Don't read it, just read all about it

I don't read very many books nowadays (TV, shortened attention span, laziness, etc.) but I do read a lot of reviews. This gives me the feeling that I am not completely out of the cultural swim (I was going to say zeitgeist, but thought I'd better check, and found that I have used it five times in the last four years: that is already too many), and enables me to avoid feeling ignorant when people are talking about books.

Not that I pretend to have read books that I haven't (except sometimes when I know that everyone else in the conversation is doing it); it's merely that being able to quote from something I have read about a book, with or without attribution, stops me from being thought a complete stranger to modern literature.

And, of course reading a book review can often provide a better experience than its subject ever could; a perceptive and witty review of a rubbishy biography of a rubbishy person can be thoroughly enjoyable. Here are some snippets from Catherine Bennett's delicious review of Snowdon: The Biography, by Anne De Courcy, which tell you all you could possibly want to know about the book and the man:

What has worked for Lord Snowdon all his life almost works in this hagiography. In a little world populated by England's most ghastly and dim, he again appears to enormous advantage: abrim with style (of a sort), charm (if you like that kind of thing) and energy (mainly for sex). It is worth remembering, of course, that in this context the same would apply to the average tomcat.
....When, to his enormous satisfaction, the priapic photographer (then called Antony Armstrong-Jones) made it into the royal family, it was easy for this spoiled little pixie, with his extra-tight drainpipes and mesmerising bouffant, to be mistaken for a much-needed corrective to the snobbery, stupidity, and stolid sybaritism of the nation's top inbreds. Simply by being a society photographer, as opposed to a titled nothing, Snowdon was able to portray himself as an arty free spirit, almost an intellectual, under whose tonic tutelage, it was imagined, the Windsor troupe might evolve into a more acceptable, near-human subspecies.
...The most iconoclastic thing he ever did, as a royal, was to wear polo necks instead of ties, a level of democratic endeavour that proved eminently acceptable to his in-laws, who soon discovered that they preferred the dashing, yet reliably subservient, Tony to foul-tempered Princess Margaret.
...The exact nature of the qualities that captivated Princess Margaret, her family, Snowdon's legions of ill-treated lovers and, most recently, the author of this dazzled tribute, remains, even after 400 pages, obscure. Loyal De Courcy passes on reports of an extremely large penis, but that can hardly account for Snowdon's effect on Prince Philip. Or, later, on Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art, who said Snowdon was "the best provost we ever had".
Was it wit? None is recorded here. Young Snowdon's speciality was nasty practical jokes, such as putting dead fish in girls' beds. It was the grown-up Snowdon's, too: "they would sortie out to the houses of neighbours they knew to be out or away", De Courcy hilariously reports, of the earl and his chums, "and rearrange all the furniture".
...Looks, then? As irresistible as Snowdon may have been in the 50s and 60s, and even the 70s and 80s, it hardly accounts for the posh old shagger's continuing appeal, not only to the author of this homage, but, incredibly, to an attractive young journalist, Melanie Cable-Alexander (by whom he fathered a child)
....Although De Courcy tries valiantly to generate admiration for various artistic and charitable triumphs, her efforts are continually nullified, not by her obvious partiality, but by yet more evidence of Snowdon's awfulness, as volunteered to her, exclusively, by himself. There are reasons, De Courcy shows, why Snowdon should have emerged so deceitful, manipulative and cruel; so mean, boastful and silly. His father sounds silly too. His mother more or less ignored him until he bagged Margaret. He had polio as a child, leaving him with a dodgy leg. Then again, you'd think that half a century of adulation, plus a family, experience and a bit of maturity would eventually even things out. On the contrary. It is only, one suspects, because he is using a wheelchair that Snowdon does not, even now, creep out of a night to plant dead fish or rearrange people's furniture.

I suppose I've taken rather more than snippets, but it's still worth following the link and reading the article, if only to learn about the wedding present for him and Margaret for which British servicemen's pay was docked by sixpence apiece, and why his mother was called Tugboat Annie. It was published in the Guardian, which tells you, perhaps rather optimistically, that you can buy De Courcy's drivel from their book service for £18 with free UK p&p.

