Love - a Chapel and an Opera House (two stories)

Dear Mr Postman .. thank you for delivering this letter - sorry we weren't here yesterday .. lets hope that my mother will be able to go back to Kestrel Nursing Centre today .. and I know she will be so interested in these love stories .. buildings built by husbands for their wives ...

I found this short story in The Week, 25 April 2009, which I know will really cheer my mother .. and found the pictures on the BBC Hereford and Worcester site - and credit both sites for their articles.

The Week's article summarises this wonderful story: Jon Richards, 63, embarked on his "labour of love" after his wife Muriel began to find their local Anglican church too crowded for serious contemplation. Although they remain active members of that congregation, they now also hold services in their 12 foot x 8 foot chapel. Built from brick, it has Gothic windows, salvaged from a scrap yard, and is furnished with original church pews and a tapestry of the Last Supper.

The BBC Hereford and Worcester article notes that Mr Richards came up with the idea as Easter services have been held on a nearby hill and they liked to think that 'this is a spiritual hill, and for many years we've had crosses erected on the hill at Easter time, and we have an Easter service' ...

Glyndebourne, on the other hand, is a 700 year old country house and opera house near where we live in Sussex and my brother has taken my mother and I a few times to the opera .. it is an amazing place .. the interior has just a glow about it .. and the acoustics are fantastic.

John Christie, the owner, came into full legal possession of the estate from his grandfather in 1920. Mr Christie's fondness for music led him to hold regular amateur opera evenings in the newly built magnificent organ room (80 feet long), which he commissioned and which almost doubled the south facade of the house.

It was at one of these opera evenings that he met his future wife, the Sussex-born Canadian soprano Audrey Mildmay. During their honeymoon attending the Salzburg and Bayreuth festivals, the Christies developed the idea of bringing professional opera to Glyndebourne with the focus being on smaller-scale productions of opera by Mozart which would be well suited to the intimate scale of the planned theatre.

As an annex to the organ room, the Christies built a fully-equipped and up-to-date theatre with a 300-seat auditorium and an orchestra pit capable of holding a symphony orchestra. The theatre has constantly been enlarged and improved .. in 1936 it had 433 seats, in 1952 it held nearly 600, and finally in 1977 it held 850.

By the late 1980s the theatre's expansion, which had proceeded in a somewhat piecemeal fashion, included an agglomeration of outbuildings which housed restaurants, dressing rooms storage and other facilities.

In 1992 this amazing new 1200 seat theatre was built with the inaugural performance given 60 years to the day (24 May 1994) after the old theatre's first performance, and was once again Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro: The Marriage of Figaro.

Glyndebourne was a labour of love back in 1931, realised in 1934 ... which continues to this day - the south Sussex Downland is an unlikely setting for an internationally renowned Opera House which continues to impress, attract and offer the most wonderful productions, with opera lovers coming from far wide ... to picnic in the warm summer sunshine on the lawns in front of the grand house before the performances ... champagne, strawberries abounding .. a real English setting.

Thank you Mr Postman .. my mother will definitely love these stories .. as she lived during the Glyndebourne period and she is very religious .. we will have so much to talk about ... do you know of any other labours of love?

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters

The Chapel pictures are from the BBC Hereford and Worcester site.

Wikipedia provided most of the information about Glyndebourne, including the pictures.

Mum and Day at hospital ...

Dear all .. Mum got sent back down to the hospital .. but all seems to be well and so spent 12 hours there .. and she'll stay overnight and then go back to the Nursing Centre probably tomorrow ..

I'm coming over to San Diego day after tomorrow .. so my posting will be fitted in as and when .. as today has disappeared .. and most of tomorrow will too I suspect ..

I'm here .. just not very posting oriented ...

Thank you - blessings to all ...
Hilary Melton-Butcher
Positive Letters

The Eden Project, St Austell, Cornwall

The project caught my mother’s eye when she first heard Tim Smit give a lecture in Penzance about his dream – his proposal for an amazing garden project in Cornwall. The wheels started to turn .. researching, planning and design, funding, a place for it to be built .. enlisting the help of friends, consultants, business partners etc ..

