Jargon

I was once at a teacher's union meeting where a man got to his feet and spoke for some five minutes and, though he sounded highly intelligent, used words that seemed perfectly OK, I must say I did not understand a single sentence - I understood separate words but when they were strung together I could not fathom what he was saying.
Martin Vander Meyer, in an article in which he speaks (intelligently, cogently) about the dreadful council tax writes that at a meeting he attended there was a debate about 'regional biodiversity strategy' (?). Someone said it "has a major role to play in contributing to the development of the Integrated Regional Strategy, as conservation of biodiversity is a core pillar of sustainable development." That's good to know, he said with an exclamation mark attached.
It's crazy: when committees are formed a certain kind of language develops or, rather, evolves that is full of the sort of jargon only members of the committee comprehend.
A long time ago I attended a weekend course (get together more like) on Film in Education; one of the leading lights of the course was a man from the magazine "Screen", maybe its editor. Whenever he spoke I made it my aim to try to understand what he was saying, but not once was I satisfied. He spoke in a jargon that, probably, other "Screen" people would have understood but I didn't. Individual words I knew (most of them) but strung together they were, to me meaningless.
I had, I felt, been duped into attending this conference thinking it had to do with Film in Education whereas what it turned out to be was an effort to introduce Film Study into the GCSE (then O level) syllabus. They had invited a man from a government department to come and speak to them and listen to their arguments. He came, dressed in a suit with stiff colar and tie - he came, I felt, straight out of an Ealing comedy depicting a government minister. His face was pale, humourless and composed like a doctor's as he listened to the arguments (including one from our "Screen" rep whose contribution, of course I did not follow) and when everyone had finished he spoke. It was almost beautiful. Calmly, logically, as if working on a specimen that needed a thorough examination, he cut all the arguments to pieces and after he had done so, he left, placing his government trillby firmly on his head and saying goodbye to the stunned audience.
I have never beheld such a thorough demolition of what had seemed (when I could follow them) sensible points of view, leaving them scattered to the air like so much chaff. He spoke words that anyone could have understood - anyone!. It wasn't jargon, it wasn't even government inspired jargon, it was plain speaking like Fowler urges us to speak.

Weston Super Mare

Richard Morrison, writing in The Times a week or so ago, specially mentioned Weston Super Mare as a dreadful holiday resort. I was there today and I felt he'd got it all wrong. His brief, I felt, was to look at seaside resorts through the jaundiced eyes of someone who wanted them to be something other than what they were.
I was surprised today how many people were there along the promenade and in the town. I have never seen so many cars collected in one town before today. All the restaurants and cafes were bustling with trade. Kids were in great number on the long sandy beach, some were bathing - which is often difficult since the tide goes way out seemingly for miles. Donkey rides were popular and ice cream was so popular that one had to queue for a lonmg time to buy one. Yes, I even saw candy floss for sale.
In short, this is a place where people can enjoy an old fashioned type of holiday.
I was determined to do three things: walk the promenade (we rode it in a motorised train); have a fish and chip meal (the best plaice and chip meal I have had in years); eat an ice-cream cornet (alas I didn't wish to queue so missed out on that treat).
I must say today was a perfect summer's day; Weston Super Mare on a wet day is, I have to say, close to what Richard Morrison's feeling for it was in his article.

Chekov

Are Chekov's plays tragedies or comedies? When he wrote "The Cherry Orchard" he told Stanislavski, the play's director, that he had written a comedy. Stanislavski, however, decided that it was a tragedy and performed it that way.
I always regard them as comedies but nothing like comedies as we know them from music hall acts to Noel Coward's upper class musings on life while they're doing not very much in the way of work. (Chekov's characters too are quite lazy and now I come to think of it, having recently seen "Hay Fever", there are certain similarities in that the main female actor in the Coward play is very like Madame Ranevsky in "The Cherry Orchard"). One of the problems directors get with Chekov is that sometimes they decide to play him for laughs and end up with a Russian version of a Brian Rix farce; another is that if they play it as tragedy the characters take on the moods of people at a funeral, moaaning about life and death.
There is a way of doing Chekov as serious and comic. I think this is by making the characters play their parts for real, as serious as they possibly could be - then the laughs or, rather, chuckles come. For the characters do moan and whine a lot but they do so in an absurd way.
I once saw a production of "The Seagull" directed by Tony Richardson with his then wife Vanessa Redgrave in it and it was a laugh from beginning to end.
Yet in "The Cherry Orchard" the family has to leave their cherished land and live in near poverty, they have to give up their lovely cherry orchard and live in the city and they have to bear the fact that their former serf, Lopahkin, has purchased it from them and intends to profit from the sale by building blocks of apartments there. What could be more dismal if not tragic? Well, it isn't. Anything but. Probably it has to do with Chekov being such a great artist that one feels great excitment while watching the play and this feeling cheers the intellect.
I have booked to see "The Cherry Orchard" in July with Ethan Hawke in it. He must surely be going to play Lopahkin. Now I have to admit you don't laugh at Lopahkin, you kind of feel sorry for him yet admire his newfound ambition. Hawke will perform that role to perfection I think.

