Friday 13 November 2009

PS to 'Isn't noise great?'

Yesterday, I heard a Radio 4 programme by Alastair Campbell waxing lyrical about Jacques Brel. I don't speak French, and although I know Brel's songs are something of an institution in France, it is one form of 'noise' which has never really rattled my cage. There were contributions from a range of French folk who had known Brel, man of whom had worked with him, and they all remembered him with affection. Many commented on his double life: rather conservative and upright paterfamilias in Belgium, where his wife and children lived, and principal shagger about town when living and working in Paris. Fair enough, and it was his many affairs which fueled his romantic songs. But one observation, repeated by several contributors, rather struck me: for all his charm and 'niceness' - 'nice' was one word used to describe Brel - he was 'harsh with his kids'. And that, curiously, makes it very easy for me almost to rule the chap out of court. I say 'almost' because I really can't know the ins and outs of his relationship with his wife and there might be circumstances which justify his 'harshness' although I can't imagine what they might be. But on the face of it, I am not a fan of anyone who is 'harsh' with his or her children, especially when they are young and especially when, otherwise, he finds he makes an effort to charm the pants off the world. Sounds a bit like a self-centred cunt to me.

Thursday 12 November 2009

Schnittke and Scriabin and my fondness for the noise they make.

Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have remarked that ‘the English don’t understand music, but they like the noise it makes’. Before googling that quotation to track down where it had originated, I had assumed it was by some foreigner putting the boot into Old Blighty and its culture. Beecham was a bit of a card, but given that what he said, however true, was not intended to be complimentary, I am rather puzzled by it. However, I didn’t start this entry to write about Beecham, the English or left-handed compliments. I use the quotation as an introduction because it describes my relationship with music almost exactly.
I know little about music except the obvious and trivial things one picks up, especially if, like me, you have been knocking around with a guitar for more than 40 years (and have very little to show for it). I know chords, I know how I should be able to read music (although I can’t actually read music), I know about keys (and, incidentally, I am rather fascinated at how different keys, no one knows quite why, convey different moods). I know that what most people in the West regard as music is but a fraction of the music being made worldwide and I know there is a variety of different scales. When I was 12 and we were living in Berlin, I had a year’s worth of piano tuition but finally gave up because ‘I wanted to play jazz’ - not that, at 12, I had the slightest idea what jazz was. But I don’t ‘understand’ music in the sense others claim or are said to ‘understand’ music.
Once, a little facetiously but also, in a rather conceited fashion because I thought it was rather a good analogy, I asked someone: say you went to a very good restaurant and ate a very good meal. You enjoyed much about the meal, not just the taste of the food, but the texture, how much care had gone into it’s preparation, the service at the restaurant, the company and the wine you drank. Later - that night at home, or a few days later - you might well find yourself recalling the meal and discussing it. But were you to be asked: ‘But did you understand the food?’, you would be rather nonplussed. It would simply not be an appropriate question. Food is eaten and enjoyed, wine is drunk and enjoyed, a good company, service and ambience are also enjoyed and valued. There would seem to be nothing which might be ‘understood’ about any of them in any accepted sense of ‘understood’. (Yes, I know much faux intellectual noise could be made about the elastic character of the notion of ‘understanding’ were this a Guardian or Independent seminar, but it following that line of discussion would only take us down a rather dull alley, so let’s drop that angle sooner rather than later.)
That’s how I feel about music: I don’t ‘understand’ it at all. I can’t even see what there is to understand of even conceive of what there might be to understand. But I very much like and enjoy the noise it makes. And except for mainstream Grand Ole Opry C&W and all that finger-in-the-ear ersatz English folk which was spawned in the late Sixties, I seem to like virtually everything I hear.
Most recently I have become a fan of a chap called Schnittke. I heard a reference to him on Radio 4’s Front Row in which it was said he claimed the Devil had dictated music to him. Intrigued I turned to Spotify, which is very useful in hearing composers, songs or artists you hadn’t heard before, and listened to some. And I like it a great deal.
I am sure it is not, or would not be, to everyone tastes. I don’t ‘understand’ it. But I love ‘the noise it makes’. Try some yourself and see. If you find you do like it, then there’s Scriabin, too, another composer of enjoyable noise you might like to try. If you want to try some ‘noise’ at the jazz/rock end of the scale, listen to some Dave Fiuczynski, a guitarist who is always interesting and enjoyable. And, no, I don’t ‘understand’ a single second of it.
To my list of C&W and finger-in-ear folk (with added vitamin-enriched sincerity) include some, by no no means all, of the mid-19th century Romantic music, of which a little, for these ears, goes one hell of a long way. If there is a spectrum with romanticism at one end and classicism at the over, sign me up with the classicist. For some reason, romanticism reminds me of a lesser well-known saying by Oscar Wilde: ‘Sentimentality is a bank holiday from cynicism.’ Bear that in mind when you next read of how Nazi concentration camp governors used to organise choirs of inmates singing German carols for their children at Christmas.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

