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Hoots & Havers October 2007

The two pictures here are a puzzle. The image on the left is a snap of a painting in my possession, supposed to be the lawyer father-in-law of David Stewart of Kynachan. This was taken for identification to the Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh in 1969. Then they said the artist was Sir John Medina, dated it to about 1700 and the sitter is wearing a Geneva gown, the uniform of a Protestant preacher or intellectual, which was commonly worn by the legal fraternity at the time.

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A few wee ks ago on the web, I came across the other image, said to be Cardinal Beaton who was murdered in 1546. To my eye, the engraving has been taken from the Medina portrait and I tried to find out where it had come from and why it was thought to be Beaton.

The Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh have copies of the engraving from the 18th/19th century and they say it is Beaton, possibly based on a picture of the Cardinal which was once in the collection of the Duke of Hamilton in Holyroodhouse. The painting must have been copied from one of the engravings. Quite apart from the clash of opinions between the Gallery in 1969 and the Gallery now, this manifestly cannot be correct.

There’s a portrait of the Cardinal in Arbroath Abbey collection and he has a goatee beard and the appropriate red robes. The Geneva gown did not come into use until a century after Beaton’s death and, aside from that anomaly, a Roman Catholic cardinal would no more wear a Geneva gown than he would a Rangers shirt, nor would his portrait be proudly displayed by a succession of Presbyterian ministers who handed it down.

I’ve tried the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Keepers of the Queen’s pictures and the Duke of Hamilton. Most know about the engravings, but none the portrait on which it is based and none why it is thought to be Beaton. So I’m a bit stuck. Any ideas?

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My mother, who is no spring chicken, worries that she’s losing her marbles. Her main symptom is her inability to recall names. I assure her that this complaint normally strikes at about the age of 25 and only becomes a problem with advancing age because only then do you start to worry about losing the odd marble.

I find it a pleasant alternative to the crossword or suduko. In my case, it is most fun when one sees an actor on TV and know that you have seen him/her before but can’t quite place where. If you know the face really well, you know you know, or at least once knew, the name. Then it lies fallow in the brain and every so often it will rise to the frontal lobes and one can have a chew at it. It’s amazing how often it eventually tings into consciousness.

Using the web is much the same as using a thesaurus in a crossword and is cheating. In the small hours of a sleepless night I try to recall the names of the Magnificent Seven. Although he wasn’t actually one of them, it took me months to remember Eli Wallach’s name who played the Mexican baddie. And then I’d forget it once more and was able to play the game all over again. I recently got stuck on a rather obvious heavily-bottomed black actor, and was distressed to have the quest cut short when the name Morgan Freeman swam into my ken whilst writing this article.

A longterm assignment is the name of an American who popped up the other day as a Faerie Prince of some sort in the few minutes of a Lord of the Rings film I came across. I can see him playing the most appalling baddie in something else, but I have not yet made the required connection. It’s a game that has to be played solo, so I won’t bore with the result – if and when it comes.

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The pheasants of Grandtully have been featuring on the Comment forum. It’s an annual hassle as the condemned do their suicidal scamper on the road in the hope that at least one of their persecuting species will swerve and take out himself as well as an oncoming car. And if they die in the attempt, so what? Becoming painfully dead is their only purpose in life. I used to shoot them myself, and I may well have once pulled the wings off flies. But I came to the conclusion that it was a rather gross to get jollies from killing other creatures, and stopped.

It began to worry me when I lived in Somerset. The shoot I knew best now puts down 140,000 birds a year and it’s a race for them between being shot or dying of lead poisoning from the pellets carpeting the surrounding landscape. I don’t particularly mean to be rude to those who shoot pheasants up here, but down there they’re merchant bankers, literallyand figuratively - London brayers down to play and blow their bonuses on corporate shindigs and to get mud on the Hampstead SUVs. They’re mostly lousy shots which can be a problem if they’d booked, say, a 600 bird day. So the solution was to place a handful of keepers at the end of the wood on the last drive to bring down as many birds as it took to fill the quota. Then, of course, they were buried by the JCB.

I heard of one shoot in France where the hunters surrounded a small wood and the organiser released the birds from a wagon that had been trucked to the middle of the copse earlier in the day. It saved a lot of pissing about.

It surprises me that the beastie welfare brigade have never moved into battery pheasants. The banning of fox and deer hunting always seemed misconceived. Both pastimes, even if the same moral doubt can be raised about killing for fun, had the incidental effect of conserving each species and the countryside in which they lived. But the same can’t be said for shooting corporate pheasants; They saturate their locality and require ruthless keepering. Of course it brings shedloads of money to rural areas, but it’s impossible to justify from any moral, environmental or welfare viewpoint.