Never in This Field of Cows …

Listening to V-At by Tarwater

Damn-near-perfect TV programme last night to go with this damn-near-perfect music from the Wiretapper CD. Music is V-At by Tarwater which has a certain indefinable magic that summons up all sorts of memories. Play loud in the car and have a great driving moment of quality.

The great TV was Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain which concentrated mostly on the politics of this fair land since the end of WWII. I was worried beforehand that it might be dusty and boring and indeed the review had said something along the lines of it just being Mr Marr talking to camera interspersed with archive. Well it was exactly that but with an authoritative and interesting delivery it raises AM up there with Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski as a documenter of how things are. Now I am not clever enough to know whether the whole approach was different to anything I have seen before or whether I just do not generally know about the period covered in last night’s programme but it did seem to be packed with information that seemed fresh and unknown – of course the general big stuff was somewhere in my head but the juicy way it was presented made it seem new. My dad said he wasn’t going to bother watching because he had lived through it all – I hope he changed his mind. I’m not sure that the impressions of Churchill (the statesman – not the dog) were really necessary.

I’m fair whistling through Rendezvous With Rama – more than half-way through and with so much I remember still to come. What is interesting is that the gap between last reading it and now had wiped my brain clear of the memories of what I though the place looked like and so I am able to create a new picture. I also notice that I am much better at creating images from the descriptions. Actually I lied about all the old images having been wiped – what I mean is that they are so faded that my more-mature mind is able to overwrite them. The thing that strikes me about the various illustrations (the one on Wikipedia for example) is that they have far too much detail. The overwhelming impression in my head is of wide vistas of featureless grey material broken only by small islands of complexity rather than the fields and roads of the drawings. No one seems to want to illustrate the stairways down which the crew of Endeavour had to descend to reach the interior of Rama (and of course climb up again).