The Eden Project was born .. and we were hooked into following its annual incremental explosion of growth .. plants, buildings, ideas .... and so from the late 1990s we have been visiting together, or separately and watched his bigger dream of a theatre of living plants and people take place .. which just happened to be being created in an abandoned china clay pit!

Can you see the bee in the picture? There are wonderful sculptural, artistic touches everywhere ...

In 1987 this charismatic maverick of the world – he’d read Archaeology and Anthropology at university, worked for ten years in the music industry as composer/producer in both rock music and opera – moved his family to Cornwall where he and John Nelson together ‘discovered’ and then restored the 12th century Lost Gardens of Heligan (post sometime soon).

Eden began as a dream in 1995 and opened its doors to the public in 2000, since when more than 8 million people have come to see what was once a sterile kaolin pit turned into a cradle of life containing world-class horticulture and startling architecture symbolic of human endeavour.

Eden has contributed over £800 million into the Cornish economy. It is also proud of its success in changing people’s perception of the potential for and the application of science, by communicating and interpreting scientific concepts through the use of art, drama and storytelling as well as living up to its mission to take a pivotal role in local regeneration. It demonstrates once and for all that sustainability is not about sandals and nut cutlets, it is about good business practice and the citizenship values of the future.

Set out below are the first two paragraphs of an excellent article, written by Richard Cree, which appeared in the January 2009 Director magazine:

Unconventional, passionate and visionary... Tim Smit, the inspiration behind the Eden Project, has never played the corporate game. Here he talks about the rise of social enterprise, renewable energy and where the blames lies for the financial crisis.

Despite its integration into mainstream politics, there's still something about environmentalists that suggests sandal-wearing cranks, trying to save the planet through knitting and lentils. Tim Smit, founder and chief executive of the Eden Project, seems to enjoy the non-conformist stereotype. Within a 45-minute conversation, the brains behind Cornwall's eco-tourism success story claims that banking non-executive directors "should be facing criminal charges" and that the big four accountancy firms should be "facing charges of treason".

There are two covered biomes at the bottom of the pit – the Rainforest Biome, which is the largest greenhouse in the world, contains over 1,000 plant species covers 1.559 hectares (3.9 acres) and measures 180’ (55m) high, 328’ (100m wide) and 656’ (200m) long.

It is used for tropical plants, such as fruiting banana trees, coffee, rubber and giant bamboo and is kept at a tropical temperature. The fast-growing trees race up to the light. Climbers hitch a ride and orchids and ferns live high in the tree tops as do bats, birds, frogs, ants etc all part of the necessary bio system.

The Mediterranean Biome covers 0.654 hectares (1.6 acres) and measures 115 feet (35 m) high, 213 feet (65 m) wide and 443 feet (135 m) long. It houses familiar warm temperate and arid plants such as olives and grape vines, beneficial insects, lizards etc and various sculptures.
The Outdoor Biome (which is not covered) represents the temperate regions of the world with plants such as tea, lavender, hops, hemp and sunflowers.

There’s a theatre and an arena for staging various exhibitions, concerts, plays, while “The Core” is a new exhibition and learning centre. The Core takes it inspiration from the tree, with its central trunk and canopy roof that harvests the sun; and its form from nature’s fundamental growth blueprint. Opposing spirals are based on Fibonacci’s sequence: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 ... where every number is the sum of the previous two. Check out a pine cone, pineapple or sunflower .. they all follow the Fibonacci principle.

You approach the biomes from the fruit labelled car parks – apple, orange, banana etc - up high on the southern edge of the pit .. walk down (or there are plenty of people to help in all manner of ways .. little buggies, wheel chairs, mini buses etc) .. to the visitor centre – and as you walk through, completely hidden from you, this amazing panoramic vision greets you!

From here you can gaze at the biomes and when ready start wending your way down a twisting path through planted sides of the pits (or again there’s a little train to get you to the bottom). It is a staggering achievement, full of promise of more to come, they are always collaborating locally, within the UK and around the world to improve peoples’ lives .. working towards sustainability, while saving numerous plants from extinction .. eg protected species such as the rare Coco-De-Mer: see my post from the Seychelles.