Keep straight on past the Käsefabrik

It sounded quite straightforward: our German friends had told us on a postcard, "Take the main road north out of the town, turn left at the second ronkleboot and the farm is one kilometre further on, on the right".

Ronkleboot threw us but we guessed that it might refer to a boat: perhaps the impresario Bob van Ronkel kept a couple of his houseboats moored on a river running alongside the road, and called them Ronkelbooten. Anyway, we reckoned that there was no need to ask for clarification, because whatever the thing was, it must be quite a landmark; we would notice the first one and be ready to turn left at the second.

It was not until we had passed half a dozen roundabouts that it came to us that we had misread our friends' cramped handwriting. Obviously they had wanted to be helpful and used the English word, spelt quite correctly but badly written; if only they had used their word (Verkehrskarussell?, Verkehrskreisel?) we could simply have looked it up.

Wooing in public

I am always sorry for male orchestral players in hot weather, for even today they are often expected to be formally dressed, while the audience can usually wear what they like, but at a fundraising recital at the Wigmore Hall on a very hot day last week it was black tie for the sweating audience while Bryn Terfel and his pianist happily trotted out in open-necked shirts and, in Terfel's case, much exposed chest.

His style has an element of what the Guardian calls discreet laddishness, and he often introduces a Three-Tenorsish knockabout touch to his performances. At the Wigmore Hall he got the audience to sing along to Molly Malone, and while giving Don Giovanni's serenade as an encore he wandered down the aisles distributing flowers to women in the audience.

There must be something about Welsh bass-baritones, for even cuddly Geraint Evans enjoyed exercising his talent for seduction on the stage, though of course if you're playing the Don that is what you are supposed to be doing. I once saw him on TV giving a master class in which he showed the student learning Zerlina's role not only how to sing it but also just what it felt like to have an elderly but irresistible lecher after you.

It's not only singers who can do this. The great Paul Tortelier gave a series of master classes on TV in the seventies; in the one I saw there was no doubt at all about the powerful effect he was having on the pretty young cellist, and the fact that he knew it perfectly well. He was in his sixties then with none of Terfel's Cardiff Arms Park kind of bravura and it is impossible to imagine him with a bare chest, but he achieved much the same result with his glittering eyes.

I'll be in touch

God has given us through various messengers a great deal of information about how many of us are going to Heaven when The Rapture takes place. This fellow with a beard and a tartan cap, for example, tells us that he has been provided with authoritative statistics, updated daily, confirming that in Phase One 800,000 adults and 9,600,000 children will be moved up. The balance of the population that is left behind must then endure the first twenty-one months of a Great Tribulation while waiting for Phase Two, in which 389,600,000 more people will be wafted aloft. But others have heard quite different Words of God, and it is difficult to know whom to believe.

When it comes to the date for the great event there is even less consensus among the experts: you can decide to believe top end-time prophet Robert Weinland, who says that the preliminaries have already started and the demise of the United States will take place before the end of 2008, or the brothers Septimus and George, who provide some spectacular illustrations and give a firm date in 2011, or RaptureReady, which states firmly that the prophecies in Revelation will not be fulfilled "in our generation". Others believe that it will be in their own lifetime, or speak of "very soon", which comes to the same thing, since most Rapture buffs are of advanced age: it takes many years of diligent bible study to reach the highest level of lunacy. Still others say that Jesus is keeping the actual date very close to his chest, and that we will never know until it happens; there may be portents, of course, but these are notoriously unreliable

Personally, I am keeping an open mind on all this. However, there is no real need to change my beliefs and way of life in order to be sure that I shall be among those chosen to ascend, for according to an organisation called Rapture Letters it is possible to arrange to be notified by email so that you can make the switch, rather like a Catholic death-bed repentance. In other words, I carry on coveting my neighbour's maidservant, making all sorts of idols and permitting my slaves to work on the Sabbath until I get the tip-off and then, Bingo!, a quick profession on my part of deeply held faith and, no sweat, I'm on my way skywards.