60 is looming (and other less trivial matters)

At midnight, in ten days, I shall be 60. Curiously, I don’t care, but I must admit that I can hardly believe it. It seems like only last week that I was 30 or 40 or 50, but suddenly I am the age I once considered to be ‘old’. But I shall play it for all its worth. I shall be entitled to a ‘senior railcard’ which, for example, brings down the cheapest ticket from Exeter St Davids to London Paddington from £12 to £7.90, so I have already bought 12 tickets (six there, six back). What with petrol now costing around £1.06 a litre, the journey by car from home in St Breward to work in London, then back again, would cost £63.50. The journey from St Breward to Exeter and then to London by train then back would cost £31. That’s £32 less, or £1,664 less a year. Guess what I shall be doing.
Question: do all 60-year-olds spend their time celebrating small victories like having discovered a café where the tea is not quite as nice but you get free sugar? I rather fear they do. Shit.
I shall, of course, prepare myself for a welter of platitudes along the lines of 'you're only as old as you feel' and 'good God, man, 60? That's nothing! I'm 79 next birthday and still wipe my own arse!'
I must record, however, that ever since knocking those bloody statins on the head, I feel a lot better than I have for a long time. I have also knocked the Ramipril on the head, and feel rather as I did before my heart attack but before I started feeling exhausted which began a few months before the attack.
I know 'wisdom' dictates that I should 'listen to medical advice' and down as many bloody bills as the pharmaceutical industry can persuade them to prescribe. But I don't want to. I should like to keep my pill-popping to a minimum. I'm sure in time I shall be taking as many as Ann (my stepmother's sister who is now 80) and that my bedside cabinet will slowly transform itself into looking like a branch of Boots the Chemist, but I'll limp over that bridge when I get to it. But I can say that, the bug I had for about two weeks notwithstanding, I feel better now than I have for years. For one thing, I'm hardly drinking (after many years of polishing off at least a bottle or red wine a night on the three nights I was at home) and more or less eat a vegetarian diet, although that is more because I rather like it than for any philosophical reasons.

An interesting book was discussed on Andrew Marr's Start The Week. An Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand, has come up with the idea that the Jews weren't dispersed by the Romans after the revolt in AD70, but that the number of Jews around the world had their origins in people who had converted to Judaism. And he said that, given, of course, that there will have been quite a bit of intermingling in these past 2,000 years, the true descendants of the people who were living in Palestine, Gallili and Judea are the Palestinians. And he made the telling point: who is more entitled to the land there? The people who say they have not lived there for 2,000 years, or the people who have lived there for 1,000? I have probably rather trivialised his account, unfortunately, but what he had to say was interesting and, it must be said, not in the slightest anti-semitic.

Monday 9 November 2009

Blogging, the ontology of blogs and why I would rather keep a commonplace book than write some interminable, boring account of the . . .

