Funeral, and Seamus Heaney

When I was a young person I had a boyfriend, and we went about with his friends, who as a gang were punky and interested in drugs. One of the gang, big Pete, took too many drugs (really a lot) and developed schizophrenia, and after that he was not able to settle to anything. He was also an alcoholic. And after many years, he died of cirrhosis of the liver and heart failure, and yesterday our gang was reunited for his funeral. There were tears; he died young. Pete had written a great many poems (surprisingly religious) and he wanted them published, so we are going to choose some and put them on a website. I am to be helped in this by a Prof of Literature, who did not take too many drugs, thank the Lord.

So yesterday we were protagonists in our own story, and then I came home and in that context we are not the protagonists but really, the scene painters, the back-room boys who pay the tax, the catering people, whilst the young people take the stage; a strange adjustment.

Seamus Heaney has died; I was moved to send one of his poems to my exbf because it was about grief, and he replied that they were fellows of the same college, Magdalene, Cambridge. He did not say anything about the poem, which was a disappointment, but that's not his subject. I am sad that I know only one person who is intelligently interested in poetry.

He was a great poet and Irishman. Very much loved. He wrote this one for his grandsons.

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon

A kite flew above Sunday,

A tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I’d tied the bows of newspaper

Along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark

And now it dragged as if the bellied string

Were a wet rope hauled upon

To lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul

Is about the weight of a snipe

Yet the soul at anchor there,

The string that sags and ascends,

Weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

And this line goes useless

Take it in your two hands, boys, and feel

The strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

And take the strain.

Overly geeky

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, admitted in 2009 that the infuriating double forward slashes that precede every website address were unnecessary and, in hindsight, a mistake. "Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //," he told a symposium. "I could have designed it not to have the //."

Old News

My peculiar hobby is cutting things out of newspapers.  I suppose this is a bit like grasping at life as it speeds by, and I don't want to just forget it all, and neither do I want to be ignorant of the world I live in. I have just finished filing these articles.

Category 1 Interesting books - reviews of books I might read
A Possible Life - Faulks
How Much is enough? - Skidelsky
Ancient light - Banville
The Better Angels of Our Nature - Pinker
The Betrayal - Dunmore

et almost infinitum!

Category 2 Current concerns
Junk culture, hacking, antidepressants - do they work? - the growing gender imbalance (Germaine Greer said it would not make women more valuable, only increase sex-trafficking and prostitution), scrap metal stealing, Portugal experiments with decriminalising possession of small amounts of drugs, the great Pacific Garbage patch (a pool of rubbish twice the size of Texas), John Lewis management, how many nuclear warheads there are in the world, the Catholic silence on child abuse, the Royal Mail and how badly it has been managed, tsunamis, running the railways, GM food , libraries, plastic surgery, our dependence on money from Qatar, how to look after people with dementia - a model from the Netherlands, the hunger of the North Koreans, the death of the newspaper, CCTV nation, the scramble for territory in the arctic, is Fairtrade a good idea?, microgeneration of domestic power, the effects of porn.

Category 3 Health and Science.
Roman Britain was warmer, drinking chocolate is good for the memory, domestic cats kill billions of items of wildlife a year, pop music is louder than it used to be, should surgeons take Modafinil?, Calpol is linked to asthma, sperm can be grown in a lab, college kids have less empathy than they used to have, the Nazis gave Pervatin to their troops - now called crystal meth., older parents are happier, aspirin is good for you but not everyone should take it all the time, premmy babies are more likely to develop autism.

Category 4 Politics
A surprising number of my concerns turn out to be American. Working conditions in the iPad factory in China, middle-class tax breaks, slackers, sexual harassment by top men (like Arnie), oil pipeline, Obama loves covert operations, Guantanamo Bay, social mobility is difficult in the US, the corrupt Putin regime, Germany's economy based on mini-jobs; its efforts to boost the fertility rate. In the UK: abortion of girl babies in the UK, fixing the rate of UK gilts so yields are low thus robbing savers of decent interest, Climategate - scientists deleting unwelcome data, Britain's children are unhappy and wallowing in materialism.

Category 5
Human interest stories.

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Andy Leeks again

I am now on volume 3 of Andy Leeks' commuter diary and gosh, volume 3 is interesting. I can't remember anything that happened in Volume 2. I do remember that it repeated too much of volume 1, especially the musings on Christmas and New Year. But in Volume 3 Andy's wife gets pregnant! They already have a little girl who's clearly adorable, being bright and imaginative, and looking after her takes up much of Andy's spare time. Now they are getting excited about number 2, and then Andy starts to feel a bit down, so he books a holiday to Cyprus; they can go during term time, lucky things. Then, after some difficulties with making the hire car go, they get to the villa and Andy falls down the stairs! Oh my word. Is he terribly injured? I believe there are more shocks in store.

