The library, echium candicans, and some sad reflections

 

Every time I go to the Huntington when these large spiky purple flowers are out - even on a dull cold day like today - I feel so happy that I get to work in the library here (these flowers are Echium Candicans, or Pride of Madeira.  As the name suggests, they aren't native here - though they thrive beautifully in the climate - so I doubt that there will be any in our garden.  Shame.  Maybe I'll sneak a couple into the front?).

But it was a day very much tinged with sadness, because my old friend Francis O'Gorman died yesterday evening - of cancer of the jaw, at the horribly young age of 57.  I knew him slightly when he was a graduate student in Oxford, and then, much better, when he was a Lecturer at Pembroke College before heading off to permanent jobs - so he was part of the Victorianist crew who would end up at our house eating and drinking after our seminars.  And after that - I'd see him often at conferences, although, in a rather startling recognition of how the pandemic warped our sense of time, and our capacity for professional sociability, I think that the last occasion might have been at the Ruskin conference in Oxford in 2019.  In part, too, I think this lack of first person contact can be attributed to the power of Facebook: he posted so frequently, and with such astute observation, that one felt his presence vividly almost every day.  But virtual presence isn't real presence, and I just wish I'd seen more of him in recent years.

Professional obituaries for Francis will doubtless write about his professional distinctions; about his enormous productivity - whether on Victorian subjects or beyond; and about his musical talents.  He was an impressive organist; and after he took early retirement a couple of years ago, he had much more time to be happy at the keyboard, in his and his wife's Kate's extraordinary garden, and with his orange and white cat Oscar, who just, and with terrible timing, predeceased him.  Francis was, indeed, a tremendous cat lover, and when I first met him he had, of course (as a Ruskinian) a particularly dear one called Effie. I could go on and on about the things that Francis felt about passionately, from birds to Venice - but what distinguished so many of them, and what ties them both to the origins of this blog, and to Ruskin, was his attentiveness, his capacity to find beauty and pleasure in small and ostensibly ordinary things.  He will be so missed.