Fanfare Funfair

Feeling Crabby

Many years ago when computers were dangerous and new, I was given an Oric 1 in return for some work I did. This slab of plastic and mysterious, magical innards had a rudimentary sound chip which allowed me to program in notes and actually to play several notes at once. The very first piece of music I put in was a Crab Canon by Bach which had the brilliant time-saving property of being the same when played backwards or forwards and hence meant only half the amount of data input. I don't have the recording I made of it or even the Oric but I have been able to create a new version which you can listen to here. It's not long. Go on. I know you want to.

World Poetry Day - Culture Wars

For ChrisH

Usefully I'd legislate myself away he says,
Borne on the red wind to my oblivion,
But he is a deep sea fish, all teeth and rot,
A compound fury concealed in doggerel,

Barely holding back the spit and fleck,
Of rage and half-concealed despair,
We fail him with our lack of intellect,
One word in three or two above us,

And he berates obscenely, all our errors,
How we fail to understand the world,
Our place in it to serve just ourselves,
And now we are in the next war,

Unarmed with wit and cool obscurity,
One side victorious in Martin’s war,
The other trained in ill-formed invective,
Built on the containment of emotion,

And here I walk the narrow line myself,
Versed in biofeedback slowing hearts,
To limit tremors in the bolts I loose,
Secretly aching for that killer blow,

The froth-corrupted injury of silence,
That staggers; that shuts him up for good,
A word or two as a billion hollow points,
Launched late in this oh-so civil war,

At seven tonight we win, we break the news,
Of victory, the climb to sunlit uplands,
We can predict it perfectly, to a moment,
The fall of the last soldiers, posed on hills,

And left and right stand hand-in-hand,
Awaiting approbation that must surely come,
Citations, mentions in despatches, medals,
Glinting in the bloody light of evening,

But there are dead fonts now, empty op-eds,
The raw, unfollowed critic’s training course,
Swinging in the winds of change and spite,
It’s all one-sided now and in the name of balance,

Mash-ups (No Zombies)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they vapourised Syme, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Is there anything else on Radio 4 at the moment? George Orwell and Sylvia Plath seem to have taken over and I'm expecting one or both of them to be guest editor on Today sometime next week. Not a complaint of course apart from the time it's going to take to listen to it all once it's off the PVR and on a device somewhere. 

Albert Farrar Gatliff and John Caulfeild Wolseley Gatliff

I didn't know but my dad had this picture of my great-great uncle - Albert Farar Gatliff, a general in The Royal Marines and a bearer of The Unknown Warrior in 1920. I've been trying to find him in this film ...

... but the picture was taken 20 years previously. Dad also has his swagger stick.

However, none of this is as important as another discovery prompted by discussions with members of The Gatliff Trust who were at my aunt's funeral. They asked me if I knew what happened to my grandfather's brother - my great uncle. We knew he died in 1914 though his date of birth would have made him 15 at death, a very young age for any combatant. However a few fuzzy google queries actually turned up that he was a Royal Navy Cadet and he died during surgery at Dartmouth. So John Caulfeild Wolseley Gatliff has been belatedly added to the Commonwealth War Graves Commision list of casualties - one of the youngest ever.  

Elizabeth Noel Gatliff: 1926-2012

My wife has pointed out almost every day for the last week that I have not blogged since September. Well here we are again. Sadly this hiatus has been because my wonderful aunt, Elizabeth Noel Gatliff, died on Boxing day. She was 86 and had a life of excitement and joy that most of us can only dream of. I'm posting this picture of her in the crowds on VE day which is how she should be remembered - with spirit and laughter. She was a nurse and health visitor for many years, working in Canada and Australia and visiting every part of the world without fear or anxiety. She did not see any divisions in the world, only people and believed that everyone could be better off basically by having a bit of respect and by giving up a bit of oneself to others. I am comforted that she died peacefully in the Horton Hospital in Banbury because she had campaigned with many other people to keep services from being moved from there to Oxford for the sake of saving a few pounds. I was touched and overwhelmed by the number of people who came to her funeral and I can only hope that I managed to convey the colour and excitement of her life in the tribute I wrote. 

It's All Gone HD

SCARTS in Transit Yesterday

Finally we have binned the SCARTS. Like tinsel, the sharp edges of these connectors have always put my teeth on edge and at last they have all been replaced by HDMI cables and another of my anxieties is put to rest. Eventually the cables themselves will be superseded by Wireless-Fireless and then all I have to worry about is the gradual erosion of my DNA by invisible rays. And don't start me on warp drive and teleporting - all this Higgs-Boson excitement has opened up yet another wave of invisible things to worry about. I am not mad yet.

