Saturday 24 November 2012

A father writes (though not this one), and parents the world over might understand

It is by no means the world-stopping story of the month and most certainly few people living outside Britain will have heard about it and even fewer living outside Britain, but it is worth mentioning here, not least because it might ring a chord with parents throughout the world.

It concerns a retired Royal Navy submarine commander, Nick Crews, who lost patience with his three children and told them a few home truths. And having written that, I can already sense that some readers might already be jumping to conclusions: reactionary old buffer goes ballistic because he is out of touch with modern life. But it was nothing of the kind. Crews has three children, two daughters and a son, and feels all that, given the start they had in life, all three failed to make anything of themselves. But again what I have just written might well give the wrong impression.

Crews didn’t rant and rave at them, but, by his own admission, bit his lip and told himself that it was not for him to interfere. He says his own father had been rather remote and that from the start he had decided to - in his own words - be a friend to his children and not be as remote. Each went to boarding school - not necessarily the advantage it is made out to be by many here in Britain but it cannot be denied that it does give many an additional step up in life - and given his career in the Navy, it is reasonable to assume the they didn’t want for anything while growing up. What did for Crews was the misery he saw his children put there mother through: they would ring her up and moan, moan, moan about their lives and their lot in life. One day he snapped and sent all three an email in which he finally spoke his mind (you can read it below). It didn’t go down well.

All three had been married and divorced, one daughter had remarried and the son was about to marry again. All three had been to university, but professionally had not achieved much. But Crews stresses that it was not their lack of success in life which got to him, but how - as he points out in his email - they would dump all their woes on their mother, who was getting more and more unhappy. All three were upset to get the email, but then home truths do usually upset us, and so far Crews is only reconciled with one, his eldest daughter, who now admits she feels he has a point.

In follow-up pieces in the media, I came across this by Crews which I feel resonates far beyond the matter in hand and sums up rather neatly - at least for me - much of the ethos of the western world. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph columnist Christine Odone (which you can find here) Crews describes ‘contemporary society’ as offering ‘a cancerous cocktail where on the one hand everyone is supposed to be free to do whatever they wish, but on the other we all expect protection from the consequences of our actions’. Anyone who reads this blog regularly will not be surprised that I agree completely with that description.

OK, so Nick Crews is a Brit, a reasonably prosperous middle-class chap from a certain background - he went to Sherbourne - but I am sure parents, from whatever ‘class’ and from other backgrounds, throughout the world might understand his frustration and disappointment.
The text of his email:

Dear All Three
 

With last evening’s crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.
It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.


We are constantly regaled with chapter and verse of the happy, successful lives of the families of our friends and relatives and being asked of news of our own children and grandchildren. I wonder if you realise how we feel — we have nothing to say which reflects any credit on you or us. We don’t ask for your sympathy or understanding — Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children.
Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents.
So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgment to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.


In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn’t for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.


I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don’t want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it’s not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won’t do it by simply whingeing and saying you don’t like it. You’ll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn’t possible, or you simply can’t be bothered, then I rest my case.
I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.


Dad
.

I have no idea about any of those, around 30 a day these days, who read this blog (except three). I don’t know whether you are a man or a woman, young, middle-aged or old, what your ‘background’ is and whether or not you have children. But I’m pretty certain that those of you who do have children will feel for Crews. Of course it would be easy to make him out to be some kind of snob who feels his children are letting him down in the eyes of his friends - his son works for a taxi service and one daughter works in a ship chandler’s.

But, rightly or wrongly, that’s not the impression I get. One thing almost all of those who, like Crews, have gone to sea, is a lack of airs and graces. The sea is a great leveller. Crews is not being snobbish, he is speaking from the heart.

Saturday 10 November 2012

Let’s hear it for the Fourth Estate or why Kim, Kourtney, Jen, Em and Jess are keeping democracy alive. Then there’s the rekindling of a love affair: me and Don

Here are some spiffing items of news you might well have missed over these past few days. But be reassured that throughout the Western world dedicated man and women are beavering away around-the-clock as I write to make sure you are always up-to-date. So did you know that Jennifer Garner has a bit of trouble carrying her child and a rather heavy handbag? Bet you didn’t. Well, there’s another reason to read this ’ere blog.

