{"id":1647,"date":"2019-04-30T16:51:09","date_gmt":"2019-04-30T16:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1647"},"modified":"2019-07-30T14:00:15","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T14:00:15","slug":"chancing-upon-the-aurora-borealis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2019\/04\/chancing-upon-the-aurora-borealis.html","title":{"rendered":"Chancing upon the Aurora Borealis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Are you green with envy at James Lasdun\u2019s long account of chasing and experiencing  the Northern Lights in Norway and Finland in the 29 April 2019 New Yorker<\/em>?  I could certainly have done with the commission \u2013thirty-five years ago. But I have to allow that it was purely by chance that I saw the Aurora Borealis on the 23rd<\/sup>  or 24th<\/sup> of June 1984. I might even then have been a bit blas\u00e9 about my sighting, as I was drinking a glass of champagne at the time, seated in the cockpit of the first-ever Virgin Airlines flight from Newark New Jersey to London Gatwick. I might just have seen this vivid green display on other, perhaps later occasions, just as I am almost sure it was on an early Virgin flight \u2013 perhaps this very one \u2013 that I spottedmy double (in a queue at Newark, about 5\u20196\u201d or 5\u20197\u201d, stocky, with curly blond hair and watery blue eyes). This, however, was definitely the Virgin flight on which I lost my Northern Lights virginity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         The reason I\nam a little unsure about the date is that I was on the return leg of the inaugural\nflight from Gatwick, and I don\u2019t remember whether it was a daytime or an\novernight flight. The latter seems more likely to have given the flight crew\nand me a glimpse of this vivid emerald spectacle, though I grant you that Newark\ndoes seem an unlikely venue for this show. The pilot and co-pilot had, of\ncourse, seen it all before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         I must hasten\nto say that the champagne was drunk only by me, and none of the crew indulged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Why was I on the flight-deck? That is the bizarre part of the story.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         In 1968-69, I\nlodged in a huge mansion flat in Hanover Gate Mansions, across the road from London\u2019s\nRegents\u2019 Park. I was a Harvard Travelling Fellow, with some sort of honorary\nappointment at University College London, of which I never availed myself. I\nwas writing a book (my Harvard PhD dissertation; but I rapidly got a top\npublisher\u2019s contract for what became Moore:\nG.E. Moore & the Cambridge Apostles)<\/em>. The person who invited me to stay\nthere was Myles Burnyeat (my dear friend, who was formerly Prof of Philosophy\nat Cambridge  and Senior Research Fellow\nof All Souls, and not long ago voted the most influential classical scholar in\nthe world). The day of my arrival at my new temporary home, Myles confided, over\na cup of dreadful instant coffee, that, as I was certain soon to discover for\nmyself, he was himself a Cambridge Apostle. He had, indeed, made an appointment\nfor me to meet the semi-official spokesman for the Apostles in the next few\ndays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         This, though,\nis a distraction. Other residents at Hanover Gate Mansions included Myles\u2019s\nthen-partner, the American academic Nancy Gayer; plus her elder son, Gordon\nIvan Fields (b. 1951), who became \u201cthe British fashion mogul\u201d Gifi Fields (responsible\nfor the rah-rah skirt, I read); and twin boys (b. 29 Dec. 1952) Robbie (later, owner\nof Posh Boy Records), and Randy. As the boys were so close in age, their\nrecreations were similar, and I soon got used to the fragrance of marijuana\nthat pervaded the apartment\u2019s soft furnishings. Naturally, the boys were frequently\nbusted for minor infractions to do with smoking spliffs (and it\u2019s not\nimpossible that they, or a friend of theirs, were the chief suppliers to my\nAussie art critic pal, the late Robert Hughes, who also lived in our block of\nflats.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, they made repeated\ncalls upon the legal services of my also late closest friend, Michael Seifert,\nwho was constantly rescuing one or another of them. It was at this point that\nMichael got fed up, and said to the boys that they now knew the law on the\nsubject as well as he did, and could perfectly well plead for themselves from then\non. That\u2019s how and why Randolph Fields became an eminent barrister, expert on\ninsurance matters, asbestos clearance and other environmental coverage \u2013 and a\ncelebrated poker player. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Randolph was also interested in\nthe airline business, and during the Falklands troubles had the idea of opening\na commercial route to the Islands, which didn\u2019t work but, to abbreviate a long\nnarrative, got him hooked up with Richard Branson in founding what was then\ncalled Virgin Airlines.  Randy and Sir\nRichard had the inevitable dispute, was bought out by Branson for an initial\n\u00a31m in 1985, and sadly, died in Jersey in 1997, but not before winning several\nWorld Poker titles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We kept in touch: the Fields boys\u2019\nmother, Nancy was at our 1977 wedding party, and so, perhaps, were some of them.\nIn 1984, having lapsed from academia, I was the Food & Wine editor of The Observer<\/em> newspaper, during its\ngolden age. Except that I was returning to the UK on that flight, I\u2019m afraid I\ncannot remember any of the circumstances (although it was probably something to\ndo with the US publication of The Official\nFoodie Handbook<\/em> later that year). But it was at the invitation of the then\nco-owner of Virgin Airlines that I was drinking fizz that night on the flight-deck,\nand saw the jolly green giant lights. Though champagne may well have been against\nthe rules, there was definitely no spliff involved in the apparition of the\nverdant forms trailing scarlet, which looked like vast brushstrokes of a Howard\nHodgkin painting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Are you green with envy at James Lasdun\u2019s long account of chasing and experiencing  the Northern Lights in Norway and Finland in the 29 April 2019 New Yorker?  I could certainly have done with the commission \u2013thirty-five years ago. But I have to allow that it was purely by chance that I saw the Aurora […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/image.png?fit=345%2C259&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-qz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1647"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1652,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions\/1652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}