I get a nasty surprise that badly dints my view of the world.  No time to think before I grab at the first thing that ensures me a good view of myself.  What ever it might be, a scornful memory, a word from a friend, it adds up to the phrase, it isn’t my fault! 

My adolescent self makes an entrance to back me up. Get out from under, he says, get away, show them the cold shoulder – freeze them out. Hate them.   But the person who has landed me this nasty surprise is someone I have loved for many years, and damn it, still love. Electra, a play, written by Euripides well over two thousand years ago, stirs up this little drama at the back of my mind.  I am reading it in translation by Philip Vellacott.  The raw emotions on display bring their own disinfectant but at the same time they raise up spectres from my own past. 

Recollections of parental rows threatening my security jostle with those on show in the theatre in my head. Electra and her brother, Orestes must kill their mother whom they loved.  They are to mete out punishment for her brutal slaughter of their father who, in turn had sacrificed their sister.  In the Guildhall in London is a startling painting by the artist John Collier of the mother, Clytemnestra, in a blood bespattered chiton holding an axe, dripping yet more blood.

I cannot think of a greater contrast to the firm but delicate pictures by Philip Vellacott’s sister, Miss Elisabeth Vellacott – she was never known as anything else (she died in 2002). I had the great pleasure and privilege of knowing Miss Elisabeth Vellacott.  She led an art group that I joined when, for a short while, I lived in Cambridge as a Fellow Commoner at Churchill College.  Her work is as delicate as was the advice she dispensed.  I have very happy memories of her.