Friday Poem

Matthew Parris in The Times today wrote about his irritation with mobile phones and BT's so-called "help line". He ended with a poetic piece of prose in which he envisaged a time after the world had been destroyed by nuclear war - not a very pleasant thought but it brought to mind the famous poem by Edwin Muir which also envisaged the world after "the seven days war that put the earth to sleep", "The Horses".

"Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days' war that put the earth to sleep
Late in the evening the strange horses came....."

Parris concluded his lighter take on the event with this passage:

"When the world ends in a radioactive glow, and as toxic raindrops softly fall and dead telephone wires sing in the nuclear wind, and all human life is gone, then scattered among the debris will lie abandoned mobile telephones, lighting up with lonely pings as BT messages blizzard across their broken screens: "an engineer is working on the fault", "we are still aiming to repair the fault", "thank you for your patience".

I thought I might make it into a "Friday Poem":

When the world has been put to sleep
After the seven years war
And the sky is all a radioactive glow,
And as the toxic raindrops softly fall
And the dead telephone wires
Sing in the nuclear wind,
The strange horses will not come this time
To comfort us,
O no:
Scattered among the debris there will be
Those abandoned mobile phones
Lighting up with lonely pings
And a voice will say:
"An engineer is working on the fault",
"Thank you for your patience",
And "this call's important to us here."

Agatha Christie

The first Agatha Christie novel I read was called (back in the 1950's) "Ten Little Niggers". Of course the title was subsequently changed first to "Ten Little Indians" and then to "And then there were None"; as political correctness became more and more aware of the feelings of various groups so did the title change accordingly.
I thought it a great read. But though I tried other of her novels, I was not able to finish any - except "Murder on the Orient Express" which I thought, a few pages before it ended, I had cracked the solution, only to be proved wrong when I found that all the chief suspects had "done it".
There, I've gone and given away the ending, a cardinal sin for reviewers of books.
But now there must be few readers who don't know the ending of that famous novel - even if they haven't read the book, surely they know the ending from the film.
Charles Moore in his Spectator column committed the cardinal sin of giving away the ending of the new Oscar winner, "Slumdog Millionaire".
Ok it's not so much a sin as a "not very nice thing to do". Now I know the end I don't know if I want to see the film.
After all it's not like seeing "Hamlet" where, though you might have seen it a few times and know the end, you don't go and see it again for the desire to know "who dun it" or "who wun it"; you go because there's great depth in the play and each time you see it then something new is learnt or the poetry seems more magnificent or the character more fascinating. With Who-Dun-It's the ending is what you read it for, the excitement of getting there, trying to work it out on the way.
Go to the corner of the room, Charles Moore and put the dunce's cap on.
I am reminded of what Edmund Wilson wrote after he had read, and reviewed, Agatha Christie's first Poirot novel, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"; "who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" he wrote.

Norway

There was a travel advert in a newspaper saying "Free Air Fares". Except that they only gave you the free flight if you booked their £1303 holiday to Norway. In other words, the holiday actually would have cost about £1700. That's too much for a 12 night holiday in Norway. It's too much for a 20 night holiday in Norway.
There's a piece in the travel section of The Telegraph about Bergen. What a wonderful place it is!
I remember Bergen well. It is the only place I have ever been where the weather changed about five times from one extreme to another in about eight hours. It was bright sunshine one minute, the next was cloudy, then rain, then thunder and lightening then hailstones, then snow.
The article talks about the place in Bergen to meet friends and mentions the Bien Bar. I have to believe him that a bar selling alcohol exists in Nrway but I never found one. We stayed at a quite posh hotel where the price of beer was exorbitant and the price of wine was astronomic. So I asked a young lady at the hotel desk where was there a bar in town? No bar. What about a pub? No pub. Another hotel? A mile away but the prices would be the same.
In Bergen there's a lot of fish and a lot of weather. In Norway there's a lot of weather and a lot of beetroot, cooked as a vegetable and served with most meals. OK there's a lot of waterfalls and fiords but nothing is like you see in colour TV films - everything is grey.
And they don't sell wine or spirits in supermarkets..... End of story.