Here are some further items which it is essential you should know if you are planning on meeting a friend for coffee or considering having your hair done: Kourtney Kardashian takes her son shopping to Hamleys in London; her sister Kim - remember her? - wears a jumpsuit in rather chilly weather; Pippa Middleton - remember her? - has the same hat and dimple as Cheryl Cole and a rather similar dress; Helen Flanagan - no, I don’t have a clue who she is, either - vows to eat anything during he stint in an Australian ‘jungle’ for a TV show; Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez might have split up! Lordy, can it really be so? Rihanna wears a flame-coloured jacket on a night out; Van Diesel takes his daughter to the beach; Rose McGowan - no, I don’t have a clue who she is, either - decides to wear rather warmer clothes as the weather in Los Angeles gets a tad nippy; Jessica Alba goes shopping in patterned trousers; Miranda Kerr and Alessandra Ambrosio relax (separately, apparently); Emma Roberts - no, I don’t have a clue who she is, either - buys three iced coffees; Ashton Kutcher holds open a door for Mila Junis.

To put all that vital stuff into some kind of perspective, since the beginning of the year 21 journos have been killed in Syria, 12 in Somalia, five in Pakistan, three in Brazil, and one each in Thailand, India, Nigeria, Lebanon, Ecuador, Phillipines,  Bahrain, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Cambodia and Indonesia. That’s 52 altogether, all of them, one hears, rushing around getting the latest lowdown on the Kardishian sisters, Ms Garner, Ms Kerr, Ms Ambrosio and the rest of them.

You thought only fuckwits in the West can’t breathe without knowing how many iced coffees Ms Roberts likes buying. Well, think again: in 2012, 52 hacks and hackettes gave their lives trying to find out and bring you the latest ASAP. Or not, as the case may be.

LATER UPDATE: Anyone really anxious to hear the latest about the Kardashians, you can find out what happened when Kim and Kourteney went shopping in London.


. . .

I was planning to write a piece on how we, almost inevitably, fall out of love, whether it’s girlfriends, boyfriends, gobstoppers, sherbet lemons or, in this case, our former music heroes. The hero in question was to be Donald Fagen, who has just released his fourth solo album, Sunken Condos. He might be better known to many as the other part of Steely Dan, and they were - are I suppose - one of my fave bands. The trouble was that after his first solo album, The Nightfly, which he released in 1910, his next two didn’t really set my loins alight. Each - Kamakariad and Morph The Cat - had one or two good tracks, but the rest . . .

Then, a few weeks ago, I was in touch with a friend who asked whether I had heard Fagen’s most recent solo album. Well, dear reader, I didn’t even know he had realeased on. So I bought it and had Amazon deliver it and listened to it. And I was exceptionally underwhelmed. Many pieces of music take a while to grow on you, but I didn’t even think that was going to be the case. It seemed to me that Fagen was almost parodying himself, what with those ‘sophisticated’ (I think that’s the word they use) chord changes and cynical lyrics. In fact, I happened to go for a drink with the friend who mentioned the new release and I said as much.

Well, last night, for some reason, I decided to listen again. And I am glad to report that this particular story has a happy ending. I now think it’s rather good, better, in fact, than solo albums two and three.
On the lines of falling out of love, though, I must admit that where Prince was also once a big favourite of mine, he does, of late, seem to have lost the plot. Once he was original and interesting. Now he just seems to settle for interminable funk workouts. Now, I happen to like those, but if it’s funk workouts you want, it has to be said you are spoiled for choice.

Saturday 27 October 2012

Four pieces of music you might enjoy (and absolutey nothing about the bloody euro, the EU or anything of that ilk)

It’s odd when you hear a piece of music and, although you have never heard it before, you seem to know it, it seems to be far more familiar than is at all possible. To put it another way, if you were able to compose and perform music in the the same idiom, this would be it. If I can go out on a limb and risk some of the more cynical among you who might happen to be reading this thinking me as the pretentious pillock you always suspected I was, I would say that the music ‘speaks to me’. It’s uncannily as though it were my music.

I have had that sensation several times over the past years, and it happened again a while ago with a piano sonata by Scarlatti (Domenico - there seems to be a whole tribe of them, his dad, his granddad, his brother, two uncles, a chap down the road, old Guiseppe who used to run the bar and compose in his spare time, loads of them, but the one I am referring to his Domenico). The piece is K466 in F minor. I was idly listening to Radio 3 one Saturday morning (and having just written that, I’m beginning to wonder whether one really can ‘idly’ listen to the radio, but there you go) and it was played by some Japanese pianist or other. And it was as though I had known the piece all my life. I ‘understood’ it immediately. It was as though I had composed it. It seemed to describe me and what I felt.

Then there is the music of David Fuiczynski. Same story. I first heard his playing when I bought my first (or second, I can’t remember) MP3 player and with it came a voucher for 20 free downloads. I opted for some jazz guitar and Mr Fiuczynski was one of those playing. And it has to be said that the piece he played was utterly atypical of the the work I later came to know. But on the strength of that one track, I looked him up and, on spec, bought an album called Amandala and exactly the same thing happened: if I were a good guitarists that was exactly the kind of music I would like to create. (As far as I am concerned, Fiuczynski’s music is indefinable - not jazz, not rock, simply itself.)