Priestley

What a wonderful playwright J.B.Priestley is. Just seen the now pretty famous and much travelled Stephen Daltry version of his play "The Inspector Calls" and it is very good. But I would have preferred not to have had the rather tricksy set which seemed designed more to give the special effects people satisfaction than anyone else. I think it is one of those plays that needs to be in a closed room where the people, as it were, can't escape their torments.
It is, of course, one of Priestley's "time plays"; I have never understood what the philosophy behind this term means - nor do I want to thank you. But whatever it is, it does not interfere with the dramatic action which flows easily and grippingly along: one doesn't need to know what his time notions were because it can be viewed as a straight forward realistic play.
It does hold together perfectly I think and carries a superb punch directed at the upper middle classes and their neglect of those who have not their priveliges.
Priestley used to say that he made more money from his plays than from his novels since the novels are dated and disappear from the public attention but the plays go on and on. It's certainly true of "The Inspector Calls". The others work well too: "Dangerous Corner"; "Time and the Conways" and "I have been here before".
I seem to be getting to like Priestley more now that he has long since been dead than before when he was very much alive, writing articles making radio broadcasts, writing novels, plays and histories; I always felt there was something artificial about his Northern folksiness, now I'm getting to like it if not close to admiring it.
One of his essays was included in a book of essays I had to study in school a long time ago; it was called "T' Match"; I never thought it compared with the others in the book but I think now that I was a bit of an intellectual snob then. Now I'd like to read it again. Must look it up somewhere.

Real people in fiction

I have just seen the film "The Last King of Scotland" which features Idi Amin (played well by Forest Whitaker). But the main character in the film is a Scottish doctor who goes to Uganda to help and to have a good time. Did the person really exist? I don't think he did. We'd surely have heard the news of what happened to him there - pretty horrible stuff - and how he escaped to tell the story of the brutal regime.
So while I enjoyed the film, liked the acting, the setting in Africa, the various characters and their way of life, I was continually up against the feeling I always have in such dramas - I ask myself: "If he isn't a real person then what else in the film is untrue?"
I felt this when I saw a film about the four Irishmen who were unjustly imprisoned for years after being accused of bombing a city in England: the main character was in the same prison as his father.... But he never really was. So, I ask myself: "Should I believe any of this, is any of it true?"
Apparently the newish film "Hunger", about Bobby Sands, has similar incidents that are not true; so, again: "Can I believe any of it?"
The trouble is it's not fiction where I don't have to believe but where I suspend my disbelief; In these cases you can''t suspend your disbelief because they are telling you not to, but to believe.

Exams

Children are up to their necks in exams now, struggling to remember things that will be all too soon forgotten when the exam is over, trying to solve equations that they will never have to do again, writing essays on subjects they find deeply boring and looking forward to that time when they can throw off the shackles of school and feel free again.
George Bernard Shaw who did not want his plays to be studied in schools (though after his death, they were) wrote about education: "I am firmly persuaded that every unnatural activity of the brain is as mischievious as every unnatural activity of the body, and that pressing people to learn things they do not want to know is as unwholesome and disastrous as feeding them on sawdust."
The father of friend of mine many years ago used to tell of a well-known medical student who could never pass his exams to become a doctor: he failed year after year until the medical faculty decided it was time to let him through; so they passed him on his written exams but he still had the viva to do. He sat there before the examiners to answer questions on medicine and the body. "Right then, Roger," the chairman of the group said, placing a bone on the table, "what is that?" "A bone," said Roger. "Yes, but what bone is it?" "Look," said Roger, "it's a degree I want not bloody honours."

Poetry Dirge

How many times have I heard poets reading their own poems sound as if they are giving a sermon at a funeral: the dirge-like quality of their performance incurs, in the audience, if there is one, an almost somnambulistic feeling; you hear someone murmer "Mmm," or a thoughtful "Mmm yes, er..."
Jule Styne said something potent about the writing of lyrics that, I feel, could apply to the work of many contemporary poets: "Too many writers write self-pity". Where are the light-hearted lyricists of old, the gutsy story-tellers, the rhymers?
Rhyming now is, it seems, infra dig. One editor of a small magazine (and I'm not surprised it's small) said she welcomes poetry sent to her as long it didn't rhyme.
People like to hear rhymes, especially in humourous poems. Maybe it's another reason for the nails in the coffin of modern poetry: it's out of touch (like Parliament!) with ordinary people.

