These offices, now the Academy of Contemporary Music, were formerly the offices of Melrose Film Productions, set up by ex-Panorama producer Peter Cole and his business partner Richard Roxburgh.

What Stevie Wonder said about music, Swiss painter Paul Klee said about painting. He strove to make his art a universal language understandable by all. Charlie Chaplin aimed to do the same with silent film. Speaking a universal language is a high and worthy aspiration for all creatives, including filmmakers.

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

The reference to “fast movies” is interesting – it means timelapse photography or trick films of early cinema. Gatsby was published in 1925 and set in 1922.

Summer combines simultaneously languorousness and a sense of being fleeting and over all too soon. A bit like life…

Dilexi Veritatum (I have loved the truth)

The day before yesterday Marc Bloch was reburied in the Panthéon, Paris’ monument to the highest achieving citizens of France. Bloch was honoured as one of the greatest French historians. He was also recognised (in the words of fellow historian Yuval Noah Harari) “as a man who chose resistance over safety when his country fell into darkness.”

Bloch fought for France in both World Wars and received numerous decorations for bravery. He became one of the leaders of the Résistance.

In March 1944 Bloch was captured by the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators. The collaborationist French newspapers celebrated Bloch’s capture, highlighting his Jewish identity and describing the Résistance as a Jewish-Bolshevik terrorist organisation. Bloch was imprisoned and tortured at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, and then executed on 16th June, ten days after the Allied landing in Normandy. (And Bloomsday 22).

Harari, also a mediaevalist by training, has been deeply influenced by Bloch. “What moved me most about Bloch is his uncompromising commitment to truth. For him, history was never nostalgia or mythmaking, but a discipline of honesty – a way of resisting propaganda, prejudice, and the comfort of convenient fictions. For Bloch, truth was not just an intellectual position, but a spiritual practice.”

Bloch wrote: “I am prepared, therefore, if necessary, to affirm here, in the face of death, that I was born a Jew: that I have never denied it, nor ever been tempted to do so. […] A stranger to all credal dogmas, as to all pretended community of life and spirit based on race, I have, through life, felt that I was above all, and quite simply, a Frenchman. […] I have loved her greatly, and served her with all my strength. I have never found that the fact of being a Jew has at all hindered these sentiments. Though I have fought in two wars, it has not fallen to my lot to die for France. But I can, at least, in all sincerity, declare that I die now, as I have lived, a good Frenchman.”

This degree of integrity and fearlessness is extremely hard to live up to but a very worthy aspiration for us all.

“Travel makes you modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

At a time of climate crisis, we all need to travel with more consciousness and intention, being clear and grateful for how we benefit from the journeys we choose to take.

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.”

Jane Austen, letter to her sister Cassandra, 1796 (September 18th – Rowling, Kent)

There’s a lot to be said for not worrying too much about elegance and just being yourself.

“It’s not the heat — it’s the humidity.”

The thing about sayings and proverbs is that more often than not they are true.

“It’s so hot I put everything off. Hot weather is the mother of procrastination.”

This one can be written later…

“Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature.”

There’s nothing quite like a great simile. Raymond Chandler was a master of the striking and entertaining simile.

And there’s no better way of looking at the world than through cool glasses.

Summer afternoons in England are the perfect time to appreciate the simple pleasures of life. Sunshine, dappled shade, running water, birds hanging out, gentle breeze, high clouds in an azure sky. That’s this evening in South London anyway. Happy days.