It was the wife’s birthday on Friday and we celebrated by spending a couple of nights in a very pleasant Dorset hotel in Beaminster (Emminster to those of my readers who only know Dorset through Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles). After breakfast on Saturday morning we went for a drive and our first stop was Lyme Regis (pictured above), a town we had visited at least twice before - as has almost everyone else – but on neither occasion had we liked the place very much.
Lyme Regis fair fizzes with literary history. Macaulay described it as “a small knot of narrow alleys lying on a coast wild, rocky and beaten by a stormy sea”. Jane Austen is credited as having composed Persuasion there (whatever “composed” means) and wrote of “the principal street almost hurrying into the water”. Beatrix Potter wrote and drew some of Little Pig Robinson when staying in Lyme Regis; Henry Fielding got into an amorous scrape with a merchant’s daughter here and, of course, the town is associated in recent decades with the book and film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and its writer John Fowles who spent most of his life there.
It should be a wonderful corner of England, alive with its past and present, but somehow everyone in the town seems to be pretty miserable. The Italian restaurant bids its customers a Happy Christmas and promises to re-open at the end of March. The Lyme Regis Woolworths seems to be trading alright but no-one within is smiling; one of the two bookshops is trying vainly to sell an original French Lieutenant’s Woman film poster for £125, the other has an interesting book about Lieutenant John Lapenotiere and the schooner HMS Pickle (Lapenotiere was the man who brought news of the great victory at Trafalgar – and Nelson’s death – from Falmouth to London) but at £15 for a slender volume it seemed too much for my post-Christmas pocket and, being an avaricious bookseller myself, I should be able to find a copy cheaper.
Co-incidentally the weekend papers include reviews of John Fowles: The Journals, Volume 2. D J Taylor writing in the Sunday Times describes Fowles as a whinger on a heroic scale (totally surpassing any ranting you may find in this particular blog). Fowles seems not to have a kind word for anyone or anything. Amongst those who come in for grumpy condemnation are Michael Caine and Twiggy, all reviewers, his local pub, Salman Rushdie and A.N. Wilson, his publishers and Raquel Welch. Taylor concludes that the main reason for Fowles’ inner malaise can be identified as being the dreadful effect of a man having too little to do and too much time to do it.
No chance of this blog-writer being caught out in that way, methinks.
