Today is the 141st anniversary of John Buchan’s birthday

John Buchan was born on this day, August 26th, in 1875.

His birthplace was Perth, Scotland. The house where he was born fell into disrepair, but together with the house next door is being extensively refurbished and set to be turned into offices. Other than a small plaque, there will be no evidence remaining that John Buchan ever lived there.

John Buchan House, 20 York Place, Perth

The new Buchan Story Heritage Museum in Peebles explores his life and works. They are acquiring, preserving and displaying many interesting exhibits. Buchan was the Conservative candidate for Peebles, which is to the south of Edinburgh, and his family had many associations with the area.

The new Buchan Story Museum in Peebles

The John Buchan Way is a commemorative walking route from Peebles to the Borders.

I am not in a position to make pilgrimages to these far-away places to mark the occasion; London, where Buchan came to live early in 1900, is another matter. I am very familiar with many of the central London locations that he visited, lived and worked in and wrote about. I often go through and past them on the bus.

John Buchan and London, his ‘magical city’
This is a very evocative description:

“The spell of London wove itself around me. Fleet Street and the City had still a Dickens flavour, and Holywell Street had not been destroyed. In the daytime, with my fellow solicitor's-clerk, I penetrated into queer alleys and offices which in appearance were unchanged since Mr. Pickwick's day. On foggy evenings I would dine beside a tavern fire on the kind of fare which Mr. Weller affected. Behind all the dirt and gloom there was a wonderful cosiness, and every street corner was peopled by ghosts from literature and history. I acquired a passion for snugness, which I fancy is commoner in youth than is generally supposed. A young man, a little awed by the novelty of everything, is eager to find his own secure niche…

London at the turn of the century had not yet lost her Georgian air. Her ruling society was aristocratic till Queen Victoria's death and preserved the modes and rites of an aristocracy. Her great houses had not disappeared or become blocks of flats. In the summer she was a true city of pleasure, every window-box gay with flowers, her streets full of splendid equipages, the Park a showground for fine horses and handsome men and women. The ritual went far down, for frock-coats and top-hats were the common wear not only for the West End, but about the Law Courts and in the City. On Sunday afternoons we dutifully paid a round of calls. Conversation was not the casual thing it has now become, but was something of an art, in which competence conferred prestige. 

Also clubs were still in their hey-day, their waiting lists were lengthy, and membership of the right ones was a stage in a career. I could belong, of course, to none of the famous institutions; my clubs were young men's clubs, where I met my university friends. One was the Cocoa Tree in St. James's Street, a place with a long and dubious history, of which the bronze cocoa-tree in the smoking-room, stuffed with ancient packs of cards, was a reminder. At that time its membership was almost confined to young men from Oxford and Cambridge. I belonged also to the Bachelors', then situated at the foot of Hamilton Place, a pleasant resort for idle youth, from whose bay- windows one could watch the tide of fashion flowing between Hyde Park and Piccadilly.”

From John Buchan’s autobiographical memoir Memory Hold-the-Door

Although some aspects are unchanged, much of what John Buchan describes has gone for ever - including the foggy Victorian atmosphere. The streets he mentions still exist, but many of the shops and buildings have gone and the people in these streets are of very different demographics with very different lifestyles from those of Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen. I wish I could go back in time and visit John Buchan’s London!

John Buchan may have felt snug and secure in London, but some of his investigative and hunted heroes saw it as a dangerous and sinister place where they were watched, threatened, pursued and attacked. It is possible to retrace the routes that Richard Hannay and Sir Edward Leithen took and visit some of the featured central London locations, but the traffic and the masses of tourists and shoppers make it impossible to recreate the paranoia-inducing atmosphere that the fictional action took place in. The poor air quality is the most dangerous aspect now.

John Buchan and Portland Place

I have mentioned Portland Place in the Marylebone district of central London in connection with Masonic associations and street patterns that look like Olympic torches.

There are also some connections with John Buchan: he lived at no. 76 from 1912 to 1919; he wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps while he was ill in bed there. Richard Hannay resided in a flat in Portland Place; he was known to the public and the police as the Portland Place murderer.