Andy is not unlike Charles Pooter (the Diary of a Nobody) in that his concerns are not large, he rails against the bags-on-wheels movement, for example. Why not just carry your briefcase as people always have? The non-functioning lift is also a target of his sarcasm. However, his jokes are entirely intentional, funny, and often at his own expense, and small snobberies aren't his thing either, so maybe he is entirely unlike Charles Pooter.

See previous post A short, funny read

A good day - London

Stan was at a loose end yesterday and I thought we should go and do something. So we agreed to go to London. Caught train easily, walked over the Hungerford bridge, down escalators to Villiers Street. I really like Villiers street. Went into Gordon's Wine bar which is in a cellar and sells nothing but wine. Obviously I really wanted beer but behind the bar, instead of a range of drinks, there are 4 large barrels of sherry. I do love sherry. We had a glass of water and a schooner of amontillado, which we shared, it was not any more expensive than wine and was really lovely. We sat in a candlelit thieves' den and listened to the trains rumbling. This cellar is quite an institution; Hillaire Belloc and GK Chesterton also drank there. This fact is kind of wasted on Stan as he knows nothing about literature: but he likes looking at people and is brilliant at sizing them up.

For food we went to the Pret near St Martin in the Fields. Then to the National Portrait Gall for the annual portrait exhibition. This is so interesting - so many styles of portraiture - I liked the mass portrait of Yorkshire Hell's angels, the triple portrait of the magician (Drummond Money-Coutts, whose stage presence came across, and the movements of his hands)  and some of the more classically-styled portraits. The winning picture was plain boring. The second placed one was better but not particularly memorable. The one on the poster was brilliant - a man looking in a series of mirrors.

Walked a very strange route to the Tate on Millbank which is being "done up". A good selection of pictures is still on view and we just enjoyed having a good appreciation and discussion of the pictures that took our attention. I tend to be interested most in our wonderful history of crazy artists, and their remarkable visions, e.g. Blake, Dadd, and Spencer. I particularly love Spencer's conviction that heaven is actually Cookham. I sometimes think so myself.

Probably Heaven

Cain and Abel

Dadd, fairyland

Stanley Spencer - the resurrection in Cookham churchyard

A strange film installation was in the main rooms with the most bizarre creepy noises as the soundtrack. Apparently the creepy noises were made by the motor of the camera with which the piece was filmed. It was very interesting. Stan was riveted as he loves film.

He said: "can we go to that little DVD shop?" he meant the shop in the British film Institute. The cinemas and bars and restaurant seemed to have escaped his notice. I like the BFI and one day I will go there and see everything I have missed.

On the way back we tried to take some artistic pictures with Stan's phone, as after looking at art everything looks like art, even the paint on the road.

Edward Snowden's actions

have had some effect.

First of all, his account of government snooping has changed the climate of public opinion and aroused more sympathy for Bradley Manning, whose sentence was (perhaps as a result) not as harsh as originally suggested. But 35 years, according to his lawyer, is longer than child molesters and murderers get. I hope by the time his case comes up for parole the fury has died down.

Secondly, President Obama has said that he will review the huge trawl for information that the NSA is performing at present .Read report here. (The more I read about President Obama the more it seems to me that he is confusing legitimate opposition with security threat. Someone who criticized him on Twitter had a visit from the security services. This is all very McCarthy. There is a libertarian tradition in the US but Obama views it as an enemy.)

Thirdly, the British government has made itself look a bit silly by sending the secret service to the Guardian offices to smash up a couple of computers. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/20/guardian-editor-alan-rusbridger-nsa

The British government has made a huge mistake by detaining David Miranda - a journalist not a terrorist, indirectly connected to the Snowden information, and now there is a real row about what the terrorist act is for. All this is shining a light on the darkest, most shameful and most bullying tactics of the government, and I hope it leads to some constraints on their agents' activities. If Nick Clegg condones it his party should sack him. It's against everything liberals stand for.

Stan's collection, Adaptation, Gran Torino

My son collects films - DVDs and Blu-ray. He knows that he doesn't need to do this; he knows that soon nobody will need a hard copy because they can just stream them, but he wants to own the artifacts that he likes the most, and these things are films.