A longwinded resume of the cars I have owned and crashed is not of interest to everyone. I realise that, and it also occurred to me that if the word ‘blog’ is derived from ‘web log’, accounts of what happened 20 years ago might, at first, not seem to qualify. Well, in that case I shall stop calling this a blog. I once kept a diary, from the early Eighties until the mid-Nineties, and it was not just an account of my daily life, in fact it was hardly that at all, but more of a commonplace book. The blog performs a similar function, though not quite the same. There’s also the point to be made that there are really no rules on blogging and every blogger should be able to do what he or she likes.
Were it a diary, today would be described thus:
Woke early at about 4.30am, which I rarely do, but decided to surf the net, read some reviews in the heavier journals of Selina Hastings’ biography of Somerset Maugham and continue writing Part Whatever of my Guide To Cars I Have Crashed. Mark, my brother, with whom I lodge when here in London, got up at 6am because he does a weekly stock take on Mondays at the Troubadour where he works. I dozed and listened to the radio (Today on Radio 4) between 7am and 9am, latterly dozing more than listening, then I got up, brushed my teeth and walked work. It is only a 25-minute walk from Earls Court Sq. to Derry Street, just off High St. Kensington where the Mail has its offices. Listened to Start The Week while walking there. Bought a tea and a bowl of fruit in the canteen, then went to my desk, picking up today’s edition of the paper on the way. Leafed through the paper, with especial though superficial attention to the pages I worked on yesterday to make sure there were no monumental cock-ups, then logged into this, my blog, to finish off the car guide. At 10.25am, almost an hour later than usual, I finally got my arse together to take the lift down to the gym, which seems to be in the bowels of the building, but is, in fact, on the ground floor. Ten minutes on the exercise bike, 20 minutes on various weights, then warmed up, then ran a mile on the treadmill. I was flying solo today, so I could be 30 minutes late with impunity. Back at my desk by 11.30am, pissed around doing very little, looking up stuff on the net, gossiping with whoever was available to gossip with (and suggested that Sue, Chris and I should have a Word Of The Day which we would try to work into everything we said. Today’s word was ‘plangent’, but the challenge never got off the ground except for Sue observing tonight that as the editor has taken the week off, we were all denied the ‘plangent’ sound of his complaints.
Etc. This is getting tedious, and is boring me to write just a little more than it is boring you to read. So now you know why I have decided to redefine the word ‘blog’ to suit myself and bugger convention.
By the way, when I first thought of writing an entry such as this, I thought I might try to come up with some jokes about ‘investigating the ontology of blogging’. But doesn’t really come off, so I have used the word only in the title.

My cars: a short guide. Part VI - A massive Vauxhall Victor, a Simca, two 2CVs, naivety and a valuable lesson learned

