Cliff Morgan

There was no one like Cliff Morgan playing at outside half. I first saw him when he played for the Welsh schoolboys team. I had heard something about him, how fast he was off the mark, how he could jink his way through gaps "that weren't there" but none of this talk prepared me for the real thing. At first he just passed the ball to his centres, not showing any style or brilliance, a mere pivot. Then suddenly he was off, breaking away from his team, cutting his way through the opposition. This he did many times. In short he was virtually unstoppable.
But the big games were ahead of him: playing for Cardiff after Billy Cleaver who was very popular (in East Wales that is, not so in the West where they always complained about there being too many players from Cardiff in the Welsh team) and one wondered if he would cope - he wasn't very big, stocky yes but meat for wing forwards maybe? Not at all. He was brilliant. Only once can I recall him having as poor match; that was against a strong South African team with wing forwards the size of trucks and fast with it. One was a man called Van Wyck who gave Morgan a torrid time, hitting him hard every time he received the ball. While he survived the crunching tackles -he was a stocky ball of muscle who could have survived a house falling on him - he changed his game to a kicking game and, in his own words, lost the match. He had his revenge in South Africa playing for the Lions when he left Van Wyck standing a few times, one to score himself.
He worked on the next bench to me when we did Intermediate Chemistry. He was always surrounded by lecturers and other fans and I don't recall exchanging any conversation with him. Outside lectures one day I had to pleasure of meeting him, introduced by a mutual friend, and he was a joy to know, talking without ceasing, his languagfe not without the odd - ok, the many - expletives.
The BBC smoothed his rough edges later on and he became a great broadcaster.
When he played his first game for Wales against Ireland, Jackie Kyle, his opposite number, came up to him before the start, put an arm roung his shoulders and said: "Have a wonderful, wonderful game, Cliffie, my boy." Cliff said he never forgot that.
A close friend of his was another Irishman, Tony O'Reilly who, when paying a tribute to him on his death recently, said; "I have often been asked if he would have been any good in the modern game and the answer is yes, certainly, absolutely."

Institutions

Charles Moore, writing in The Daily Telegraph: "From its inception the NHS has been a nationalised industry. All nationalised industries put those who run them first, their trade unions second and their customers nowhere. They are by nature indifferent to human need and so their effect, whatever the intention, is cruel. Until this is acknowledged, nothing much will change."
He has a point but I think his focus on nationalised industries is too narrow: I think what he says applies to pretty well all institutions. After some time, when good intentions start to be eroded by the necessity of maintaining effective efficiency, something happens to the system: it seems that it becomes necessary in the minds of those who run the institutions that efficiency of operation is more important than whatever were the good intentions at the start of the process.
Charles Moore is a Catholic: isn't he aware that the institution of the Roman Catholic Church is too concsious of the mechanism of its own set-up to notice the sinful behaviour of some of its priests as regards their paedophilia, or, if aware, then too anxious to cover up their wrong-doings by moving them to other parishes?
It isn't only nationalised industries which are guilty of these malpractices. The trouble is, I believe, that someone comes along with an idea which seems brilliant - e.g. comprehensive education. It is untried and an experiment but believed to be the right thing to implement. After a while the brilliant idea is found not to work to the degree of satisfaction previously desired but instead of the idea being abandoned, it is made to work. Or an attempt to make it work is operated. Then it seems to work because those operating it think it is working: they operate it for their own benefit because they cannot believe their "brilliant idea|" lacks credibility. Once it appears to be working then everyone is satisfied - except those, the children, who are being so-called educated.

Wine

Rory Sutherland writing in The Spectator a week or so ago maintained that "most wine is actually rubbish". He thought people liked to talk about wine but didn't really know much about it or even like it. What about some wines having astronomical high prices while others are quite cheap: isn't there are difference in the quality? He says: "One winemaker sent the same wine to a competition under three different labels. One was rejected by the judges as 'undrinkable', another won a double gold award".
I have to say I'm in some agreement with Sutherland. In the past twenty years or so of drinking wine, mainly red wine, I have to say I have had only two bottles where I have said: "Mmm, yes, this is very good." One was a Chateau neuf de Pape given to me by a friend, the other I bought for a special occasion in a wine shop in Cardiff - don't remember what it was. Mostly the wine I drink seems much the same. I take no notice of what it says on the bottle - matured in brandy barrels etc - I just drink it. Sometimes it's quite palatable, sometimes just bearable but mostly it's very ordinary with no great 'lift to it except, of course, the lift that comes from the alcohol in it.