Dear Mr Postman thank you for coming today - this is my mother's first day back at the Nursing Centre, Kestrel House, and she'll be pleased to hear about our visits to The Eden Project, as we had such interesting times. She will be much amused by a phrase in the Guide to the Eden project .. during it’s “Why we’re here (in a nutshell)” description, which says: "Yes, we want to live lightly on the planet, but with champagne in our veins" ... her favour tipple now-a-days is champers!! Sadly she’s nil by mouth ... it’s not easy ...

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters Inspirational Stories

Happy Birthday Mr Punch ....

Dear Mr Postman thank you for visiting today .. and for bringing this letter about Mr Punch – it’s his birthday today – May 9th – he’s 347 years old! Good for him – it is amazing how some of these figures transcend each era of life and live on ..

There is evidence that marionette puppetry was in use in Egypt as early as 2,000BC – wire controlled puppets made of clay and ivory have been found in Egyptian tombs. Greek literature (from 422BC) suggests that puppetry was important in the presentation of theatrical shows and festivals – eg: the ‘Iliad’ and its sequel the ‘Odyssey’, both attributed to Homer, were performed this way, while Aristotle, Archimedes and Plato all referred to marionettes. The Greek word usually translated as “puppets” is neuropasta, which means “string pulling”, from nervus, meaning either sinew, tendon, muscle, string or wire, and span to pull.

Most of us I expect will have childhood memories of our own, or our children, sitting watching the antics of puppet “Mr Punch” in his candy-striped booth – at home, at shows – perhaps even on the beach .. or at puppet shows put on for us as a special treat.

Now-a-days .. the show has evolved .. as it is not appropriate to show the traditional story of Mr Punch killing his baby, beating his wife Judy to death; he might be imprisoned for the murders, but he manages to escape using a golden key. He then murders a policeman, a doctor, a lawyer, the hangman, death and the devil .... all with huge pleasure, each time squeakily repeating his catch phrase “That’s the way to do it!”.

Anarchic - it really is – comes from the Greek meaning “without rulers” .. a political philosophy which considers the state, as a compulsory government to be unnecessary, harmful and/or undesirable. But!! we loved it as kids .. roaring with laughter at his antics and his squawking, squeaky voice ... – did you? or have you taken your own children to a Punch and Judy show? or perhaps you’ve made a model .. and built the puppets?

Puppet shows started to appear in Britain at the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s, while 9th May 1662 has become the accepted date on which the figure, who later became Mr Punch, made his first recorded appearance in England . The diarist Samuel Pepys observed a marionette show featuring an early version of the Punch character in Covent Garden in London. Pepys described the event in his diary as "an Italian puppet play, that is within the rails there, which is very pretty."

Its name then was Punchinello, of which Punch is the short form. The show had been imported from the character called polichinello in the commedia dell’arte in Italy, where its original was known in the Neapolitan dialect as Polecenella, perhaps a diminutive of pollecena, a young turkey cock, in reference to its beak, which looked a bit like the puppet’s long red hooked nose!

Punch was extremely popular in Europe and, by the end of the 18th century, he was also playing in the American colonies, where even George Washington bought tickets for a show. But marionette productions, presented in empty halls, the back rooms of taverns, or within large tents at England's yearly agricultural events at Bartholomew Fair and Mayfair, were expensive and cumbersome to mount and transport.

In the latter half of the 18th century, marionette companies began to give way to glove-puppet shows, performed from within a narrow, lightweight booth by one puppeteer, usually with an assistant "bottler" to collect their earnings from a crowd the "bottler" had likewise been obliged to gather!

Originally intended for adults, the show evolved into primarily a children's entertainment in the late Victorian era, but the outline of early 19th-century shows is usually still recognizable. It typically involves Punch behaving outrageously, struggling with his wife Judy and the Baby, and then triumphing in a series of encounters with the forces of law and order all performed in the spirit of outrageous comedy and is intended to provoke shocked laughter, whilst the Victorian version of the show drew on the morality of its day.

It’s the enormous satisfaction of Punch with his awful deeds that led to the idiom ‘as pleased as Punch’ appearing at the beginning of the nineteenth century for somebody who was delighted. Punch’s pride in outwitting every figure of authority also led to ‘as proud as Punch’ as an alternative.