The Georgian terraced house where John Buchan lived was later demolished together with its neighbour and replaced with a bland, contemporary office building. No. 76 recently became the new home of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

As I was visiting the area this week, I decided to take a look at some buildings of interest in Portland Place, no. 76 in particular. 

The notorious no. 33 appears unoccupied. There is nothing to show that John Buchan ever lived in a house on the site of no. 76; there really should be a blue plaque on the outside. There was once a plaque in the foyer, but it went missing during some recent renovations. All we have now is the photographic record.

John Buchan deserves a much better London memorial than this:

Ayn Rand and the Age of Aquarius

We know that Ayn Rand had no time for anything mystical or metaphysical, so it is unlikely that she ever investigated astrology or studied the history of religions. She would have been dismissive of and shown contempt towards anyone who tried to talk to her about such topics.

This means that she probably didn’t know anything about the predicted Aquarian Age, where the influence of Aquarius is balanced by the opposing sign of Leo.

Despite this, there are some references to elements associated with the Age of Aquarius in her life and works.  Perhaps it is all just a coincidence - a very uncanny one though. Perhaps she unconsciously picked up something of the spirit of the coming new age. Perhaps she was an unwitting avatar for some of the subtle forces and unseen influences that affect mankind.

Ayn Rand was born under the sign of Aquarius; she was very logical and rational, which is a major feature of the sign. Her ideology was like a religion for her; we would expect a new religion for the new age to be idea-based rather than feeling-based as in the Age of Pisces.

By coincidence, one of her great novels is called The Fountainhead; the outpouring of water for mankind in the form of ideas is a very Aquarian image:

Ayn Rand, Leo and her lion cubs

One of the main characters in Ayn’s autobiographical novel We the Living is called Leo; he was based on someone she knew as a girl back in Russia and never forgot.

Ayn worked in the studios of MGM, whose mascot is Leo the Lion.

Lion cubs are associated with the waxing Age of Aquarius/Leo.

By coincidence, Ayn Rand owned two small stuffed lion cubs, given to her by her husband as a wedding present. She called them Oscar and Oswald. She drew a sketch of them crying (pouring water!):

Two of her unpublished stories are signed by “O. O. Lyons”.

Yet another string of minor incidents

I recently experienced a string of minor misfortunes while out on a shopping trip.There was a time when such incidents would have been very jarring but not any more; I was not affected at all. I even tried to mentally bring some positivity into the atmosphere.

The first incident happened when the bus I was on swept past a bus stop without stopping. A woman who had wanted to get off there became very angry, all the more because the next stop was a fair distance away so she had a long walk back. She swore at the driver.  He said that she should have rung the bell; she insisted that she had rung it. She seemed a bit disturbed and disconnected, and her voice had a strange, unpleasant tone.

The next incident took place in a small supermarket. A woman left her queue to go back and get some item she had forgotten. She took her time, leaving a lot of people waiting. Someone mentioned this, quite politely, to her when she came back – without apologising for the delay - and she took offence and got into an argument with him. Staff had to intervene.

When I was on the bus on the return journey, there was trouble involving a man in a wheelchair who wanted to get off and a passenger who intervened on his behalf. The driver closed the doors to let the ramp down, but she jumped to the wrong conclusion and thought that he was going to move on without letting the man off. She shouted for him to stop. 

It was just a misunderstanding, but the bus driver got annoyed and said, "I'm not blind!" She got annoyed and said there was no need for him to be so rude. As she got off a few stops later, she told the driver that he should not have spoken like that to someone who was just trying to help. 

Soon after that, the bus made a sudden, violent swerve and I was thrown forwards.

A young tourist asked me if she was on the right bus. I tried to help, but it seemed that her English wasn’t good enough for her to understand what I said, despite all my efforts. This was frustrating. I showed her a stop where she could change to a better bus; she produced a map and other papers and said that she knew where she was; I realised that she didn’t really need any help after all. She seemed rather vague. A very minor incident indeed, but I suspect that it was part of the string.