This seems a very good deal. It is all explained on this website, but the basic idea is that you give the organisation the email addresses of all your friends and relations and these will be stored in a database. Then, when the Rapture has taken place and everyone left is wondering where all the pious people they know have gone, your loved ones will get an email automatically sent out explaining that the saved ones are in Heaven and all they have to do to join them is to say that their life of sin was all a terrible mistake, that they have really always been great fans of Jesus and that now they want to join him for an eternity of bliss, please. And it's FREE!

Since the scheme became widely publicised on talk radio and the internet it has been the butt of many unkind jokes such as:
The code really needs to be tested in order to weed out bugs, so we need to ask God to throw us a mini-Rapture during a beta period. It would be really embarrassing if people failed to get their letters just because of a missing semicolon or something.

And there are cynics who say that this is nothing but a scam to harvest a huge number of email addresses which can be sold on to netmarketing companies. I am sure that such lies are being put out by agents of the Anti-Christ.

Facing danger

Only those who have actually been in mortal peril can know how they would react to it it. I know exactly how I would, for I did once face imminent death, or thought I did. This was some years ago, and I will first digress and recount a more recent experience.

I was at the delicatessen counter of the supermarket the other day, admiring a Parma ham and looking to see if it was approaching its Display Until date and if they had halved the price as they do sometimes. Suddenly, all the lights went out.

It was very very dark, and for a few moments there was complete silence except for a little bit of whimpering from understandably frightened children. Then, as their mothers re-assured them, the great British Blitz/Dunkirk spirit burst forth like a flashing sword from its sheath, and there were jokey cries of "Don't panic!", "We're all doomed!", "Anybody got a shilling?" and so on.

The lights came on after about five minutes, but if the blackout had been longer I've no doubt that the older shoppers would have kept up our courage by belting out some of the wartime favourites (there was one called When the Lights Go On Again, All Over the World..), and the pious ones would have launched into Abide With Me. It was a heartwarming occasion, though I suppose there may have been some who took advantage of the darkness by stuffing their pockets with packets of bacon or even indulging in acts of an improper nature.

The incident which tested me with much greater rigour took place some years ago when I was staying on the seventeenth floor or thereabouts of the Hotel Okura in Tokyo. When the water glass on my table started to jiggle about and there was a quiet rumble I smiled knowingly, well aware that such tremors are frequent in Japan. But the jiggling got much greater and the noise louder, and when the guests in the adjoining rooms started running into the corridor and screaming in Japanese it occurred to me that they must have known something really serious was happening. Perhaps this was The Big One which everyone said was bound to come one day. Believing that I was about to provide some corner of Minato-ku which would be forever England, and that there was nothing whatsoever that I could do about it, I lay down on my bed in the foetal position, put a pillow over my head and began to curse my luck out loud, blasphemously and obscenely.

Natural as this reaction might have been, I felt a little sheepish when the jiggling stopped, but happily there was no-one to witness my behaviour. This was not at all a proud occasion, but at least I have known ever since how I react to mortal peril.

A good ten minutes after all was quiet, a soothing voice came from the loudspeakers: "Do not be ararmed. This hoteru is earthquake-proof". Even if they'd told me that before, I doubt if I would have been completely re-assured.

There are bad times just around the corner...

...We can all look forward to despair...
So sang Noel Coward in 1952, but in fact he was late with prophecies of doom, for by then things were looking up; the really miserable years had ended.

I mentioned the other day David Kynaston's magisterial account of life for the the British after the Second World War, Austerity Britain 1945-1951. The euphoria of the victory celebrations wore off very quickly, and expectations of better times to come were not realised. In fact, in many ways the post-war years were harder to endure than the war-time ones.