Wilfred Lawson

Just seen a good programme about George Frederick Handel on BBC2; made me think of a film made back in the fifties or sixties on Handel's life which starred Wilfred Lawson as the great composer. He played it well, though I thought, before seeing it, that it would be a most unlikely role for Lawson.
I don't think Wilfred Lawson was ever box-office popular, certainly with his rugged, pock-marked face and gritty, ringing voice, not a matinee idol, but he was a very fine actor: he was often referred to as "an actor's actor". I recall Albert Finney on "call my Bluff" many years ago doing a superb impersonation of Lawson's voice while the panel, blindfolded, tried to guess who it was doing the impersonation. They did not get Albert Finney - he was too good at the impersonation.
Apart from the Handel film I can only recall Wilfred Lawson in two other films one of which was "Pygmalion" where he brilliantly played the dustman Doolittle and a horror film which I cannot recall a thing about except that he was in it.
He was much praised as a stage actor and achieved great critical and popular success with his West End performance in Strinberg's "The Father". When I say he had critical success this was what most critics averred. But not Kenneth Tynan. After he gave it a drubbing a woman I knew, Miriam Pleasence, Donald Pleasence's wife, told me she approached Tynan in a bar one evening and proceeded to give him a dressing down for his criticism of Wilfred Lawson; Tynan gave her some excuse about his having to leave the theatre early or some such thing.
I must try to get hold of a copy of the Handel film and see if it is as good as I thought when I saw it as a young man.

Henry Morgan

A while ago I was wondering if anyone read Steinbeck these days, then wanted to know when he lived etc. (1902 - 1968) so looked him up in Wickipedia and discovered that his first novel was called "Cup of Gold" which was set in the 17th Century and featured the Welsh pirate, Henry Morgan. The book had to do chiefly with Morgan's attack on Panama.
When I looked up Henry Morgan I discovered that if I had lived when he was alive, he would have been a neighbour of mine since he was born in Llanrumney, close to where I live now. I don't think I'd have liked him as a neighbour he being one of the most ruthless of pirates. Of course, like a lot of men with violent pasts, he "reformed" and was eventually knighted and sent to the Carribean where he became governor of Jamaica.
There has always been a lot of hearty, laddish, great-guy admiration for this thoroughly callous man and there is, I feel, a little of that tone of affection if not admiration in a poem by John Masefield called "Captain Stratton's Fancy":

Oh some are fond of red wine and some are fond of white,
And some are all for dancing by the pale moonlight;
But rum alone's the tipple and the heart's delight
Of the old, bold mate of Henry Morgan's.

Alan Bennett

I have never thought of Alan Bennett as a great playwright but often an entertaining one. I am possibly the only person in the civilised world who didn't much like "The History Boys" or the one about George the Second. I like him more than I like his plays. He's the "ordinary guy" who likes the idea of being ordinary but actually isn't - and I think it worries him.
George Melly told of how Bennett enacted a conversation he had heard between two women on a bus:
"What did the doctor say to your feet, Doris," and she replied "He said they'd not be much use to me in future. Not as feet."
He loves people, especially old women, but I doubt if he's a good mixer; he likes to watch and listen.
His sermon in "Beyond the Fringe" is a masterpiece; when you hear it you wonder why he never did much more of that sort of satire. I once mentioned that "sermon" to a Catholic priest who instantly proceeded to recite to me the whole of it - which I found rather surprising in that it is, after all, a satire on his profession or, should I say, "calling".
A conversation I heard a while ago would, I think, have appealed to Alan Bennett: two thirtyish women waiting for their kids at a school gate:
"I've told her.... I've said to her 'Janet, you're just not positive enough.' Know what I mean? She's just not positive." Pause for thought. "The thing is she's negative."
With some comic writers, like Woody Allen for example, if the story line is going one way and a joke is likely to take it another, they'll go for the joke. I am thinking of a play Alan Bennett wrote a long time ago in which the following superfluous exchange occurred:
Psychiatrist to wife: "How's your sex life these days?"
Wife: "Huh! He's asleep before his teeth reach the bottom of the glass."
He couldn't resist the temptation. But, of course, it is irresistible.

