Cider with Roadies - Stuart Maconie

Stuart isn't just a keen student of modern music who has become an encyclopaedia of the line-up of the Whatsit band and what their albums were called and when released and which were the best tracks, although you feel he can probably keep up conversations like that for a long, long time. No. He is also comfortably rooted in time and place and wonderful at self-irony. He also has a wider cultural knowledge (note the title), having understood how art arises out of political contexts for his English degree, he applies the same insights to the history of pop/rock. He also taught in a community college in one of the dodgy areas of Liverpool - he taught scallies and single mums English Lit and Sociology. (I'm right there with you Stuart but I bet you were brilliant at it, unlike me.) Because he has had a life outside the world of the NME (a sharply-written music paper called the New Musical Express) and the BBC (where he works now as a presenter) he has an enviable everyman quality. We know in theory that all folks are the same, be they into Wham! and McFly or Kraftwerk and Chic, or Morrissey and Bloc Party, whether gay or straight or northern or southern, but for Stuart I think folks are really pretty much folks, even though he knows exactly how crazy they can be. He is brilliant on the radio, a true enthusiast, can cheerfully talk to anyone, loves a joke and pub banter.

I would recommend this book to anyone over 35 who has ever been a music fan and queued up excitedly for a gig. I especially recommend it to anyone the age of Stuart, who must have been born in 1960. If you were born in or around that year and you spent all, most, or much of your time listening to music, grab a copy and enjoy reading the story of your own life. I haven't been listening to music for a while and I have forgotten that it adds a thoughtful quality to life. I am surprised that I can live without it but I can.

The only down side to this book is that I found it addictive. I wanted it to finish before it did because the narrative gets lost at the end (it's a memoir) and goes all generalised (hotels. planes.), but I just had to finish it. He was great company.

(I even shared the student experiences by reading it to my son, and it cheered him up a lot. Yeah, it's grim being a student and living in a squalid mess. Even Stuart felt down at times.)

Sir John Betjeman

You would never think that Sir John B could become a fashionable enthusiasm. He is such a parochial poet, stuck to his narrow island, Victorian churches, London, Cornwall, his class consciousness that always prompted him, out of good manners, to be good company; to talk, to share, to be sweet. And yet Suggs has chosen him on Cultural Exchange, and Jarvis Cocker once said he was listening to Betjeman on his ipod. You listen to Betjeman's voice to be comforted and charmed, rocked by the steady rhythm and inevitable rhymes, but also to be moved by the subtleties of emotion, the message of the huge Cornwall seas roaring and breaking, and to come face to face with fear of death or faith in Christianity - one of my favourites is called Before the Anaesthetic. There is something of the English Hymnal and the Book of Common Prayer about Betjeman's work, something that we have in the backs of our minds as part of the common culture and the dimly-remembered shared relationship with our English God, which these days only the Queen seems to fully comprehend.

But there are also the feelings that people develop for places - the love of home, of some small corner of this little island. I think this poem is little-celebrated but it reminds me of my hut on the island.

Eunice

With her latest roses happily encumbered
Tunbridge Wells Central takes her from the night,
Sweet second bloomings frost has faintly umbered
and some double dahlias waxy red and white.

Shut again till April stands her little hutment
Peeping over daisies Michaelmas and mauve
Lock'd is the Elsan in its brick abutment
Lock'd the little pantry, dead the little stove.

Keys with Mr Groombridge, but nobody will take them
To her lonely cottage by the lonely oak,
Potatoes in the garden but nobody to bake them,
Fungus in the living room and water in the coke.

I can see her waiting on the chilly Sunday
For the five forty (twenty minutes late)
One of many hundreds to dread the coming Monday
To fight with influenza and battle with her weight

Tweed coat and skirt that with such anticipation
On a merry spring time a friend had trimm'd with fur
Now the friend is married and, oh desolation,
Married to the man who might have married her.

High in Onslow Gardens where the soot flakes settle
An empty flat is waiting her struggle up the stair
And when she puts the wireless on, the heater and the kettle
It's cream and green and cosy, but home is never there.

Home's here in Kent and how many morning coffees
And hurried little lunch times of planning will be spent
Through the busy months of typing in the office
Until the days are warm enough to take her back to Kent.

Betjeman did sometimes go abroad - Vienna, perhaps? - and felt very singular, as we see in the following poem.

In the Public Gardens

In the Public Gardens,
To the airs of Strauss,
Eingang we're in love again
When ausgang we were aus.