Punch the former British weekly magazine of humour and satire published from 1841 until 2002, was named after Mr Punch. When we used to go to the dentist in London, outside Harrods!, I loved looking through the Punch magazines at the cartoons: I didn’t mind the dentist and had another happy experience with the cartoons of life in those times.

Oh! Mr Postman .. my mother will love this story ..and it will bring back memories of our childhood and the visits to the dentist and much mirth .. that were often tied in with other excursions in London .. – and as the title says Happy Birthday Mr Punch! – with many years ahead of you ...

Hilary Melton-Butcher
Positive Letters

A Judge, Gardens and a Great Stink ..

A letter from Judge Simon Brown, QC to The Times .. that sounds interesting .. my father was a barrister (QC = Queen's Counsel) and a member of the Inner Temple - so my mother was particularly interested in this post ... we also laughed as my god-daughter's brother is called Simon Brown (13) and we decided that they weren't the same!

Judge Brown is the Master of the Garden of the Inner Temple and wrote (I have paraphrased it - to make it simpler, not necessarily clearer!): The letter is titled "Garden that acts a filter for London traffic fumes" and begins .. "Sir ..

Trees are the lungs of our environment. It is vital to have not only good forests in the countryside but also ample trees in the hearts of cities where our motor vehicles still rule the roads.

In the mid-19th century the ancient Inner Temple Gardens in the City of London besides the Thames became blighted by the new gasworks nearby at Blackfriars and other factories on the south bank of the River. Charles Dickens memorably wrote of the consequent prevailing fog and sooty atmosphere in Bleak House. Samuel Broome (1806 -70), the Inner Temple gardener, was required to find a means of dealing with this engulfing environmental disaster.

His answer was to plant plane trees as they filtered the air. This enabled his plants to flourish to show standards. Chrysanthemum show were held regularly in the gardens every October and November between 1854 and the end of the century. During this time the public were allowed free entrance, with the gates remaining open until dusk every day from June onwards. The Gardener's Chronicle of that time recorded up to 8,000 people visiting daily at the height of smoggy times in the summer.

John Newton, Broome's successor, planted 20 plane trees in his memorial directly on top of the newly constructed embankment housing the new railway and the sewage system by Bazalgette as part of the attempt by parliament to solve the blights of the traffic problem at Charing Cross and the Strand, and the "Great Stink" of the Thames.

It is an irony that while the original environmental problems were conquered by determined government action, as well as by the trees, these memorial trees now serve to filter the traffic fumes emanating from the motor vehicles on the Embankment. The Garden continues to be beneficial to offices workers .. offering a place to picnic or sit on the spacious green lawns among the trees.

While environmental problems will always exist, we must continue to rely upon the virtues of the gardeners of "Diligence, Patience and Perseverance", as Broome would say, as well as their natural environmental empathy, to overcome them."

It is interesting this .. as we have a lot of parks in London - a great many used to be part of Henry VIII's palace grounds and are rather large - St James Park, Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Richmond Park, Greenwich .. to name a few!!! I hadn't realised that the embankment was built at this time .. another post looming!! .. I did mention the Great Stink and Bazalgette in my post on Obama's Beast of a car ...

There are so many points of interest in this post .. developments of Gardens as breathing treasures, plant shows, the state of London during the industrial era of the 1800s .. and the stinking Thames before it was cleaned up in recent years .. I remember the pea soupers back in the 1950s and 60s .. horrible, cloying fogs .. and if Londoners had to put up with that in the summer months too .. no wonder they were so grateful for the Inner Temple Gardens!

Dear Mr Postman thank you for calling in today, and I am pleased to tell you that all is well - my mother had the operation and she has recovered and seems to be doing well - long may it last ... she loves letters, so will be happy to receive this once I can read to her again ..

PS - An article from Wikipedia on the Great Stink - highlighted as their article of the day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink   it just adds a great deal more to my post here.  Added 23rd June 2015.

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters Inspirational Stories

Moles, Worms and Charles Darwin - Naturalist ...

