. Even those of us who have no claim to be called learned — by ordinary standards, let alone Falkland’s — can mitigate the hardship of a hot day passed largely indoors, with a book. I have recently revisited a couple of old friends, which both made me think about Boris. The first was Keith Feiling’s A History of the Tory Party 1640-1714. Sir Keith writes beautifully and with a sense of immediacy. Macaulay had a similar gift of making you feel that you were in the room during the events he describes. With Feiling, we are in George Herbert’s parish, Nicholas Ferrar’s Little Gidding: at Great Tew, dining with Falkland; amidst the Cavaliers at the Oxford court: the wits, the poets, the divines — the rakes. Thoughtful cavaliers believed in rescuing the beauty of holiness from Laudian cruelty. But not all of them reached beyond carnal beauty. John Donne, a precursor of the Cavaliers, did, despite: ‘If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired and got, t’was but a dream of thee.’