The waltz was played, the songs were sung,
The night resolved our fears;
From bunchy boughs the lime trees hung
their gold electroliers.

Among the loud Americans
Zwei Englander were we,
You so white and frail and pale
And me so deeply me;

I bought for you a dark red rose,
I saw your grey-green eyes,
As high above the floodlights,
The true moon sailed the skies.

In the Public Gardens,
Ended things begin;
Ausgang we were out of love
Und eingang we are in.

Lucky me, I have a recording of Betjeman reading these poems and you can't get them on Youtube. They sound better than you would guess from reading them inwardly.

A great pleasure - Cultural Exchange

Is the feature on Front Row called Cultural Exchange where famous personalities talk about a work of art which has inspired them. I always love to hear Mary Beard enthusing about the ancient goings on which she is so comfortable with, and I love to hear Will Self's voice - he could make anything sound fascinating, and I love Diana Athill and Germaine Greer - all the right people have been able to contribute - even the wonderful Anne Tyler!!! and today I was at home and able to hear a part of a reading of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler which made me think - I am going to read that one again.

All Anne Tyler's books have got a point to them, it may be about the family dynamic being worked out over time, or it may be about the contribution that women who don't work (or work part time and informally) make to society, it may be about  the way you really can't escape your own personality wherever you go, even if you try to make your like work out differently (Ladder of Years), it maybe the fact that a marriage might not work, and end, but still continue in some shadowy way (The Amateur Marriage) but there is always something to take away from her novels, and maybe something funny, true and ridiculous to make you laugh along the way. On Cultural Exchange she contributed an old photograph. You can see it on the Radio 4 website and you can see how a person with some imagination (Anne has loads) would get a lot out of it.

Anne Tyler rarely gives interviews - I expect she thinks they are a waste of time - but she did a good one in the Guardian a year ago, and you can see from the comments how people love her writing but not in an uncritical way - we are disappointed with her occasional bland and twee novels. She is usually not afraid to confront the evil that men do - think of the beginning of the Accidental Tourist, the image of the innocent young boy being shot and killed in a MacDonald's. Oh, and she is popular with men, and Nick Hornby is a fan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/13/anne-tyler-interview

Half term

Like all teachers I suppose, at this time of year, I have a pile of exam practice papers to mark, and I am loath to get on with them because I feel I need a break, in spite of the fact that it has been raining all day. So I have not done anything workwise today except, I hope, get my sts onto the admin list for the exam and reassure, by email, student A that student B has not been complaining about him/her. Student B is just awful. He/she falls out with everyone else in the class and has been running a bitching campaign against me - I think not out of animosity but out of boredom and possibly jealousy and frustration. Naturally I feel for student A because I myself have been through exactly the same feelings of self-doubt and being undermined. Some people (like student B) are clever but in a bad way, getting other people to pass on their poisonous messages. So for two weeks I have had the stress of the mock inspection, then a big confidence crash involving the class I see most often, and a big struggle to get up and be positive again.

The person I confided in, apart from my family, is Ginny, who is a volunteer in one of the classes, and is 80 years old. She is gorgeous in a white-haired, crinkly-skinned way, and an ex-teacher herself. She is a self-taught musician who talks about doing "gigs". Both of my volunteers are lovely and encouraging, but Ginny said, when it comes to teaching we all have our own style (mine is a quiet style) and you are never going to please everyone. You can only do your best! And I just need to make sure I am doing my best, and not falling behind the game.

I need adrenaline to teach, usually, and all those surges and falls of adrenaline make me terribly tired, so today I recovered, but ate far too much sugary stuff, which is another drug to make up for feeling flat and down. Now I am drinking a really nice French red wine.

The L-shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks

Published in 1960. But really, it's a classic. The writing is strong and tough and pulls you in to the grimy, parochial post-war world that is always being beautifully televised now - The Hour comes to mind.

The protagonist is a pregnant, confused, 27-year-old, who goes on an emotional and physical adventure that's just as exciting as taking a camel to Timbuktu, but it all happens in the backstreets of Fulham. She starts out as a prejudiced and narrow suburban girl who doesn't realise how much she's engaged in fighting with Daddy, and she finds her feet and becomes someone else... She learns she's not so great and that those people she feels superior to are the best people to know when you're in a mess. It's an every day miracle, like a bulb coming up and producing a tulip, studied carefully. It's a book to save a life. I shall press it upon my daughter.