Mud

Jeff Nichols, writer and director of the film "Mud", when asked by a reporter on the New York Times what the film was about, replied "It's Sam Peckinpah meets Mark Twain". It isn't. In many reviews Mark Twain is mentioned with particular reference to "Huckleberry Finn" (no other mention of Sam Peckinpah) but the film has only a passing similarity to the novel: it's set in Mississippi, on a river, yes, and is about a boy who makes friends with an outlaw,yes, but it's theme is not of the world of Twain. Again, a critic wrote in today's newspaper, summing up the film with four stars: "Down on the MIssissippi, two boys discover Mud (Matthew McConaughey) in an adventure of the Hucklberry Finn kind".
It's all a bit troubling since this film is of a superior kind to most movies and its story has very little resemblance to Twain's book.
While on the surface it is an adventure - a boy of 14, Ellis, and his friend, Neckbone, meet an odd guy living rough on an island; he has shot a man over a woman and he is being chased by a gang recruited by the dead man's father and brother, two rather frightening people; he's also being chased by the police, in league with the father; the boys decide to help Mud because Ellis feels that Mud's devotion to the woman he loved, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) is so genuine, greater for example than that of his own mother and father who are breaking up etc. - but while it is an adventure, it is also a study of a boy's beginning of an understanding of what adult love is, how chancy and unstable it is: Ellis finds he is surrounded by deceit and game-playing - even Mud's and Juniper's affection is not the deeply held love Ellis felt it was.
Great performance by the boys and by McConaughey.
But the film's too long by at least half an hour. 

Arnold Bax

I bought a book from Amazon recently called "The Symphony"; a set of chapters on great composers of the form: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelsshon, Schumann, Liszt, Franck, Bruckner, Brahms, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius, Vaughan-Williams, Rachmaninov and one other whom I did not expect to see there - Arnold Bax.
The book was first published by Penguin in 1949 which is about the time I first bought it. It was on my shelves for a long time but when I looked a few years ago it had gone, I don't know where. So I decided I needed it again when I recently heard Vaughan-Williams' second symphony, known as "The London". No doubt there are many other books from which I could have obtained the information I needed but I suddenly had a nostalgic desire to look again at this book.
It's very good. It's not written by one person but has different authors for each chapter.
As I say, I did not expect to see Sir Arnold Bax's name there; I can't recall that his name was there but, obviously, since it's the same book, not a revised edition, it must have been.
I didn't even know that he wrote symphonies. Elgar, yes. V-Williams, yes. But not Bax. I knew only one piece by Bax and that I think is his most popular work: Tintagel, a tone poem about a castle on the coast of Cornwall. Can't say I like it much. But I must try out a symphony or two of his - from seven - on Youtube.
His name came to mind last week when I watched David Lean's "Oliver Twist": Bax wrote the incidental music for the film. Jolly good too.

Wagner

Sitting here last evening looking at the blank screen of my computer and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life - as one does when one gets to my age - I felt rather down in the mouth. I needed something to lift my spirits - I had already read On Line Daily Mail but that hadn't helped much, in fact it had done the opposite - when I suddenly had the bright idea to seek on Youtube a certain Wagnerian "number" with the title "Siegfried's Burial March". Now you wouldn't think that that piece of music from "The Ring" would do anything but make my depression even greater than it was. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Try it for yourself - the Klaus Tennstedt's version with The London Philharmonic Orchestra. It is absolutely thrilling, moving and it lifts the spirits as no other work can do. For me at least.
But what can I say about the work better than Thomas Mann in his essay "The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner".
"The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried's funeral cortege no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies on the bier, slain by the pallid forces of darkness - and there are hints in the text to support what we feel in the music: "A wild boar's fury", it says, and : "Behold the cursed boar," says Gunther, pointing to Hagen, "who slew this noble flesh." The words take us back at a stroke to the very earliest picture-dreams of mankind. Tammuz and Adonis, slain by the boar, Osiris and Dionysus, torn asunder to come again as the Crucified One, whose flank must be ripped open by a Roman spear in order that that the world might know Him - all things that ever were and ever shall be, the whole world of beauty sacrificed and murdered by the wintry wrath, all is contained within this single glimpse of myth."

Vaughan-Williams

Sir Thomas Beecham made many a sarcastic remark during his time as conductor of orchestras but none, I think, quite so nasty as the one he made about Ralph Vaughan-Williams's music: words to the effect that while a young man he composed a rather pleasant piece of music when he wrote his Variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis but that "he's been writing the same work ever since".
While this is shear ill will towards a worthy musical craftsman I have to say that there is in it an inkling of truth, not so much that he wrote the same work ever afterwards but that his style is very much that of the early piece. There is something unsatisfying about Vaughan-Williams's compositions, particularly his symphonies.
This week I attended a concert in whch Andrew Davies and the Philharmonia orchestra played his 2nd symphony which I don't think I have ever heard before and was surprised to read that it was one of his most popular works. Now it couldn't have received a betrter performance that that given here since Davies is a great champion of British music ([perhaps it would be more accurate to say "English music" since there is very little Welsh, Scottish or Irish music of a classical/symphonic kind) and the Philhramionia orchestra is one of the best in the world but.... well I was left with a feeling of being somewhat let down. I could see what the composer was doing in introducing snatches of themes but, unlike Sibelius, they did not come together in what I call "the big tune". There were a lot of little intros to tunes but never a culmination into something big, whistle-able, thrilling as in say, Sibelius's 1st and 2nd symphonies.
Maybe Vaughan-Williams worked better with other people tunes as with his variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis or with his Greesleeves with its tune from an original folk tune (though some say Henry 8th wrote it).
One of the problems of coming away from a concert with the snatches of his tunes in your mind is that they stay there for some time. I am still toodle-whodling and humming certain phrases but, like those in the symphony they rarely get anywhere.