Kynaston sets the scene as those years began by listing some attributes, negative and positive, of a country quite unrecognisable to anyone born later than, say, 1935:

Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles, no duvets, no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks.
Four Indian restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolleybuses, steam trains, Woodbines, Craven 'A', Senior Service, smoke, smog.
No launderettes, no automatic washing machines, wash day every Monday, clothes boiled in a tub, scrubbed on the draining board, rinsed in the sink, put through a mangle. hung out to dry. Central heating rare, coke boilers, geysers, the coal fire, the hearth, the home, chilblains common.
Abortion illegal, homosexual relations illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal.
White faces everywhere. back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, no high-rises. Arterial roads, suburban semis, Austin Sevens, Ford Eights, no seat belts, Triumph motorcycles with sidecars. A Bakelite wireless in the home, Housewives Choice or Workers Playtime or ITMA on the air, televisions almost unknown, no programmes to watch, the family eating together, Milk of Magnesia, Vick Vapour Rub, Friar's Balsam, Fynnon Salts, Eno's, Germolene.
Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no 'teenagers'.
Heavy coins, heavy clothes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being.
Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed.

Strong women and grim years

Went to Charleston Farmhouse the other day; this is the Sussex retreat where the Bloomsbury group hung out during and after the First World War, and is maintained as a sort of shrine to them. We have little interest in this bunch of posturing ninnies, but there is an annual festival there, now in its 19th year, featuring writers, performers and artists in debates, interviews, discussions, readings, illustrated talks and dramatisations in a marquee in the grounds.

This year we wanted to go when Tony Benn or Polly Toynbee were there but were too late for these stars and settled for biographer Virginia Nicholson, daughter and grand-daughter respectively of Quentin and Vanessa Bell, and historian David Kynaston, talking about books they have recently published: both were fascinating, perhaps more so than Tony or Polly would have been.

Nicholson's examination of the way in which two million women survived without men after the First World War showed that they did not merely cope courageously with poverty, childlessness and frustration, but challenged conventions, campaigned to better their lot, proved that there is more to life than men and helped to change our society. I asked her whether she had any knowledge of how the achievements of the 'surplus women' in, for example, France and Germany, where the losses were even greater, compared with those of the British women she had written about; her answer, quite reasonably, was 'No'—she had decided not to write the much longer book that wider coverage would have entailed. As it is, Singled Out fills an absorbing and inspiring 272 pages.

We bought the paperback and got her to sign it, but when it came to David Kynaston's mammoth and equally absorbing Austerity Britain 1945-1951 we thought we had spent enough on the evening, and I only hope that Kynaston gets some benefit because I got his book out of the library—the Public Lending Right's website doesn't tell you what the current pence-per-loan rate is. Anyway, two weeks later I have reached page 106 out of 633, and have already found on page 19 something worth quoting in the next post, on Friday.

Mudhorse fishermen

According to Matthew Fort in the Guardian, Adrian Sellick is not the last of the mudhorse fishermen: he is passing on his skills to his children. Here he is, setting off across Bridgwater Bay in Somerset, pushing his sledge-like barrow, or barrow-like sledge, across two miles of mud flats with a load of buckets and nets. When he gets to the place where he set his nets, he collects his catch, replaces any damaged nets and then pushes the mudhorse two miles back to land. Helped by his father, he sells whatever he has caught from a shack beside the road to the beach.

Clearly, this requires fitness, strength, detailed knowledge of the mudflats and the ways of fish, and also courage, for it would be easy to get cut off by the tide. It is good to know that there are still Englishmen who choose to make what must be a very modest living in such a hard way.

If it looks too good to be true...

...it is probably a fraud. Yes, I know; however.....

I like lieder, particularly Schubert's, and have a modest collection of recordings on disk or cassette, now never played, and on CDs, now copied to my Mac so that I can pluck heathroses, chat up the mill girl or sing on the water while I toy with some tedious database or pointless website. I recently added one song by downloading it from iTunes (this cost 79p).

A couple of weeks ago I logged on to the iTunes Store to look for some more and found that there was an album available for download containing four hundred and sixty-three Schubert lieder sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by Gerald Moore, at a price of just under eight pounds sterling. This would fill about twenty CDs, and works out at 1.725 pence for each song.