Shurely Shome Mishtake!

Statistician and Painter - never seen in the same room

Much excitement from eldest about the Tom Stoppard adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End which started on BBC 2 last night. Of course this has mostly been the result of cool hero of said production being portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch though she has already whistled through the (accurately named) teratology causing some "ahs" of recognition when the assistant at Waterstones eventually uncovered it in a back room somewhere. I did start it myself in a desperate attempt to keep ahead of the TV version but in one episode it overtook me by quite some distance. And here's a tip for you - while the dead-tree version on Amazon is £8 - the links from there to the Kindle editions show versions at between £4 and £5. Search instead for it in the Kindle store and you will find it for 77p. Much as I don't like spending for something I already have, I was wasting much time in looking up words in the Kindle dictionary anyway so I've saved a bit of time there.

The TV version is very good - without the dumb exposition of most such dramas but bearing in mind Tom Stoppard is completely at home writing about football or Quantum theory, I wasn't expecting much allowance for the Downton audience. Christopher Tietjens is an honourable man - the most honourable man in literature maybe - a man blessed with an intellect of superhuman proportions yet cruelly manipulated by his socialite wife. There may even be shadows of Cumberbatch's most famous role in that he has the analytic mind of Sherlock Holmes but without the limit of only retaining information which is useful to him. Tietjens is as comfortable with matters of statistics as applied to Government Social Policy as he is with all-things equestrian or the minutiae of local legal systems. And like Sherlock, Tietjens has a sidekick who in any normal company would be the cleverest person in the cast in McMasters, an equally-honourable man of supreme intelligence and social wit. A fellow statistician, McMasters is an expert on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a point highlighted by the producers decision to make the Actor who portrays him (Stephen Graham - last seen lusting after Sean Bean in The Accused) look uncannily like the subject of his monograph. There are shades of Goodbye to All That and even the Ghost Road Trilogy but Parade's End is more ambitious than either. It is described as an early modernist novel but to me seems like a link between mid 19th Century books and later more popular 20th century works.

And as a final tantalising link to another of my obsessions, I'm pretty convinced that FMF is The Nightingale of the PJ Harvey B-side to The Glorious Land.

Great TV - now can The BBC be persuaded to do a version of Arcadia?

That Simon Armitage - What a Git!

It said in the guide 20 minutes each way - a quick walk of half a mile. And at the end a poetry seat and impressive carvings of one of Simon Armitage's poems about water in all its forms. Here's that half mile.

That's our car in the distance - I've blurred the number plate.

Doesn't look much does it? Just a gentle walk - 20 minutes - no rain - ambience of distant traffic and the occasional protest from a nonchalant sheep. Well it was about 20 minutes - but it was anything but gentle. The ground was slippy with rain and sheep droppings, its was treacherous with hidden holes just large enough to catch a carelessly-placed foot. Some of it would even have benefited from a few carabiners and other strange devices known only to Chris Bonnington and his ilk. I'm not sure they're expecting many casual visitors. Well we got there and it was worth it. Here are the stones themselves - click to see enough to read.

The stones are sheltered in quarry workings which are silent - all sound is swallowed in the way described in the poem itself. And then we had to come down which is worse - slippy and falling forward, it's amazing I didn't break anything - including the camera. And so to Marsden for lunch - a nice Chili Jacket at Angie's Kitchen - followed by a short hop (by car - I'm not mad) across the tops to Holmfirth and a coffee in Sid's Cafe. It must have been Ivy's day off. I did spend the day looking out for SA himself but I expect he might refuse to sign the book now I've called him a git.

A Capitol Idea

Possibly to put his fat-fingered father to shame, 8-year old has just completed this 3D puzzle of The Capitol. Any offers of assistance were met with a grunt and most of it was done in one day. My own attempts at making his Airfix Junkers are rapdily turning into a glue-sodden mess of failed assembly. A couple of layers of paint might just perform a miracle. We shall see.

A New Wave of Reason

We'll get that Turntable one day.

Off to town today for daughter to spend money on yet another new phone (Samsung Galaxy Y if you really need to know) and a visit to Probe Records yielded this wonderful item with the unexpected bonus of having the B-Side etched with the instructions on the Voyager Record instead of a second groove. If you think that a duet with Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking is the best thing since Sliced Protons then buy it. However, the real beauty of this speck of serendipity is that this is just one piece from a series - The Symphony of Science - a parade of scientific heroes set to music. Guess who got a Vocoder for Christmas.