Dear Mr Postman .. thank you for coming today .. my mother has gone down for her operation .. she was happy and unconcerned - which is excellent .. we had a couple of hours together when I read her some items that I'd like to turn into positive stories for her .. she was laughing and enjoying the connotation of the various story links and my discussion points with her - she is still so with it - it is extraordinary and wonderful that we can share so much .. - she is looking forward to hearing her story on moles, worms and Charles Darwin ..

Are you surprised at the choice of post? Well it makes a change .. and I visited my uncle yesterday and he has mole hills everywhere!! The property was an old chicken farm .. so the soil is extremely rich in nutrients .. and that suits worms just fine! It doesn't suit him .. or me for that matter .. as we've both spent time (every day) religiously going round the garden filling in the holes .. it doesn't seem to do a blind bit of good - they run riot!!

It suits moles just fine! I've uncovered some surprising facts .. they're about 20cm (8") long, covered in black velvety fur and bear powerful, shovel-like front feet, which can shift 14kg of earth in an hour! (that's some shovelling?!) They're not blind, but spend most of their life underground hunting for worms.

An underground larder is created to store food for a rainy day (excess worms having their heads bitten off to prevent escape!!) and their appetite is enormous, they also enjoy a sprinkling of slugs and leatherjackets (crane fly: daddy-long-leg larva) .. it's a solitary animal which hates its fellow moles almost as much as we hate them!!

Charles Darwin, the Naturalist, was born 200 years ago .. and amongst his many claims to fame was as a doctor, geologist, zoologist, botanist, scientist, etc .. and the short tale today that amused me was that the last work Darwin published in 1881 was a 286 page work entitled: "The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits" - he had spent 22 years watching an area of garden in Down House, his family home in Kent, just near Biggin Hill aerodrome, and recording this information. He concluded that

"It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures."

Apparently 90% of the fallen leaves in an orchard are dragged into the soil by earthworms ... and one square metre of fertile soil will contain more than 100 worms .. the leaves will become rich humus benefiting the land. My mother earlier on was asking me .. whether worms could talk .. why - I have no idea .. and I couldn't answer then, not sure I can now, but .. they use light and vibration adjustment to warn themselves of impending predators .. birds, moles, some snakes, slugs, snails, hedgehogs, badgers, etc .. disappearing back down their tunnel. Worms move with their segments covered by minute hooked bristles - they stay attached by their tail or their head before 'worming' their way along.

A worm does not survive if cut in half, but will survive if it loses part of its tail - new segments being formed, while if it loses its head .. the injured worm remains immobile for about a couple of months, by which time a new head is regenerated away. It then wriggles away - a born-again worm!!

I rather liked this poem written by William Cowper from the 1700s, which also seems to reflect upon society today ... encouraging us to look after our small unsung heroes of the land ...

"I would not enter in my list of friends,

(Thou graced with polish'd manners and fine sense,

Yet wanting sensibility)

Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.

An inadvertent step may crush the snail

That crawls at evening in the public path,

But he has the humanity, forewarned,

Will tread aside, and let the reptile live."

And just to round it off a "Silly Verse" by Spike Milligan, one of the childhood memories of the sense of the ridiculous .. we used to laugh before a lot of these entertainers had even started speaking ...

Worm
Little worm - wiggle wiggle,

You make me and my sister giggle.

You live in mud,

You live in wet.

Yet never ever see a vet.

You must be very healthy worm,

Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle Squirm.

Well thank you Mr Postman for visiting .. you're right I'd better go and see how my mother is getting on ..

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters

Selfridges, Real Entrepreneurs ... Yellow - no I don't think so ...

Dear Mr Postman .. thanks so much for letting us have our letter .. my mother will be delighted to have her story .. today is a good day .. Janice, her healer, who has become a 2nd daughter to my Ma is able to visit this afternoon, and it's been agreed that the operation will go ahead tomorrow = thank goodness - it will be wonderful to get my Ma out of the hurly burly of hospital. This story amused me and I'm certain it will my Ma ..