Adaptation is a study in absurdity in that it stops being an examination of how hard it is to create art and becomes a study in how easy it is to undermine a high purpose by adopting a formula, and it is very funny. Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep play their roles brilliantly, and as for Chris Cooper, you don't know he's acting. I think it should have won a screenwriting Oscar for being original and clever, but having said that, having the writer (Charlie Kaufman) up there talking to himself is not new. Alan Bennett has also done it. He wrote about writing about a tricky subject in "The Lady in the Van", and dramatised his arguments with himself, presumably he had the joy of casting someone who could imitate himself. In this film you have a writer who's writing about another writer's account of her interactions and feelings with a rough diamond orchid stealer. It sounds crazy and in the end it is. But when the writer has got stuck in a hole, his twin brother Donald (who doesn't exist) is there with his worldly advice and by using all the non -respectable schlocky writing tricks in the book, he pulls it all together.

I can't tell you how not interested I am in cars. I had no idea that a Gran Torino is a car. But I gave ten minutes to a film of that name and then I had to watch the whole thing. It's great - a beautifully constructed film with a strong story. The car has practically nothing to do with it - it's a film about poverty of opportunity in the immigrant community, gang culture, and an angry old boy who doesn't give a shit, and then learns to give a shit. It says on the box it's a must-see, and I do agree, for a change. Clint Eastwood; what a guy.

Postscript: The Donald Kaufman character says something wonderful about love. He loved a girl and she laughed at him behind his back. He said he knew she laughed but he loved her and she couldn't take that away from him. Charlie says "but she thought you were pathetic." Donald says "That was her business. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago."

That's for all of us who loved in vain, someone who laughed at us.

Language by Daniel Something

I was reading this book and enjoying it very much for all sorts of reasons when I lost it. I may have left it behind in the Youth Hostel. It is annoying. However, I have found my iPod and may be very happy about that. (It was the daughter's fault all along). The thing about possessions is how wretched you feel when you lose them.

Acquisitions

How strange it is that people can become famous simply for collecting possessions.

For example, Charles Wade, who gave Snowshill Manor to the National Trust. I recommend this page for his life story. He inherited a large amount of money and after fighting in World War I, spent it on a Tudor Manor, which was almost completely decayed. He renovated and extended the house and then started to fill it with beautiful and interesting things, which he bought from house sales and markets in the UK. He liked good craftmanship, evidenced in such things as model sailing ships and particularly, inlaid cabinets. The house contains wonderful examples of these oriental cabinets, and also, interesting early machinery such as spinning wheels, a weaving loom, model farm carts from all counties, a complete set of early bicycles including a hobby horse, and medieval musical instruments.

Quite by chance, he collected about 20 wonderful sets of Samurai armour; each one must be unique.

But nothing is labelled, so you have to ask the volunteers about everything, and there is no context for anything. This is because Charles Wade made the demand of the National Trust that it all be shown as he wanted it kept, and he didn't want it to be like a museum. No. He wanted it personalised. so when you see his collection, you see something of Charles Wade, and thus he achieves immortality.

Another example of this phenomenon is Isabella Stewart Gardener, whose museum in Boston (Massachusetts)  has to be seen to be believed. Another is the Burrell Collection in Edinburgh.

A doorway at the Burrell, very fine, completely out of context.

I'm not sure that the glory of owning things should be a reason for immortality. It is very sad that we don't know who designed and made the superb firescreen inlaid with shell that is in one of the rooms downstairs in Snowshill Manor. That person lived an obscure life, perhaps suffered hardship, and left something amazing behind. Same of the person who carved, out of a single piece of ivory, 3 intricately patterned balls that turn inside each other. How was that done?

I was uncertain about Charles Wade. On one level he was very eccentric. On another, the longing to be famous, to be immortal in human terms, is the most mundane of ambitions.

However, his Manor House gave us a reason to go to a most beautiful part of the country which we would not have otherwise done, and the views are lovely. the dreaming orchard has pears and apples and also hazelnuts ripening, the hum of bees comes from the flowers, and there are doves cooing away in the dovecot.

Post script: During our lives, most of us acquire things we want to pass down, or we have an heirloom from someone with a story attached to it. In our small way, we are all hoping for immortality by way of possessions. My mum wants to give me some small silver items. I said OK, I would have them. But really, my ambition is to have just the things we use and no other things.

On the other hand, my son wants to dress up for a fancy dress party, and suddenly I feel that we should have a larger stock of dressing up clothes. Where is grandpa's Samurai warrior suit when you need it, eh?