Conversations with barbers

I have told before of the barber who came round from behind me to look me in the eyes and say "You actually were a member of the Saint Germaine night club where Sydney Bechet played?" This barber was himself a clarinetist for a local swing band. I don't think Bechet was there the nights I attended but he might have been.
A local barber called himself Andre, French style; he was always ready to converse, eager to know what I was doing these days etc. At that time I had a beard which he trimmed free. "It's like this," he said, "who's to know where sideburns end and a beard starts; people argue that sideburns are not beards, therefore should be considered to be part of the hair on the head. So, for the quiet life, I treat sideburns and beards as 'hair on the head' and don't charge extra."
He told me he often went to London but he didn't stay in hotels; he stayed at Heathrow Airport. "You take your sleeping bag there and bed down for the night; in the morning you get up, shave etc and have breakfast in the cafe." Good idea I thought, may try it sometime. Never did.
A barber close to the centre of the city liked to chat: "what d'you do? Hah! teacher eh? I was never any good in school. Always being caned by the headmaster, the sadist."
"Well you've done well for yourself," I said, "owning this place."
"S'pose so," he said. "Been here before?"
"Yes," I said. "She cut my hair last time, pointing to the barber next to us.
He lowered his voice: "She's not a she, she's a he."

Quotes

Maybe hours, or even days, after someone has told me something, I'll think of a response I should have given, possibly a clever one, possibly a funny one - never at the time.
When I was a college lecturer I was given a choice of being in charge of a small department well away from the new main college buildings or continuing in my capacity as simply "a lecturer". I chose the second since I wanted to go to the new place with the new facilities and where most of the staff were, not to the musty old place way out of town where there were just a few "old hands". A day later I thought of an answer I could have given when my boss asked what I would prefer to do; he added: "Would you like to be a big fish in a small pool or a small fish in a big pool?" Answer: "I can't say I'd like to be fish at all."
Which wouldn't of course have been the politest or, in view of promotion prospects, the most tactful thing to say.
So, in a way, it's best not to think up clever ripostes and say them instantly without thinking the consequences through.
One of the best of these sorts of sayings was made by Whistler, the painter, to Oscar Wilde who said, after Whistler had made some witty remark, "I wish I had said that"; Whistler rejoined "You will Oscar, you will."
Someone was quoting H.L.Mencken yesterday but it wasn't a quote I have seen before. I looked up my Dictionary of Quotations for other Mencken quotes but found none there I had ever seen before. My two favourites of his are: "If you are travelling anywhere in the US by train and you throw an egg out of the window, you'll be sure to hit an evangelist." My other favourite is one I'm not sure Mencken actually said: "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
Though I did have one once: with a crowd of rugby fans in a restaurant, we waited and waited for the bill to arrive until one bright spark said "Let's do a runner". Which we did. OK, it was wrong; but what if I'd stayed behind? I'd have had to pay for the lot!

Plays

After visiting Chichester for their Theatre Festival I've come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of play: those which deal with serious matters and those which don't. "Taking Sides" was in the first category and "Hay Fever" was in the second. That doesn't mean to say that one should scoff at those in the second category for surely one can go to the theatre to just have some fun.
I have seen three or four productions of Noel Coward's "Hay Fever" over the years and I recall laughing aloud in one of them; but this production at Chichester with Diana Rigg did not make me laugh once, not even a chuckle, not even a smile, only a feeling that I could be somewhere else maybe doing some charitable work for the sick or for Africa.... The audience was full of people of a certain age; by that I mean that the majority appeared to be over 70. I felt that they really wished to enjoy the production and though there was some laughter I felt that it was rather forced.
Ronald Harewood's play "Taking Sides" fell into the category of "serious stuff". It dealt with the interrogation of Willhelm Furtwangler, the celebrated conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, who was accused of collaboration with the Nazis during WW2. It was more than just interesting, it was gripping dramatically although one knew the eventual outcome - that he would not be found guilty and that he would be rehabilited to conduct many more concerts. Michael Pennington gave a superb performance as this charismatic but troubled man who argued his corner well though knowing well that he was in a very tricky position morally. Harewood ticked all the boxes in this kind of play where he used all the evidence of research and "taking sides" was a good title because you could never come down on one side or the other - the arguments were so strong on both sides.
At the very end there is a powerful scene where the interrogator, an American major, has to shout to be heard above a recording his assistant has put on of a part of Beethoven's 9th (opening movement) - a striking coup de theatre but one which rather unbalanced it in favour of Furtwangler which I can't believe was Harewood's intention.
Now I will play a recording I have of Beethoven's 5th by Furtwangler and the Berlin Phil: what an opening! Daniel Barenboim has talked about the "raw intensity" of Furtwangler's conducting. He's hit it right on the head, raw intensity it is. So was that passage from the 9th in the play.
I shall also get hold of a copy of "Hay Fever" and read it. Surely it cannot be as dull as the version I saw!