Blair and Barnhill

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28 October

Many will know that George Orwell = Eric Blair. Perhaps fewer know that, partly out of fear of personal retribution from Stalin following publishing Animal Farm, Orwell went to live for several long stretches at Barnhill (the estate shown), in the white property in the photograph.

Barnhill is located close to the more northerly tip of the wild and remote Isle of Jura, one of The Western Isles.

In the end, probably because he had tuberculosis before he went back there for the last time, he had to be taken off the island, and he died in London, but he had been working on the novel that, by the expedient of reversing the final digits, became Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This is not the first time that I have taken shots of Barnhill from as close as, unless one is renting the property, one can get from the private road, but I will have to look out those earlier images...



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The Dave-ings of an Arranged Mind (1)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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30 April


Well, let's see where this goes*:

1. Cameron is a Scottish name

2. David is a Biblical name

3. Blair is a Scottish name

4. Eric Blair (also known as George Orwell) made Barnhill, on the Isle of Jura, hame**

5. Brown actually sounds Scottish, as well as being it

6. As did John Smith, at rest on the Isle of Iona

7. In both cases, certainly with less affectation than Billy Connolly*** in Mrs Brown (1997)

8. Osborne, whose first names were originally Gideon Oliver****, first had paid employment, with the NHS, in a way reminiscent of Defoe: he had to make computer entries of the names of the dead of London****

9. In rotten Boroughs*****, votes cast by those actually dead may have exceeded those of the living

10. Which inevitably brings us, once more, to the question of Gogol and Dead Souls (1842)

11. But, in the UK, we pride ourselves on knowing The Government Inspector (1836 (revised 1842))

12. Apparently, a bit like the origins of Tomkinson's Schooldays****** (1976), Pushkin was supposed to have told Gogol an anecdote, from which Gogol then derived his play

13. Which takes us neatly to Public Schools, judges (again!), fags, and whipping-boys!



End-notes

* A little game called Thirteen Degrees of Archery.

** Although he did much work on what he came to call Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is a common misconception, amongst those who know about his connection with Jura, that he died there.

*** Were Pamela and Billy made for each other? (No, I don't mean anatomically - not even in a Ken-and-Barbie sense!) Well, one was a welder, and the other was born in the Anderston district of Glasgow, and both have disguised their natal history, by, eerily, electing to speak with the accent that really belongs to the other.

Yet for all that Billy says cock and fuck, Pamela was far more genuinely provocative, even in just a few seconds, with her well-known American Express gag. (Plus beautifully amusing in taking off the quiddities of how the news was read at that time.)

**** On both counts, according to Wikipedia®.

***** Concerning which I owe all my knowledge to Blackadder the Third (1987) (as do some students theirs of The Great War to Blackadder Goes Forth (1989).

****** Palin and Jones******* collaborating to great effect in many of the Ripping Yarns

******* Yes, Bridget and Sarah!


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