Most recently it has happened with a composer called Kenneth Leighton. I really can’t remember where I was or how I came to hear it, but I heard a piece by him on Radio 3 and I was hooked. So far I have bought his second and third symphonies.

Similarly, but not quite, is a piece by jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans called Young And Foolish. There is something about it which goes right deep inside me and then towards the end seems to touch a part of me which I feel no one had ever seen for the simple reason that I have tried not to let anyone see it. Sounds like a load of wank, I know, but what the hell.

Here are four pieces, one by each of the above. First up is the piano sonata K466 in F minor by Scarlatti. If it doesn’t sound too daft, I should like this piece played at my funeral.



Then there is a piece by David Fiuczynski. Given his varied output, all I can do is simply choose one of the many pieces by him I have on iTunes, and one of the main reasons I choose this is rather banal: it’s not too long and a good-quality Quick Time movie of it would not be too big to upload.



Here is the fifth movement of the Symphony No 2 by Kenneth Leighton. There is just something about this music I - ahem - adore. Sorry, for that, but that’s how I feel. And it shouldn’t be Sarah Cox, but Sarah Fox. I didn’t realise until a few seconds ago while listening to the piece once it was here on the blog and it’s too bloody late to do anything about it. Well, actually, it’s not too late - I could go back to the original iMovie movie, correct it, re-save the Quick Time movie, upload it again and get it all square but, dear reader, I at this point I really can’t be fucking arsed (and if there are any virgins reading this, make that bloody arsed. Can’t upset people, can I?) So an apology to Sarah Fox will have to do, though I doubt she will ever find her way here. But if you do, Sarah, sorry.



Finally, here is the piece by jazz pianist Bill Evans called Young And Foolish. UPDATE - Feb17, 2013: No it’s not, it’s called Peace Piece. Sorry about that. My mistake. It is also posted on You Tube and some punter called Geoff Rowe put me right. Oh well, lose some, lose some. It is quite simply beautiful, though not exactly in the way you might originally think. I would also like this piece played at my funeral. When I hear it, I feel someone is looking into my soul, especially the discordant bits towards the end. Thing is, that’s me and everyone else who was once young and foolish. More wank, I’m afraid, but there you go.




I trust you like some, perhaps even all of them. If you are interested in other videos, you can find them here.Oh, and as I have gone out on a limb in this entry and laid myself wide open to ridicule in some of my descriptions, I might as well add that apart from the Scarlatti sonata and the Bill Evans track a third piece I should like played at my funeral is Mozart’s Symphony no 41, and if time is a little short and the undertakers are getting restless to get me down under sooner rather than later so they can bugger off and get home before dark, I should at least like that symphony’s last movement played.

Thursday 25 October 2012

In which, for no very good reason I can make out, I go to bed without supper...

Well, an interesting 24 hours which at the point of writing - 8.45pm - is soon to culminate with me going to bed with no supper. Not that I have done anything wrong, it’s just that I am married to a rather odd woman who insists on doing things her way however daft, not to say utterly and bafflingly incomprehensible, her way might be.

Finished my Wednesday shift at 6pm as usual last night, but instead of taking myself off down the M3, then the A303 as usual, with my usual stop-off in South Petherton in Somerset or Sticklepath on the edge of Darmoor for a pint or two of cider and a cigar, I headed out to a little village a few miles north of High Wycombe to visit the widow of an old friend of my father’s.

When my stepmother had her stroke five-and-a-half years ago, Susan, by then already widowed for a few years, took on my stepmther’s two dogs, two springer spaniels called Daisy and Puffin. Daisy was already a grande dame and died not long afterwards, but Puffin was in her prime and proved to be excellent company for Susan. Sadly, Puffin had to be put down a month or two ago because of bad health (I think it was cancer) and when I heard, I rang Susan and gathered (although she never said a word) that she was feeling very bereft and lonely.

So I decided to visit her and take her out for a meal, a deed made far, far easier and extremely pleasant to boot in that Susan is very good company and, although by now over 80, still very girlish and young in the way that some folk miraculously remain young in spirit and thus give the impression of being far younger than they really are. Susan lives in a cottage which was once two semi-detached cottages, and walking into the house is like stepping back into the Fifties, with books and papers and a variety of pictures and paintings everywhere. Before she retired she taught art and is still active.

