Ancestors.

The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.

Sir Roger Scruton

Worthy.

One of my favorite stories of this kind is the local apiarist (beekeeper) in my neighborhood. He told me that the first seven years of him keeping bees he never had more than a couple of jars for himself. Even though he had gotten into it with the idea of selling honey, he found that he neighbors were so hostile to the idea of having bees around that he had to walk around the neighborhood after every harvest and hand out jars of honey. Hundreds of kilos every year was given away. Over time the neighbors figured out that the bees were not dangerous and that this man was not abusing their neighborhood but actually making it a better place. More people started keeping flowers in their gardens and eventually the man could start selling his produce rather than giving it away.

This story illustrates a point that everyone from your grandmother to Tahitian islanders, to the hardcore Neo-reactionary thinkers can agree on: be worthy. To be part of something you must first be of use to it. A community is only as strong as the effort put into it by its members. You must have something to offer. This is as true in urban beekeeping as in modern courtship.

Learn a skill, master a craft, teach something: learn, create, pass on.

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Croo, "Coventry Carol"

The King's College Choir performs ...

Undaunted.

I have nothing positive to say about popular culture, and nothing positive to say about the cultural establishment. We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work. Popular culture contains pockets of gentleness and melody. Architects, writers, and composers produce works which are neither kitsch nor “kitsch.” Prayer and penitence have been interrupted, but not forgotten. To those who wish for it, the ethical life may still be retrieved. Ours is a catacomb culture, a flame kept alive by undaunted monks. And what the monks of Europe achieved in a former dark age, they might achieve again.

Sir Roger Scruton

Thank you, Kurt.

Hurra!

Oktoberfest beginnt heute.

Unbendingly.

In the 1980s the architect Quinlan Terry was a bogeyman to much of his profession. Unbendingly traditionalist, he believed that the classical orders were handed down by God. He saw nothing good in modern architecture. He thought that the stainless steel exo-viscera of Richard Rogers’s Lloyds building needed brick walls and a slate roof. His stance also made him a pinup, in his three-piece suit and all, to those who thought that new buildings should like just like old buildings. In the decade when economics were handed down by Margaret Thatcher – for whom, indeed, Terry designed interiors in No 10 Downing Street – and aesthetics by the Prince of Wales, an era when radical finance felt the need to dress itself in the trappings of old England, he was a man of his time.

Well, here we are again, in the reign of another she-Tory and another time of patriotic nostalgia, of the promised return of dark blue passports and a hoped-for relaunch of the royal yacht Britannia. Quinlan Terry is still at it, designing, among other things, country houses in Dorset, Ireland and Kentucky, but now there is also his son Francis, who last year set up his own practice after nearly 20 years working alongside his father. He is carrying out the same type of work as the older Terry – he has country houses on the go in Wiltshire, Norfolk, Hampshire and Ireland, and a mixed-use development in Twickenham – but he has also developed a new line of business, developing counter-proposals, backed by local residents, to overweening developers’ plans in places like Mount Pleasant and West Hampstead, London.

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