Simplcity

In his book "Fermat's Last Theorem", Simon Singh writes: "Proof is what lies at the heart of Mathematics and is what marks it out from other sciences. Other sciences have hypotheses that are tested against experimental evidence until they fail or are overtaken by new hypotheses. In mathematics, absolute truth is the goal, and once something is proved, it is proved forever, with no room for change."
That doesn't mean that there is only one proof of a mathematical formula; Pythagoras's Theorem has about 25 proofs I believe.
When I was a practising teacher in a good school in the Rhondda Valley I wrote a proof of a theorem on the blackboard only to be told, by a little genius in the class, that he knew a simpler proof - one of those never-to-be-forgotten moments when you say, through gritted teeth, "perhaps you'd like to demonstrate your simpler proof on the board" while hoping he will either get it wrong or disappear in a cloud of smoke (he got it right).
Paul Johnson in The Spectator a few weeks ago argued that the simplest explanation for the creation of the universe was that a God had performed it. Certainly scientists and mathematicians go for the simplest explanations of phenomena: the world is round; the world goes round the sun in a circular (well, nearly circular) orbit. Johnson accuses Darwinians of complexity rather than simplicity.
Surely a simpler "explanation" of the origin of the universe is one that (I learn this evening from a programme on Christianty) Aristotle held: it wasn't created at all - it's always been here!
On the subject of simplicity in philosophy Bertrand Russell has something illuminating (and funny) to say: "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

Othello

Charles Spencer, drama critic of The Daily Telegraph heaps praise galore on Lenny Henry as Othello; he was surprised that someone who has not been known for straight acting parts should perform this role with such aplomb. I am not surprised: he looks good for the part, his voice is clear and distictive, and he is black.
The only black actor to play Othello in the distant past was, as far as I know, Paul Robson (I believe he played it with Charles Laughton as Iago - what a double act!); he is supposed to have done a definitive account of the part.
But I feel that it is a pity that there is now an unwritten law about who plays Othello: he has first and foremost to be black. I recall, years ago when a black actor took on the role, many years after Robson, that a "brains trust" of reviewers felt that this surely would be the last time a white actor would be allowed to perform the role. It is as if that to offer it to a white actor is in some way insulting to black actors. Probably it brings to mind Al Jolson and the Black and White Minstrels and with it connotations of Uncle Tomism, even racism.
The trouble is there are not many great black actors capable of taking on the role of Othello and, indeed, I am glad to hear that Lenny Henry performs it so successfully; but it is great pity that our greatest actors, most of whom are white, are not allowed to take on one of the great tragic Shakespearean roles. This, to my mind, does smack of racism.
Anyway, Othello wasn't black but a Moore. Chiefly though he was a man. A man with phsychological problems. A man whom jealousy drives mad. To suggest that this is the prerogative of the black man is, well, just plain stupid and, indeed, racist.

Mendelssohn

It was the 200 th. anniversary of Mendelssohn's birth on Feb 3rd this year. According to Alex Ross, writing in The New Yorker, and quoting Goethe, he was far greater a young composer than Mozart; Goethe knew them both and he avered that Mozart developed in his late teens into a great composer whereas Mendelssohn was great from aged ten or eleven onwards.
But Mendelssohn's talent waned after his early twenties whereas Mozart's matured.
I always think of Mendelssohn in the same category as Saint-Saens: some of their music is too light to be taken seriously. And, in Mendelssohn's case in particular, some of his music is too deadly serious to be taken ... well, seriously. His oratorios are deadly dull at times. Maybe he was trying to shake off his Jewish nature by forcing a Christian message across which, though he became a Christian, he didn't really believe. Maybe he became a Christian for the sake of being able to carry on working - as did Mahler too (possibly).
I am going soon to a concert where a performance of Saint-Saen's Piano Concerto Number 2 will be given. It's a wonderful virtuoso piece for the piano, lively lovely melodies, a thoroughly enjoyable work, exciting to witness..... And yet? Is it a piece one can take seriously as art or is it a piece that is a sort of show-off party piece?
Saint-Saens wanted desperately to be accepted as a great composer but, in spite of his brilliance, never was. I doubt if Mendelssohn was as ambitious: he produced works that pleased but he didn't strive to please; and he produced works that were magnificent but he didn't strive to make them so. He didn't have to, they seemed to have come as naturally from him as breathing.

Buying rounds

A leader in The Times today mentions the unfortunate Japanese Foreign Minister seemingly drunk at a meeting of G7 and goes on to point out that some of the great people have liked to take a jar (or two, or three....). Churchill is of course mentioned - "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me" - as well as Rabelais - "I drink no more than a sponge". Then it points to those others who did not indulge: Hitler, Khomeine, Osama bin Laden, none of whom "had a reputation for getting their round in."
I have known quite a few people who were reluctant to buy a round of drinks. One such did everything he could to avoid buying his round. He would let you go into the pub first, linger at the door while you got to the bar and bought a round. Then someone else in the group would buy a round. When it came to his turn it would be too late ("must get back lads"). Another day you'd get to the door first, open it and let him in first. He'd go straight to the toilet. He was up to every ruse known to the con man.
Earlier in life when I was a smoker I came across a few smokers who never seemed to have a full packet in their pockets. You'd share your packet with the group you were with and most of them would reciprocate. Not the wily one; when it came to his turn he'd produce a packet from his pocket with one cigarette in it. And he did it all the time! Why didn't someone tell him, accuse him, give him one on the jaw? Because this sort of bloke has a kind of innocence you don't like to offend.
One day - I remember it well - we were, about ten of us, sitting playing cards when he, the one who always had a packet of one cigarette, mistakenly pulled out the wrong packet (we didn't realise it until then that he always carried two packets with him). This "wrong packet" contained the most expensive cigarettes (Passing Cloud if I recall correctly). Everybody took one. I saw one of the party who never smoked take one. We all sat there playing cards in a cloud of smoke while he, the wily one, must have felt like crying.