Rather than drive home after supper, I slept at Susan’s and took off down here to Cornwall in the morning, dropping in on my mother’s grave at the cemetery at Lower Assendon near where we once lived on the way home. At the end of last week, I took a picture of my two children, then printed it out at work and got Ron (at work about whom I could write several thousand words) to laminate it. I left this with a pot plant at my mother’s grave. I have not been there for several years, but I think I am the only one of my family to visit it. Perhaps my sister does when she is here in Britain, but I know neither of my two brothers do. In fact, I would be surprised if they knew where it is. I left the picture of my two children because between us all, my mother, were she still alive would have six grandchildren but died before any of them was born. And she was the kind of woman who would just loved to have been a grandmother and spoilt her grandchildren rotten (as is, of course, exactly as it should be).

After that I headed off west through Reading, but taking the A34 south to Newbury to join the A303 (such details making essential reading for all the nerds who do me the honour of reading the crap I write), took a wrong turning and found myself heading south for Southampton, although far. This is where I made a mistake: rather than retrace my tracks and rejoin the A303 I ‘got clever’ (a perpetual flaw of mine, and despite long ago realising the certain dangers of ‘getting clever’, I still fall for it.)

In this case I decided that, courtesy of my satnav, I would just keep ‘heading west’ and ignore its instructions. The upshot was that I criss-crossed most of west Hampshire and east wiltshire, getting nowhere closer to Cornwall than had I been exploring the Gobi desert. That
meant that a journey which should have taken me just over four hours took seven, although one of those hours was taken up with stopping off at the Taw River Inn in Sticklepath for a pint of cider (at just £1.90 - fuckwits in London and especially the Scarsdale Tavern take note) and a couple of bags of cheese and onion crisps. Oh, and to oogle Shona, who is not in the slightest bit pretty and a tad dumpy to boot, but who I could give one just like that. Furthermore, I get a slight impression she wouldn’t mind being given one). Then it was on homewards.

Here my daughter has buggered off to some school function, my son went off to football and my wife announced she ‘wasn’t hungry’. And nothing had been prepared. But I am hungry. I drove off up to The Old Inn, but that has been taken over from the two woofters who used to run it (and used to have a reasonably decent pub food restaurant) by someone who likes to attract the punter with ‘all you can eat and then some’ offers, which is not really my kind of thing (although he gains a brownie point or two for having reinstated the pool table which the woofters had got rid of to make way for more restaurant tables). I came back home and toyed with the idea of an Indian in Wadebridge, then a visit to the Blisland Inn (in Blisland - now there’s a surprise), but finally can’t get enthused about much. I finally decided to settle in, finish off the bag of Kettles salt ’n cracked pepper crisps (how is ‘cracked pepper’ different to ‘pepper’ I wonder?) feel sorry for myself that I shall be going to bed hungry. But don’t worry, we Scorpios have long memories and my wife really hasn’t heard the last of this.

Enjoy your supper.

Saturday 20 October 2012

A great day for fascists: the golden dawn has arrived. It’s not such a great day for the rest of us. Nobel Peace Prize anyone?

Most of my knowledge is of the scavenged variety. It consists of tidbits and scraps gathered here and there which can then be stitched together into an apparently coherent whole. Carefully trotted out and dipped into conversation as almost an aside, this knowledge can then give the impression of being but the tip of an iceberg, that had I but world enough and time others might well be treated to a marvellous exposition of some more arcane aspect of what is being discussed, but that I am far too well-mannered to ‘show off’ and quite possibly risk showing up some in the company who might not be as well-read, well-informed and as wise as I apparently seem to be. It takes a little, though not a great deal of, skill to achieve the effect and, as always, the admirable principle is ‘less is more’.

In the 140-odd words I have written so far, I have already attempted (and, I bloody well hope, achieved) persuading some of you - though most certainly not all - that I am rather well-read and you might well have marvelled at my skill in weaving into the fabric of this piece, a paraphrase of a well-known poem. It is, of course, all complete bullshit. Despite having taken an English literature course at Dundee University, I was comprehensively failed by the English department for hardly turning in any work and what I did turn in being immature cack. Oh, and I read very, very few of the set texts.

Incidentally, you might be familiar with another ploy used by some to intimidate others. It consists of some twat or other declaring something along the lines of: ‘As Mallarmé put it so well ...’ followed by a minute or two of something in French, delivered in the sure knowledge that you don’t ‘have’ any French of any kind and that even if you did, you would not be familiar with the piece quoted. The intention is the not-so-subtle ‘you’re an ill-educated oik, whereas I’m not, and I think it is best to make sure we both know it sooner rather than later in a relationship which, believe me, will be as brief as it is unimportant’. A related ploy is to
announce something like ‘you’ll be familiar, of course, with Weaver’s delightful demolition of the Nicene creed as being complete epistemological nonsense’, knowing full well that you are not familiar with anything of the kind and that the only ‘Weaver’ you have heard of was the sidekick in Gunsmoke and the main man in McCloud. Or how about ‘don’t you think when it comes to Japanese hikrati tokumoru, Bullock gets it just right?’ Bollocks gets it just right would be more to the point.