...and I went and waited in the hall [of the hospital] , which was ablaze with the Matisse colours of Christmas decorations. Two enormous red paper bells hung from the centre of the ceiling, and from these radiated countless paper-chain ellipses dripping with silver icicles. It was all overdone, like the decorations in the ward, but even while I was having a superior little mental scoff, they were making me feel obscurely uneasy and near to tears....Why, of all times of the year, did it have to be Christmas? It wasn't just a thing you could ignore, and being alone at it was to combine the worst elements of being alone at any other time...

London fogs; writers used to get a lot of mileage out of these: they don't happen any more.

the fog seemed to close in and the bus was forced to nose its way cautiously along in first gear. The journey went on and on - before long we were travelling at a walking pace, and I and the few other passengers were anxiously clearing the condensation from the windows and peering into the murk in an effort to see where we were. Passing a street-light came to seem quite an event; one watched their brave little sulphurous smudges receding with a feeling akin to despair, as if we might never find another.

No bees

I haven't seen a single bee this year. I don't think I saw any last year either. On the radio, Bob Flowerdew said we need to get out there with little paint brushes and do our own pollinating, which I did today, but it was too late. The business parts of the apple blossom seemed to be all dried up. However, the ants were busy walking in and out of the blossom and so was a nice green spider.

Post script:, 6th October I have a great many apples. Lovely red sweet ones, but small, even though I took a lot off the tree a few months ago. There were in fact many pollinators in the garden, mainly bumble bees, and I have started to take an interest in them. See further posts about pollinators.

Marriage is a bag which can be stretched in many ways without breaking

One thing that was very admirable about the Bloomsbury group was their determination to cast aside Victorian hypocrisy and be open about their relationships, rather than covert. Perhaps the bravest was Vanessa Bell. She loved Duncan Grant, who was homosexual, so she left her husband and went to live with him and managed to have a child with him; over the years making space for the more passionate relationships he had with a succession of men. She wanted to love honestly and passionately and knew there was no room for a locked-in, watertight commitment. It wasn't an easy or self-indulgent way of life because sharing is hard and demanding, but love survived even though lovers came and went.

I know a woman who was in a very long-standing relationship with a married man and had his child, and he visited and provided for the child. Now there was a wife, and she knew about this, but the marriage survived.  I knew another woman who made the same choice, to have a child with a man she loved, although he stayed with his wife and visited his number 2 family only occasionally. If you read any family story there is very often some instance of illegitimate children and the father having two families. Very interesting. So the advice columns tell you what a healthy relationship in a healthy marriage is, but there are plenty that survive infidelity and, really, polygamy, without collapsing, and in a way, isn't that worth celebrating too?

Women sometimes have 2 partners at once, although this is more hidden, to save the feelings of one of the men. 

One film that made an impression on me is called Pleasantville, with Toby Maguire. It’s a film about an American telly programme where the citizens of 1950s Pleasantville live idealised lives in black and white. Everything is perfect in Pleasantville, orderly and neighbourly, but grey. But when passion comes along the citizens change into pink-coloured people. The mother of the perfect TV family is deeply ashamed that she has turned coloured because of her secret passion for the artistic man who owns the town Diner . Her son (Toby Maguire) helps her to cover her face in grey make up until she looks “normal” again. But the Diner man shows her a painting that makes her cry, and because of the tears he sees that her face is pink under the make-up, and she turns her face away in shame. But he says “That’s beautiful” and he helps her to take all the make up off again. He celebrates her by painting her in lovely bright pinks and blues and making love, and of course he turns coloured himself.

Many aspects of life change in Pleasantville; there is violence because the people are afraid of the fact that people can change. And the message of the film seems to be that life is not nice or tidy and it’s certainly not perfect, but it is dangerous and difficult and beautiful, and we have to deal with that.

In the film the 'mum' character leaves her dull husband because she loves the other man. But the husband  is heart-broken, because he loves her very much in his own way, and she too loves him in a way. So the three of them sit down together and try to work something out. Maybe they can find a way to share the perfect wife. After all, laws and traditions only work as far as they work. Sometimes we need to find a more imaginative solution, and what is really interesting is that people seem to have done so, perhaps always, in their underhand, ad hoc way, although I really know back as far as Edwardian England, and what went on then was truly revolutionary.

post script: Vanessa Bell did not tell her daughter that her father was Duncan Grant, allowing her to believe that she was Clive Bell's child until she was 18, which was, of course, a mistake. Honesty has to go all the way, and must start with the children.

The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

What an excellent title!