Love songs

I wrote a musical about fifteen years ago - yes, a full length, two act musical. It has, of course, never been performed though it got close a few years ago when a composer named Dan Jones wrote a score for it. We still live in hope.
I wrote the story, the book and all the lyrics, most of them funny. But I had to write a love song and found it the most difficult thing to do. How was it that Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Gershwin and others could manage it so well? What's the trick?
Maybe it's using ordinary, everyday language in a way that heightens it....
Here's a great one:

"If they asked me, I could write a book
About the way you walk and whisper and look.
I could write a preface
On how we met
So the world would never forget.

And the simple secret of the plot
Is just to tell you that I love you a lot,
And the world discovers
As my book ends
How to make two lovers
Of friends."

How can a dwarfish, quite ugly, predatory gay drunk like Lorenz Hart write such wonderful lines?
Another lyricist not as well known as Hart could turn out some wonderful poetic lines of love:
Mack Gordon, "the greatest impressionistic sketcher" according to Mark Stein.

"It seems like only yesterday
A small cafe, a crowded floor
And as we dance the night away
I hear you say forevermore
And then the song became a sigh
Forevermore became goodbye."

As they say on Masterchef "Wow!"

Sabotage

Apparently cauliflower is now not so popular as brocolli, the reason being that according to the health brigade brocolli being green has more something or other in it that is beneficial... blah, blah, blah.
But maybe it really has something to do with the growing of cauliflowers, because, though I did some gardening some years back, I was never successful with cauliflowers. In fact I only ever grew one that was a success; that is, one that had a good, solid, large head. All the others were either yellowish or had small heads or had heads that sprayed out like a bunch of flowers.
Anyway, I grew this big cauliflower in my allotment and one day I went there, armed with knife, to bring home the delightful vegetable only to find that someone had already been there before me and pinched it. It had been done with the expertise of a.... well, another gardener; it had been sliced off at its base with what I guessed was some kind of machette.
When I mentioned this to another gardener, suggesting that some kids had probably stolen it, he said "O no, one of our fellow allotmenters."
I was not completely convinced of this, feeling that surely gardeners have a code of behaviour etc etc etc. - until I was talking one day to an expert gardener in his splendid front garden (he always won city prizes for the best garden) when I saw a smudge-like, burnt patch about 18 inches in diameter on his magnificent lawn.
"Kids?" I asked.
"O no," he said. "A fellow competitor."

Mr Men's Brother

It was at a weekend course on creative writing that the creator of Mr Men's brother turned up as a student. Everyone knew him immediately, not because they knew him as Roger Hargreaves' brother but because he was a well known ITV newsreader. I can't recall his first name. He was a friendly person who genuinely wanted advice on the writing of a novel. That there was no one there in tutorial capacity who had written a published novel did not unduly upset him; there was however a very successful crime novelist, one Roger Ormerod, author of about fifty novels, to help him.
I had a couple of chats with him. He did not mention his brother, neither did I, but he did mention a former colleague of his who had become a successful novelist of I believe (I've not read his works) spy fiction - Gerald Seymore.
He said that no one at ITV had imagines that Seymour would be a success in the genre he had chosen. The reason? No one thought he was that good a writer.
So I told him that I had read somewhere that Leo Tolstoy had a fairly close relative who fancied his chances as a novelist but had been told by a publisher that "he wrote too well".
I believe that. You can write too well to be a good story teller. You can be too conscious of style and not conscius enough of the pace of a story to make it readable.
Whether or not Roger Hargreaves' brother took my advice I don't know but I did have the impression at that time that he was rather too good a stylist to be as successful as his colleague Gerald Seymore.

