Our brush with the Bloomsbury Group
While we were staying at Rheinhold's resort near Samara, we bumped into a woman called Mitey Roche. Here is her website - https://www.miteyroche.com/about. Mitey is a woman of diverse accomplishments. As an actress, she took the leading role in the opening production of a Harold Pinter play. As a painter, she has had her work exhibited in Cannes, Florence and Mallorca.
Financially her most profitable artistic endeavor, has been the success she has enjoyed as a writer of five independently published, salacious, romance novels. She told us that she was inspired to go down this path by the success of “50 Shades of Grey”. She felt she had to be able to write better than that. The proof has been in the pudding. She has established a dedicated readership, who appreciate her ability to combine sexually explicit prose with romantic fiction. She said many of her readers start off with Harry Potter. From there they move on to Twilight and 50 Shades. Despite my sincere protestations of admiration for her craft, Mitey would not indulge any curiosity I might have. She adamantly refused to divulge her pen name.
Her inhibitions on this front might be down to the fact that she is the daughter of acclaimed poet and classical translator Paul Roche.
When Paul Roche died in 2007, there were tributes to his erudition in many papers, including the Telegraph and the New York Times. Part of his celebrity derived from his connections to the Bloomsbury Group.
The Bloomsbury Group’s mystique arose from the genius of its members in such diverse fields as Art (Duncan Grant), History (Lytton Strachey), Economics (Maynard Keynes) and Literature (E.M. Forster). Interest in the group has only been enhanced by the complexity of their love lives. Often they experienced the “love that [at that time] dare not speak its name”. In many cases they adapted by establishing an apparently conventional marriage with a person from the opposite sex, while carrying on a passionate relationship with someone of their own sex.
While he did not follow this template exactly, Paul Roche certainly provided a flamboyant foot note to the history of the Bloomsbury Group. The story starts with him wandering round Picadilly in 1947 in a sailor suit, even though he was an ordained priest and even though he had never served with the Royal Navy. It was in this garb that he attracted the attention of Duncan Grant. Paul Roche modelled for many of the artist's paintings.
When the clergy of Lincoln Cathedral commissioned Grant to paint a series of murals, they apparently got more than they bargained for. For many years the chapel containing his murals, was reduced to a store room.
I cannot imagine why the good clerics were so upset
Grant was married to a fellow artist, Vanessa Bell. That did not stop him and Roche establishing a long, intense (but arguably platonic) relationship that ended only with Grant’s death in 1978.
After meeting Grant, Roche went on to father a child out of wedlock, before finally marrying Clarissa Tanner. They had four children, the youngest of which is our friend Mitey.
Clarissa seems to have been a remarkable woman in her own right. She was one of the few people to reach out to Silvia Plath in the bleak last months before the young poet’s suicide. Likewise she set aside any jealousy she may have felt, and welcomed Duncan Grant in his last days into her home, so that he could die among friends.
Reinhold's Redemption: Sleeping Dogs don't lie
Rheinhold is the fictional name (for reasons which will become clear later) of an eccentric 69 year old German proprietor of a hotel set back in the jungle, some ten minutes’ walk from a deserted beach.
Like a lot of the best travel experiences, this one started with major misgivings. It was only after we had paid for our booking, that we came across a scathing online review of the place. Our concern only increased when another German local, practically begged us not to make the mistake of going to this hotel. I was left expecting some Teutonic version of Basil Fawlty, complete with silly walks and barked orders to the staff.
As it turned out, the only similarity with Fawlty Towers was that nobody mentioned the war.
The way a person treats defenceless animals often provides a clue to their true personality. Rheinhold has a couple of aging arthritic Labradors. Nothing is too much trouble for these dogs. They are taken down to the beach every day for a swim in the surf. During the heat of the day they get to cool off by sleeping in a pit of loose earth.
Rheinhold’s menagerie extends to a “Playmobile” type farm that includes chicken, geese and a solitary sheep.
This sheep never got the memo about belonging to a nervous, skittish breed. It liked liked nothing better than to chase panicked, honking, geese around the pen. The staff were quite disgusted with the sheep's mischievous behaviour, and used to hurl rocks and branches at it, as hard as they could.
The only animal we did not appreciate was this guy
Nocturnal trips got a lot more complicated after this encounter. The process involved locating the cell phone, switching on the torch app, and then scanning the floor for any nasty intruders.
Reinhold's Redemption: A "Shawshank" beach
There’s an iconic scene in the Shawshank movie where, at the end of their terrible odyssey, Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman finally get to Zihuateneo, and are able to celebrate their freedom walking along a deserted beach. Anybody who has been to “Zihua” recently, will know that it is heavily developed and far from deserted.
For the real experience you can go to this beach which is ten minutes walk away from Rheinhold’s resort:
Reinhold's Redemption: Sex and other Supplements
As soon as we arrived, we got the first clue that things might not be as they seemed. We were met by a lively young German lady, Hilda (name also changed) straight out of high school. Far from resembling the intimidated intern suggested by the online review, she looked blissfully happy. In fact, there was an odd, slightly glassy, aspect to her facial expression.
The strangeness continued when Rheinold treated me to a dissertation on all the supplements he is taking. Apparently, his physique had been much the worse for wear after forty years of partying. His blood pressure was high and he was developing type 2 diabetes. He responded with Germanic thoroughness, spending months conducting online research, as well as spending a small fortune getting supplements couriered down to his lonely outpost.
The results are impressive. The blood pressure is down. His blood sugar is back to normal. His hips have shrunk to the point where his pants keep slipping down and revealing a bit of butt cleavage. He is physically strong and youthful. The only thing that betrays his years of excess, are the black rings around his leathery face. The effect resembles a person who has forgotten to take off their Halloween make up.
He went into some detail about his path to physical redemption. Apparently the sugar craving that we all experience, is attributable to the presence of sugar loving parasites in our brains. He fixed this problem by ingesting Turpentine pills. His efforts to combat stomach parasites were so successful, that on the occasion when he was taken short on the beach, he was able to see thousands of the little blighters wriggling around in the sand.
However he reserved his most significant look, for the moment when he confided that all these supplements had also restored his libido. I did not think much about it until a couple of days later. There’s not a lot going on in this part of the world, so tongues started to wag when it was reported that he had been seen strolling along the beach with a bikini clad Hilda, while his hand rested on her barely clothed, barely legal, behind.
