IkoStar

This is Henry Wriothsley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton… or more accurately, it’s a picture of him that I found on the internets, the original being in the National Portrait Gallery (which has a good caf upstairs) and which I visit every time I’m anywhere near Trafalagar Square.

The NPG is across the road (almost) from St Martins in the Fields, where I was Christened back in the day when you needed to do that to save your soul from eternal damnation etc. God knows how my folks pulled that one off, but they did. Most of the stuff in this blog isn’t actually made up - just enough to offer a smokescreen against various accusations further down the track.

Anyway, this is my fav picture in the whole place and I basically ignore all the others and just look at this one. He’s beautiful (in a crafty Elizabethan sort of way)… utterly charming, but with a stone-cold killer look in his eyes. I think Shakespeare dedicated a sonnet to him or something.

He used to hang about with Elizabeth the First’s lot, managing to piss her off by sneaking off and marrying someone she didn’t entirely approve of (sanctity was actually sacred in those days) and eventually was implicated in a plot to dethrone her. Robert Devereux (who (I think) rented the Palace of the Bishops of Ely from her for the price of a single red rose a year) was executed, Henry wound up in prison in the tower.

He stayed there for a bit (the picture above is him in his cell/apartment in the tower) his wife brought him his cat to keep him company which is cool. Eventually QE1 died and KJ1 took over and pardoned him. I think he eventually fell prey to the plague while fighting the Spanish in Holland or whatever. Fleas man. If I went back in time I could definitely cure scurvy. I don’t know about bubonic plague. Fleas aren’t so easy to control.

There used to be this abandoned Maori meeting house up the road from where I used to live - here…

we used to visit it sometimes because all the original carvings/wickerwork etc were still there… anyway, flea eggs are set off by vibrations… you’d walk in, look up at the carvings etc and within about 30 seconds your legs would be covered by loads of tiny little newly-hatched 100 year old fleas. When these fleas were laid, aeroplanes weren’t even invented yet. Now that IS a tomb-protecting curse. You basically need weapons of mass destruction deal with certain parasites, and even then the little shits still manage to get though… which is another reason why free-market-fundamentalist, economy-as-natural-selection dipshits are wrong wrong wrong.

Whatever. Although I could probably go back in time, chances are there’s not a lot I could do to save Henry.

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At one point I fancied having a proper oil-on canvas version of that painting with the cat so I blew it up and printed it on canvas… looked pretty good actually. So far I haven’t gotten round to getting it a frame, so it’s sat on the backseat of my car in a cardboard tube for the last 3 years. There’s probably some eerie parallel there - going from imprisonment in a tower to imprisonment in a cardboard tube, but I don’t really want to get into that here. You can take these things too far I think. I’ll get it a proper frame next time I’m back in New Zealand.

The cat’s name is Trixie