The above should set the scene nicely for what comes next: I came across it a few days ago, and it seems rather apt for our times. I shall now look it up on the net to make sure that my belief that it is indeed by Mark Twain (that’s what the chap said who used it in the piece I read). A minute later: Yes it was. He is said to have remarked: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I have recently done many things, but two of them are to watch every episode so far of Boardwalk Empire, and to dig out reports of the rise of (Χρυσή Αυγή or, for those who don’t ‘have’ Greek, Chrysi Avgi). (‘Mum, he’s doing it again!’ ‘Just ignore him, dear, he only wants attention, and if you ignore him he’ll go away. Just ignore him.’)

Boardwalk Empire is relevant because it portrays the lives of a list of Prohibition Era gangsters in Atlantic City, New York, Chicago and Philidelphia and the speakeasy culture which evolved because of prohibition. The Twenties were also known as the Jazz Age and were a time of expansion, growing credit and exuberant business of all kinds and which ended rather suddenly with the Wall St. crash in October 1929. The Depression followed the crash and the misery it caused help the fascists in Germany and Spain (and far earlier in Italy) gain popular support.

I am not, of course - I’m not daft - declaring that the Noughties (as the first decade of the 21st century is known to some) is a repeat of the Twenties, but they do seem to rhyme and I would be on firmer ground to claim that there are a great deal of similarities: the wilful business exuberance, the delusion that the stock bull market was here to stay (one of the bigger idiots produced by ‘New’ Labour promised there would be ‘no return to boom and bust’. Yeah, right), everyone living the life of Riley (mainly because the Chinese were selling the goods they produced at or even below cost in order to ‘grow’ their economy) and generally the conviction that the good times were here to stay. They weren’t, of course, as many said and we all - in our heart of hearts - knew. We are now paying the price.

I have been banging on about what a dog’s dinner the whole euro project is and always has been and, to be honest, it would bore me too much yet again to bang on some more. Like many others I follow the news and the ‘latest developments’, and in if one takes those developments individually, they can seem to make sense. But if, metaphorically, you go up the hill and survey the European economic landscape from a better perspective, it would be hard to argue that it is all complete madness. In both Greece and Spain, one in four people of working age is out of a job. In Spain the Spanish Red Cross has appealed to ‘the better off’ to donate food to ‘those who aren’t so well off’. In Greece, hospitals are opening only two or three days a week and many pharmacies have run out of drugs. There are daily demonstrations outside the Spanish parliament. In several weeks, Catalonia will hold a referendum on whether to declare independence. And in Greece, Golden Dawn, a gang - it would simply be dishonest to describe them as a ‘political party’ - is gaining ever more support. Several years ago, they were regarded by the Greeks as the nutters they are and
could only manage to win 0.4pc of the vote. At the most recent general election they gained 12pc. And estimated 60pc of the police in Greece are members of Golden Dawn. They have started a public campaign of ridding Greece of immigrants - they declare they want to ‘get the stench out of Greece’. By ‘stench’ they mean the immigrants. They are well organised. They have a network of ‘help bureaux’ where people can get food and other assistance. They are getting their support where all fascists parties get their support: among the dispossessed and those who have lost hope among the poor and lower middle classes.

The point must be made again that none of this would be possible without the misery the euro crisis has created in Greece. Certainly, what Angela Merkel insists upon as part of her  plans to ‘save the euro’ makes a certain sense in context: why should a country like Greece which lived beyond its means for so many years be bailed out without itself helping to sort out the problem by cutting back on public spending? But that misses the point entirely: and
the point is that we should be here in the first place. And worst of all is that there is no longer an equitable solution. None whatsoever. We are too far down the road for that. Golden Dawn is up and running, and the fascist genie is out of the lamp.

We all - all of us ‘baby boomers’ who have lived through the 67 years of peace which - oh, the irony! - have earned the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize - imagine that it will all ‘come right in the end’, that now is not the time to become a Cassandra, ‘they’ will sort it out. Oh really? Yes, it will ‘all come right in the end’ rather as the fuckup that was Nazi Germany ‘all came right in the end’ 23 years later by the mid-1950s. Me, I’m 63 next birthday and won’t see the worst of it. It is my 16-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son whose lives and well-being I fear for.