The Vauxhall Victor, which succeeded my Triumph Toledo after that car’s sudden end, had only one thing in its favour: it was powerful. I can’t now remember how large the engine capacity was, but it must surely have been 2 litres. I bought it within weeks of the Toledo being written off - saying ‘writing off the Toledo’ would be inaccurate and unfair, as, for once, the crash wasn’t my fault - because the only legitimate way of claiming mileage expenses from my oh so generous employers was actually to drive the miles. Driving it, and sitting behind the steering wheel gazing some distance to the far end of the bonnet is the closest I have ever come, and the closest I shall ever come, to driving a Cadillac. If I remember correctly, the engine also made a deeply satisfying ‘vroom’ noise which spoke of power and purpose, and it surged forward slowly but surely and was the antithesis of all those little nippy 1 litre cars which rush around here and there rather like neurotic flies. The Victor, though,
had one failing: the heater didn’t work, and as autumn turned to winter that made travelling on as many trips as I was able to arrange in order to clock up the miles increasingly uncomfortable. It's not much fun spending hour upon hour speeding along the motoway freezing your balls off and no amount of buckshee mileage payments make you feel any warmer. When winter finally turned very cold, as it can do in Birmingham, there also came a disaster: there was not enough anti-freeze in the radiator and with the first frost, the radiator froze solid. And that was that. I can’t remember ever driving the Victor again. It was like the model pictured above, although mine was blue. (I rather like how the photographer has elegantly placed the Victor in a rural setting and given it a certain kind of rustic glamour. In real life, you would not find these cars sitting in a field but usually parked outside some pub in a more downmarket part of Nottingham. Actually, rustic charm is rather over-egging the cake. My first thought on seeing the picture above was why is that abandoned car looking so clean and shiny?)
I must now confess that my memory of the sequence of events and which cars I owned when is curiously hazy. I was still working for the CEGB when I bought the Victor, but I left in the early autumn of 1984 to start my photography course at West Bromwich College in Wednesbury, and the car I used to travel the 20-odd miles from my home in Kings Heath to Wednesbury (up the M5, a detail I add for those readers who like these accounts to have a more technical dimension) was my second Citroen 2CV. But before then I had two other cars, and at one point I owned three cars at once, although only because two of them didn’t run. I think the first car I bought once the Victor froze solid, and because I had to get to Wednesbury every day, was a Simca. This cost around £300 - a lot more in 1984 than at the time of writing this account 25 years later - and I thought I had a bargain. The ad in the newspaper classifieds said ‘no MoT’. No bother, I thought, very naively. I’ll get one, it'll only cost me £30. So I bought the car, took it to the garage and asked for an MoT estimate. £500. The car did not seem so much of a bargain after that, and the chap trying to rid himself of what was a pretty useless car had probably not believed his luck when I came along and handed over my money. So, I decided foolishly, I'll run the car without getting an MoT, but soon decided to scrap the Simca when I realised that the brakes were dodgy. On the long, multi-lane run-up to Spaghetti Junction and on my way to college one morning, I had to brake suddenly and almost crashed into the back of a builder’s merchant van. I realised I could not risk using the Simca. I should also add that I cannot remember transferring the insurance from the Victor to the Simca, so I was probably driving it uninsured, too.
At around this point my brother Mark came to live with me, and Mark was with me when I crashed my first 2CV. This was another wreck of a car but which I was too green to realise was on it last legs. It was also a rust bucket. I'd had it for a just week - and proud as punch not only to be owning a 2CV but because in some circles they had a kind of bohemian cachet - before it, too, was a write-off. Mark and I had gone for a drink and had argued. I was in a bad mood and was not taking the care I might while driving. Coming off a roundabout in Kings Norton - we were coming down the Redditch Rd. and turned into Wharf Rd., info for the techies among you courtesy of Google maps - we were approaching the exit of a pub car park - The Navigation Inn also courtesy of Google maps - when a car came straight out and I went straight into its side. My 2CV crumpled, with the front completely stoved in and the chassis warped. I wanted
to call the police (because technically the accident was the other guy’s fault) but the other driver tried to intimidate me by claiming he had many friends among the police based in Kings Norton and they would take his side and make out the accident was my fault. This annoyed me, and the three pints of cider I had been drinking worked their magic and I got angry. Then the other driver pointed out that we would both be breathalysed, and, for once, I was sensible. I let the matter go.
However, as far as cars were concerned I was still in a bind: three cars were parked outside my house, all of which were useless and I needed a car to get to Wednesbury every day.
This is where this account gets hazy. I bought my next car, another 2CV, but one in far better condition, after spotting it while driving past the forecourt of a Fiat dealer. (Which of my three cars I was driving at the time I cannot recall. It might have been the Victor with the radiator unfrozen, but it is more likely to have been the Simca with me driving uninsured. However, I really can't remember.) It was in a row of cars which had all been taken in in part exchange. The asking price was £999, but after looking it over I did something which, for me at the time was quite extraordinary. I asked the salesman whether it would come with a full MoT. He said it would. Then I thought to myself that I would offer him less than £999 and we would haggle. I calculated that I would at least be able to knock one or two hundred off the asking price. So I was about to offer him £750 when, on a whim and why I simply do not know, I told him I would pay £650 for the car. He told me he would look at the figures involved in taking the car in part exchange. He returned a few minutes later and asked: ‘Would that be with a full Mot’. It seemed to me that he was hoping I would relent on that point in the interest of getting a bargain. But I said: ‘Yes.’ It was not the answer I think he was expecting, but to my surprise he agreed.
I learnt a very valuable lesson there and then: in some situations, go for broke. You never know what might come of it, and often you have nothing to lose. I have never been the shy type (except occasionally with girls, though at my age - 95 in a fortnight’s time - I suppose I should start calling them women), but I do have a timid streak - which will be news to many, but I am not being disingenuous. But on that day, standing on the forecourt of a Fiat dealership on Constitution Hill, I fully understood the value of chutzpah. I trust and hope I will never forget it.

Footnote for those who cherish footnotes: astute readers, who are usually those who cherish footnotes and who can recite the Footnote and Related Appendices (Necessary) Act 1983 backwards, will have realised that I have not included a picture of a Simca. I haven't done so because I had the car for only a short time and it doesn't really feel as though it belongs in my collection of car. There is not bond. It was a ratty old car anyway and, most pertinently, our relationship being so short, I can't really remember even what it looked like, except that it was dark grey, and so can't find a picture. Sorry.