It is reprinted in The Week and was a letter, entitled Managers' Pay, written by Carl Mortished to The Times: "Once upon a time, a managing director was just a superior manager. Today they are rewarded like venture capitalists, risk-takers who claim a big return for taking a personal financial risk. This is absurd because Sir Fred Goodwin and other Chief Executive Officers have no skin in the game: they are staff. An entrepreneur is someone who might mortgage his house, his spouse and his own sanity in pursuit of some mad scheme to make a better umbrella. An entrepreneur does not yearn for the key to the executive loo."

I just liked this story .. my mother was an entrepreneur .. she bought a hotel, converted it into a Care Home, got bored with that .. knocked some of it down and built a wing one end, and a flat and extra rooms the other - doubling its size .. and owned it for 20 years before selling it a few years ago. 

Just so you know the extra wing .. had to be shored up into the granite cliffs of Newlyn, Penzance with enormous bolts and I mean enormous!! It was a labour of love for her and her patients .. she loved them and nursed them to the end - that's what makes these weeks so incredibly unfair on her ...

Another icon of London's West End celebrates 100 years of existence .. Selfridges .. the Yellow shop .. they've chosen the most wonderful rich deep colour yellow - pantone -109 yellow .. as their brand colour - and this May are offering some limited edition items .. I'm rather taken with the watch by Toywatch! Though there is a Fender guitar, a Marc Jacobs handbag .. etc.

Harry Gordon Selfridge went to work for his cousin's store in Chicago, at less pay than elsewhere - but encouraged by his mother, he took the job. 

He found his passion for retailing and with his imagination he gained promotion becoming retail manager in 1887. His holiday time was spent studying other luxurious stores and bringing their innovations in the Chicago store.

Selfridge had his first trip abroad in 1888 and wanted to take his cousin's business into the international arena .. Marshall Field, his cousin, wasn't that keen and decided the easiest way to retain Harry's interest in the Chicago store was to give him a large salary increase, and loan him $250,000 to become a junior partner. He carried on for 13 years .. opened a rival store in Chicago .. but wasn't happy and set off at age 50 to explore pastures new.

London became his stop off point .. while a Jewish banking friend suggested the 'dead end' of Oxford Street .. it is the Marble Arch, Hyde Park end of Oxford Street. 

It was at this stage that the Selfridges monogram was devised: the sign being a combination of the pound and dollar signs. So he had his store, he had his logo, he had his passion - his retailing and his international knowledge .. and the rest is history ... 

... he did however try for one other icon - which would have made his day: that the underground would stop at the shop and the station would be called Selfridges! Marble Arch and Bond Street as names and places won that battle.

Bathing machine and "sea costumes" c 1910

I've just spotted an advertisement that would amuse my mother too .. one of their first ads is entitled "Some Charming Sea Dresses" .. I can't find the image .. which is frustrating me, but have inserted another ... but that's that ... just imagine putting on a dress to go swimming - how times have changed!

Just a note on the colour yellow ..the word yellow comes from the Old English geolwe which derived from Old Germanic. The oldest known use of this word in English is in the poem Beowulf, in a description of a shield made of wood from a yew tree. 

Yellow has traditionally been associated with jaundice and cowardice. Yellow usually refers to "caution" and is the second light on traffic lights or stop lights; in American slang, a coward can be said to be "yellow-bellied" or "yellow". 

The colour is associated with ageing as well, for both people and objects (e.g. "yellowed" paper). "Yellow" ("giallo"), in Italy, refers to crime stories, both fictional and real. 

This began in about 1930, when the first series of crime novels published in Italy had yellow covers. I love Selfridges' yellow .. however entrepreneurs are not yellow!

Thank you Mr Postman for dropping by .. it will lighten my mother's heart .. I can at least show her the picture of the "Charming Sea Dresses" and she will laugh .. and we can remember the times of her start up with the Care Home - Mr Mortished's letter does seem to put things into perspective doesn't it?

Pantone Yellow Guitar and ToyWatch are courtesy of: http://limitedhype.com/2009/04/selfridges-x-converse-centenary-edition-yellow-pantone-109/
Selfridges 1909 picture is from the Bedford Lemere collection, held as an Archive reproduced by permission of English Heritage.NMRReference Number: BL 20507

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters Inspirational Stories