Dad was himself

Dad was himself. Even old, he was naturally inclined to hope for good things. Now confused, he cried when he found he couldn't go home. He could never go home again; he couldn't climb the stairs, two flights; how could he have climbed them a few weeks ago, after his last hospital stay? But he had, on his bandaged feet, on his legs that were losing their skin, he had done it through dogged determination. But a week later, was carried back again to hospital.

He and Sue lived two floors us in a flat where everything fitted together like a nest of oddments, collapsed together in a general impression of browns, smelling of cigarette smoke, the papers on the desk never moving, the books on the shelves never moving, just a small area of kitchen still a workspace, just a small current flowing through the still, dark pool of age.

So Mrs T thinks of her father, about to die, and about packing up her mother's flat - all the bedroom first, then on to the bathroom - chuck - chuck - chuck - she would put the toiletries in the sack - but the clothes go to Help the Aged, where they give her a Gift Aid number.

One morning she has a John Lennon song in her head - "I'm only Sleeping" so seductively beautiful -

"But he was depressed" Mrs T thinks. "He didn't want to get up, or think, or make a plan. He could hardly even finish the song - it just repeated itself and lasted only three minutes."

Sleeping too much was a sign of depression, as surely as sleeping too little. And sleep was a foretaste of death, too much sleep a flirtation with death.

Mrs T has wanted to say these things to her father, agonised on the brink:

"Death is but a sleep and a forgetting". "Our little lives are ended with a sleep."

She had not had the opportunity to say these things. And he would have mocked her anyway because he wasn't ready to "sleep". Mrs T had wanted to help, but everybody has to die by themselves and there is nothing to say, in many cases, nothing at all that will help.

Mrs T carried "I'm Only Sleeping" around in her head and its unhappiness hurt her. She found it on YouTube and then went on to other recordings of John Lennon, and there was the cure; it turned out to be - Early Lennon. "It won't be long Yeah! " "This Boy" "I call Your Name". It was a roughness about his voice that did it - a fierceness to his nature - he sounded like a friend to Mrs T.

Too many books

Yesterday I felt ill. 2 sleepless  nights, pouring rain, upset stomach, and the feeling that the day was meant to be fun and productive, and that I was failing myself by wasting my time. Also, the news from Paris was too much to take in, and yet I felt I should work to take it in and feel something about it.

But today I did feel tearful about Paris, as the sound of young people singing French songs from Trafalgar Square got to me. The victims of the attacks were mainly young people who generally feel no animosity to others on the grounds of their origins, whose creed is that of John Lennon's Imagine. "No religion... the brotherhood of man..." All their suppositions about the world are crawling away after a massacre. (I was reminded of this song because some French guy played it on a piano in Paris as a response to the killings.)

I would like to do something in my lessons this week to mark our feelings at this massacre, and I don't know what.

I have too many books on the go. One of the books is very embarrassing, a collection of Art Spiegelman "comix" drawn after the 9/11 atrocities. I had to pay quite a bit for them (2nd hand of course) and I haven't looked at them properly yet, but ended up hiding them under F's bed as it seemed that they were Old Hat and what's more a luxurious Old Hat. But now it seems to me that this event is part of the same thing as the 9/11 enormity, and the horror of City Terrorism is, maybe, only just starting.

(The trouble with John Lennon's Imagine, is his casual waving away of religion - "no religion too"..."no god above us". If you truly depend on the thought of your God being there for you and your being a part of God's being, then John's dreams, and his words, are horrific. Like saying: "imagine you are only a gorilla, or a pig". You need to be religious to understand why it's not a positive idea. John dreams of one world on his own terms, which are essentially communist. Daesh dreams of one world on terms that are the polar opposite. John's words seem wise to our young people but they are actually incendiary.)

A Hard Day's Night

This is the first Beatles film, and I have seen it a number of times. It was on again this week so I had another look at it (it's only an hour and a half long) and I found it interesting enough to find out about it.

Fun with mirrors: John decides he doesn't look a bit like himself: and a great shot of a light reflector too!

I found out that the Beatles did not only suggest the director, Richard Lester, but also the writer. The director had made a short, goonish film with Spike Milligan called the Running, jumping and lying down film, and they liked the style, which is included in the sequence where the Beatles escape from the theatre down the fire escape and start running around a field. It is choreographed but seems like a game, has visual jokes based on confounding expectations. In this scene, Lester took John's place as John was off in London signing his book, In his own Write. After this the style was always included in the Monkees TV Series, which I was more familiar with BEFORE I saw this film, but the film was the origin of the style.

The Beatles also chose the writer, Alun Owen. The screenplay was written by Alun Owen, who was chosen because the Beatles were familiar with his play No Trams to Lime Street, and he had shown an aptitude for Liverpudlian dialogue. McCartney commented, "Alun hung around with us and was careful to try and put words in our mouths that he might've heard us speak, so I thought he did a very good script."^[6] Owen spent several days with the group, who told him their lives were like "a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room"; the character of Paul's grandfather refers to this in the dialogue.^[7] Owen wrote the script from the viewpoint that the Beatles had become prisoners of their own fame, their schedule of performances and studio work having become punishing. The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

Because the Beatles weren't actors, the script is full of one-liners. This makes the film fast and snappy too. However, although John and Paul don't seem to act, George has a scene with a marketing man who is trying to sell merchandise to teens in which he seems to remain his own man, and Ringo just seems to be enjoying himself - has a great scene chatting to a boy by the Thames in Twickenham (which every reviewer mistakes for a canal).

The writer seems to have noticed that John was the one with the bolshie personality; although it is Ringo who runs away it is John who has their manager saying "You're a swine, John Lennon" at the end of the movie. You notice that John looks older than the others: he looks as though he is just outgrowing the idea of a rock band in suits and ties, he is probably fed up with not being able to wear glasses - he was very short-sighted, he is happiest singing his own music but eventually he will take a dislike to the whole idea of show business. The wonder is that he stayed with it for so long.

The writer picked up on the fact that John and Paul had Irish ancestry - so he makes Paul's grandfather Irish and in a scene at the police station, the latter recites a list of crimes and tortures the English had practised on the Irish. It's within a Keystone Kops kind of scenario where the police ask if their arrestees want a cup of tea before they all go running around ineffectually, so it's like finding a hand grenade in a bag of tennis balls. If you want to be reminded of realpolitik it's right there. And there is also a scene right in front of a bombed out church - this is the early 60s and the UK was still too poor to deal with bomb sites - and every shop and pub in this film full of snapshots, indicates poverty and hand to mouth living. Men had authoritarian voices and barked orders, indicating that they had done national service and were used to hierarchy. This is how the country really was, and this is what the Beatles, and the rest of us, were escaping from.

There's more fun with mirrors in this scene.

An impossible shot

and more fun with mirrors here