The meaning of Everything is an account of the compilation of a truly great piece of work: the Oxford English Dictionary, from its inception in 1858 to its completion in 1928; a fascinating account of how such an extraordinarily difficult and ambitious task was accomplished and something about the men and women who collaborated on it.

The first great task was to decide the parameters of the work. Words of every era were to be included, through Chaucer’s Middle English and Shakespeare’s Early Modern English through the consequent proliferation of words to the present day. Not only was a definition to be given of all the words in the English language, but a history of that word, with quotations, to show different shades of meaning changing over periods of time.

How to find readers to contribute all the quotations needed for comparison by the editors and sub-editors? Furnivall, the keen but disorganised first editor, successfully enlisted volunteers between flirtations with young women and teaching them to scull on the Tideway. A rowing club is named after him.
The worthy gentlemen and ladies who volunteered were assigned books, or whole authors to read, and responded with bundles and bundles of slips, containing headword, quotation and reference.

When James Murray took over the editorship from Furnivall he was passed an enormous pile of slips that Furnivall had stacked in his hallway. Unfortunately Furnivall had lost a great many more. Murray found a dead rat in one sack of slips, and a live mouse with her family in another. Furnivall had lost his address book, so he had lost track of many sub-editors, some of whom had died or moved, leaving behind piles of slips.

“The letter H was missing in its entirety, as was the slightly less important Q and Pa. The slips for G were very nearly burned with the household rubbish when one Mrs Wilkes turned out the house in the wake of her husband’s death."

James Murray worked on the OED for 35 years.

At first he worked in Primrose Hill, and caused a scriptorium (office containing all the slips in pigeon holes) to be built in his garden. Eventually he needed to move to Oxford, where another scriptorium was built, also in his garden, of corrugated iron, slightly buried to hide it from the neighbours. Murray saw a great deal more research was needed. He sent out an appeal for more volunteers to fill the gaps in the reading and especially, instances of “ordinary” words. At the peak of their labours, 1,000 slips were arriving at the scriptorium every day.

Murray wore a long white beard, and in spite of the stresses of his job, a serene and amused expression in his eyes. He and his wife Ada had eleven very intelligent and successful children, all of whom worked in the scriptorium for their pocket money. Murray was particularly kind to one of his contributors, an American doctor whom he discovered to be an inmate of Broadmoor mental hospital - he had murdered a London workman during a schizophrenic attack.

Murray died of cancer of the prostate in 1915, and the work was completed in the same style as the one he had set out.

The story of the dictionary is a very interesting one. These are some of the highlights, but the entire book is a delight to read, being very well-written. It is a remarkable book.

Actually I read this book 6 years ago, and I am at present reading its predecessor, the Surgeon of Crowthorne, which enlarges on the contribution made by Dr W Minor, of Broadmoor. Poor man -  he was tortured by his own mind - his nightly terrors caused him to commit his crime, and he might never have lost his sanity if he had not been a doctor in the American civil war.

In his old age, his sexual nightmares beyond endurance, he cut off his penis. It seemed like a remedy, but sadly although interestingly, the fantasies continued to torture him just as much.

Crash, part 2

I felt terrible this morning and I couldn't think what to do with my class this afternoon. But although they were bored to start with, I branched off into something that really took their attention because they didn't know it, (gerund or infinitive) and it seemed to answer some questions for them. So teaching them grammar, which I am not really meant to do but I squeeze it in when it seems opportune, is actually very worthwhile. It also introduces other topics for conversation.

I was also pleased that, last minute, I had made a good decision about which way to take the lesson. They were drifting off into boredom but I pulled them back again in the nick of time.

Crash

It is the third week of term and I have been working hard and steadily, but today I feel it has all caught up with me and I feel so tired!, And I find myself thinking about the students. what is it like to be a Thai bride? what is it like to be an Estonian care worker? are they treated fairly? Some of my students are unemployed, past middle age, and are getting depressed. The faces come into my mind one after another.

I saw a programme about the NHS last night and the GP who was featured was an absolute star. She saw so many patients in a day - more than 40, without losing her professional manner or her judgment. I simply couldn't do that day after day. The NHS is full of workhorses like that who keep going even when the people they see are pretty hopeless. They care. there was also a wonderful middle aged nurse who tested the homeless for TB, taking the mobile X-ray unit wherever the homeless gather, and seeing all the saddest cases, but cheerfully asking what kind of noxious substances they'd been taking and giving out pairs of clean socks. She was exactly like the midwives in Call the Midwife, but older and wiser.

what a strange society we are, some so strong and some so unable to cope.