There were some reviews by purchasers expressing amazement and delight so I reckoned this was no fraud and clicked to download; a couple of hours later, there they all were on my hard disk. It will take over twenty-four hours to listen to them, so I shall probably spread the session over a few months: even Dietrich and Gerald might pall if I try to play the lot in one go.

When I got the invoice I found that 79p had been deducted for one of the songs included in the album because I had previously downloaded and paid for it.



This photo of Fischer-Dieskau was taken in 2005, when he was eighty. The collection was issued around that time, though most of the recordings on it were made earlier.



Naturally I told friends about this treasure, but it was too late for them to share in it: within a few days the download price for this album had changed to $127 on the US site and GBP129.85 on the English one.

I suppose the first price must have been a mistake on Apple's part and I hope that hundreds took advantage of it before it was corrected. In a quarter of a century of playing with computers (only PCs until recently) I have had some miserable times arising from the greed and arrogance of hardware and software vendors, and it is pleasant to think that on this occasion one of them has given me a happy experience, even if it was by accident.

The end of the greengrocer

Dr Tim Leunig, professor in economic history at LSE, tells us that the lucky ones among greengrocers forced out of trade by the supermarkets are those who own their stores and can sell them to the new kids on the block.

And who are the newcomers? According to the good professor, small independent shops are being replaced by "small independent aromatherapists, cosmetic surgeons, weight control clinics, makeup artists, reflexologists and sauna parlours."

So that's all right then, our High Streets are not dying as many had feared. You may have to drive out of town for apples or carrots, but right in the centre you can get nice smells and a new nose, or lose a couple of kilos, or have your lipstick applied and your feet massaged, or just work up a nice sweat.

Overdue biography

I see that a book about Fazab al-Basry Hashid is being published in the autumn. I was surprised to find that not only is this apparently the first time that anything about him will be published in Europe, but that there does not seem to be a reference to him anywhere on the internet. Many other major Sufi writers and poets, such as Jalalud'din Rumi, Al-Ghazali and Mahmud Shabistari are widely known, but there is nothing to be found about Fazab al-Basry, although in some ways he was one of the most eminent.

I have always admired his writing, though I have only read translated snippets of it in anthologies. He was of course a mystic, though what kind of a mystic he was remains a mystery. However, he may have been one of the most influential men in the Islamic world in the early part of the thirteenth century, and it will be fascinating to learn the story of his life—though in fact very little is known about him—when the biography comes out. I suppose I shall have to buy it, for I doubt if it will be serialised in any of the Sunday papers.

No money changes hands

There are few activities made possible by the internet which are without question salutary; many of the things we can do on line are, or can become, corrupting, addictive, expensive, dangerous, mind-rotting or just a complete waste of time.

However, it is difficult to see any downside in a website which helps us to give away things we no longer want to people who can make some use of them. Groups such as Free-Cycle encourage this and make it easy; this concept originated in Tucson, Arizona; there are now 459 groups in the UK, moderated by volunteers, with over a million members.

You just register with your local group, choosing an ID and a password (or using a Yahoo! one) and giving a few details, none of which are published. Then you offer things you want to get rid of or ask for things you want; anyone interested in an entry is put in touch with you and then it is up to you to tell them where and when they can collect what you offered, or arrange to go and pick up what they have.

I have made use of my local Free-Cycle group six times in recent weeks, offering a 14" TV, a laser printer, a cast iron firebasket, a scanner, a 19" CRT monitor and four years' back numbers of Private Eye. In every case someone contacted me within a few hours, then called and went away away cheerfully lugging their acquisition. It's nice to give people pleasure while at the same time getting rid of things you no longer need.

Scorpion de Rooftrouser...

...was one of the twelve red-bearded dwarfs whose exploits were chronicled by the journalist Beachcomber. The de Rooftrouser family were well known, of course, but none of its other members had such an unusual first name.

Here are twenty-five more uncommon (to an English ear) first names; each one has been borne by at least one (fairly) famous person. Twenty-two of them are dead and the other three never lived.