Dancing

Austen Healey, that great English rugby player ("yes he is" - "no he isn't" - "O yes he is" - "he's useless" etc.), was interviewed recently and stated that whilst he was super fit when he played rugby, he had never achieved such super-super fitness until he entered the competition on TV called Strictly Come Dancing. Dancing he said was something else.
I believe him though my own experience of dancing was that executed not very well, usually on Saturday nights, at the local "hop" where you moved round the floor to waltzes and foxtrots holding comely young females in your arms - it was what some wit once described as "the vertical expression of a horizontal desire". It was not a very athletic physical act.
Now Morris Dancing looks to me like something really physical. The picking up of the legs at peculiar angles and the swinging of sticks, crack, crack, crack on others' sticks and all the rest of what seems to be the silliest mode of ballet ever devised by man ( are there women involved in it?).
Now people want to see the back of it. They don't want to ban it, just to see it go away. It's as if people of the modern generation are ashamed of it, like bear-baiting or cock-fighting or throwing the cricket ball (yes, I can assure you that that was once a feature of school sports).
But there still are the stalwarts who want to keep doing it, a piece of English heritage, sort of. Indeed, a film has just been made about a team of Morris Dancers and it has proved to be popular up North.
So come on Austen Healey, show us you can do this for the sake of olde England. Do what you did for the English rugby team when they were watchable ("Yes he did" - "no he didn't" etc.)
Sir Thomas Beecham had a word to say on the subject, as he did on most; he said "one should try everything once in this world - except incense and Morris Dancing."

Watches

What did Bernard Madoff do with all those billions he had fraudilently accrued? Well, one of the things he bought was watches. Not one but many. And not your Timex (if they still exist) but the famous Rolex. Heaps of them.
What I want to know is why anyone would want a Rolex watch - OK, people like the look of them or like finding out what time it on Mars, or like having them to show off to others. But why more than one? You can only look at one at a moment of time; if you look at two the times you see will be different because..... wait for it.... time has passed.
And why heaps of them?
There's something about rich people I don't really understand; they don't seem to be rich to be able to enjoy themsleves more by going on expensive holidays, say, or picking up expensive hookers, say - they seem to enjoy being rich because they are rich.
My son bought some rather expensive after shave and with it came a free watch which he gave to me because I then didn't have one. It was battery operated. I think I changed the battery three times in its lifetime. Which was over ten years.
I can just visualise Bernard Madoff in his prison cell looking at his Rolex watch and seeing what time it is on Mars. And probably wishing he was there.

Updike

One of my favourite short stories, probably my favourite, is "The Country Husband" by John Cheever but coming up close behind it is "The Other Woman" by John Updike. Both are stories of distressed people living in modern America; but while the central character in the Cheever story is the distressed if not neurotic one, the distressed person in the Updike story is not the central character, the husband who discovers that his wife is having an affair with a bloke who lives nearby; no, it's the wife of that man who suffers most. It's a brilliant story because it highlights a tragedy without looking at it from a tragic viewpoint - the main character is actually pleased that his wife has left him.
I shouldn't pretend to be knowledgeable about John Updike bnecause I have only read two complete works by him (apart from some poems and essays): two short stories; I have never got on with his novels. Someone writing in The Spectator recently suggested that he was a greater short story writer than a novelist because he did not have the space to show off his love of words, that he had to pare things down as the short story form requires.
I never was able to read John O'Hara's most famous novel, "Appointment in Samarra" (some critic whom O'Hara swore he was going to beat up, came up with the phrase "disappoinment in O'Hara" for his next novel) but picked up one of his less well known novels - can't recall the title - and thoroughly enjoyed it. So this is what I am going to do with John Updike: I'm going to try one of his less well known works and see if I'll like it better than "Couples" which I couldn't read at all. I have ordered from the local library a novel called "Memories of the Ford administration". With a title like that it surely has to be good. What publisher would accept it if it was not good because he certainly wouldn't sell it with that title alone.

Conversation with my dentist

"Morning."
"Take a seat."
"Thanks."
I am, in an instant, horizontal. Then stuff is put in my mouth.
"What do you think of the Welsh team? he asks.
"Yurbish," I reply.
Some work is done.
"You need a crown and maybe a new plate," he says.
"My mouth is not in a very good state," I say.
He nods.
"Not my fault," I say.
Eyebrows raised.
"I blame my parents," I say.
He smiles.
"They never took me to the dentist unless it was absolutely necessary."
He nods and sucks his teeth, evidently not in full agreement.
"I blame them," I say.
"You must remember," he says, "that in those days (i.e. my days, not his) people had their milk teeth which dropped out, followed by their so-called permanent teeth which went bad and were pulled out, followed by false teeth. It was a way of life."
"Thanks," I say. "And the Welsh team is still rubbish."
That conversation took place a few years ago when the Welsh team was rubbish.