Battenberg

This is something of a homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay, up to a point. I don’t know that he liked war as much as he liked cake, but many of his works reference the history and machinery of state and civil war. The last time I saw him was in 1995, on a visit to Little Sparta with Colin Sackett and David Bellingham, when we had tea in his kitchen which he thought very jolly, like a wartime crew between operations, sharing cake and banter.

I was thinking also of the banter-free zone of weekday childhood tea-times, when I think it true to say that my brother and sister and I were forbidden from talking, while my dad told my mum what a rotten day he’d had at work, and what idiots the others were, and how he was the only one who knew what he was doing. So that was our teatime war-room, contrasting with what he told us of his wartime experiences, with people he liked and respected, when his teatimes would have been as much fun as the kitchen at Little Sparta.

While the conversation was going on, and when Battenberg cake was on the table, I would sometimes cut shapes from its segments and transplant them, so a lemon square of Battenberg would have a pink shape at its heart, and vice versa. This I thought extremely clever.

The grid structure of Battenberg is something Finlay touched on in the mid-60s, in for example Acrobats and some semiotic poetry.