How many surnames can you add?

1 Richmal
2 Rudyard
3 Keir
4 Dwight
5 Willkie
6 Denholm
7 Endeavour
8 Praise-God
9 Pelham
10 Canaan
11 Dodie
12 Molonay
13 Millard
14 Plantagenet
15 Linus
16 Maya
17 DeForest
18 Kublai
19 Django
20 Brigham
21 Aphra
22 Branwell
23 Orde
24 Alma
25 Gerard

Answers HERE

Higgins and Eliza

Last week I saw Peter Hall’s production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic and realised that I had never seen the play on the stage before, though I had always vaguely imagined that I had, having read it at school and seen the 1938 Asquith/Howard film and, of course, My Fair Lady.

One line struck me as odd, and with the help of the invaluable Gutenberg Project I was able to check that I had not misheard it (and at the same time read Shaw’s preface and appendix). It came towards the end of the scene after the ball, when Eliza says she is leaving:

…ELIZA. All I want to know is whether anything belongs to me. My own clothes were burnt.
HIGGINS. But what does it matter? Why need you start bothering about that in the middle of the night?
LIZA. I want to know what I may take away with me. I don't want to be accused of stealing.
HIGGINS [now deeply wounded] Stealing! You shouldn't have said that, Eliza. That shows a want of feeling.
LIZA. I'm sorry. I'm only a common ignorant girl; and in my station I have to be careful. There can't be any feelings between the like of you and the like of me. Please will you tell me what belongs to me and what doesn't?
HIGGINS [very sulky] You may take the whole damned houseful if you like. Except the jewels. They're hired. Will that satisfy you? [He turns on his heel and is about to go in extreme dudgeon.]
LIZA [drinking in his emotion like nectar, and nagging him to provoke a further supply] Stop, please. [She takes off her jewels.] Will you take these to your room and keep them safe? I don't want to run the risk of their being missing.
HIGGINS [furious] Hand them over. [She puts them into his hands.] If these belonged to me instead of to the jeweller, I'd ram them down your ungrateful throat. [He perfunctorily thrusts them into his pockets, unconsciously decorating himself with the protruding ends of the chains.]
LIZA [taking a ring off] This ring isn't the jeweller's: it's the one you bought me in Brighton. I don't want it now.

Brighton? BRIGHTON? Taking a girl to Brighton or to its neighbouring resort (...people will say we’re in Hove...), and buying her a ring there, has an implication quite foreign to everything that is clear about the relationship between Higgins and Eliza; there is no reference anywhere in the play to them going there with Colonel Pickering for a jolly day at the races. Was this carelessness on Shaw’s part, or was the old devil just dropping a mischievous hint to confuse us?

[Oh, another line in that scene has Eliza saying “..the like of you and the like of me…”. The likes, surely?]

If the stage directions are clear and comprehensive—as Shaw’s usually are—reading the text of a play can tell you just how closely a production is following the playwright’s intentions. The very last scene in Pygmalion goes like this:

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. [She goes to the door.]
MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.
HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something.] Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman's. You can choose the colour. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible.]
LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out.]
MRS. HIGGINS. I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I'll buy you the tie and gloves.
HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don't bother. She'll buy ‘em all right enough. Good-bye.
[They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.]

As the curtain falls on the Peter Hall production, Higgins (the excellent Tim Pigott-Smith), alone on the stage, allows the self-satisfaction to drain from his face, and at the last second his expression suggests that he has realised that Eliza is lost to him. Although Shaw didn’t call for this, it is a fair interpretation, for in the appendix he explains exactly why Eliza will marry Freddy (and tells us what their future life will be like), and it is not unlikely that Higgins  finally worked this out.

From the archives (4)

More recycled posts from 2004:

business
Tastes in advertising have changed

theatre
Mummy and Daddy aren't a bit worried

personal
A life of sin and Morse code keeps you young

medicine
Fancy a new face?

people
How to be really disagreeable

USA
Five American belts explained for non-Americans