Just Rattle It Captain Clever!

Listening to Old Kate Bush in lieu of the new.

It has been a bad week in Lake Wobegone – a very bad week! Not one but two crises came along on the same day, both involving health-threatening situations and one actually going as far as requiring an ambulance. All Ok now though thank you for asking. Just look at what you could have got.

I’m still a bit shaky but as neither of the affected people was me, that is just sad and I will just have to get over it.

Still, we have Aerial to look forward to in less than two weeks now. Oh so delicious a wait for this. Pain in the brain and heart and no more thoughts of the concrete. The picture of the mirrored clouds on the cover reminds me of hanging upside down on the railings of the bridge across the common. And is the sound trace, the word ‘Aerial’?

I finished the Peel Biography; the Appendix contains his summary of what would be in the book. He sent this to his agent in 1992 and it is hilarious, though I am curious to how I would have reacted to it if I had I read it before the book. I don’t often get the shiver when reading that usually accompanies a special piece of music but it was here with this one, like it was for the end of Valerie Grove’s The Well-Loved Stranger.

Yes I know it’s not Stephen Fry.

This Title Intentionally Left Blank

Listening to Cocteau twins

My wife surprised me yesterday by saying that she still couldn’t believe it that John Peel was dead. As she had not actually heard of John Peel until she met me, that was saying something. I suppose it must have been Home Truths what done it. I had not actually heard of Daniel O’Donnell until I met my wife but I’m pretty certain that I won’t feel the same way about that gentle Irish crooner when he eventually goes to the great end-of-the-pier-in-the-sky. I am sure my wife won’t either. Having been put off the Midwich Cuckoos by the spoilers on BBC4 last week, she has expressed a desire to read Margrave Of The Marshes when I have finished it. That is not going to be long; I bought it in the local bookshop instead of any discounted place because the great-grey-behemoth that is town-and-country development these days wants to knock down the building it is housed in and put up what Charles three would call a glass stump; it will be finished in the next 24 hours.

I was very worried that Peel’s biography being started by him and finished by someone else would result in a fault-line I wouldn’t be able to get over. There are no worries on this score, his wife writes, if not in the same style as JP, with the same outlook on life and the same level of understanding of what he experienced. There was a gentle pang when I finished the first part, knowing that was the end of Peel, about this time last year but with the insertion of a letter to Tom Robinson declaring love of Sheila, the novelistic trail continues, only slightly slowed by the change of pronoun. The laugh quota per page is the same in both halves, as is the John-bursting-into-tears count and the obvious longing for family life. I left it last night with the description of his kids feeling out of touch with modern music because their dad was not there to call and ask advice of and it was sad – like Jenny Agutter calling out “daddy - My Daddy” something which gives me filmy eyes just writing it.

I’ve said before, that I didn’t listen to Peel’s show often in recent years but thinking back over it, each brief night time listen resulted in the purchase of some exquisite music which he found fit to play between the banging techno, nanosecond long death-metal tracks, and all the other un-listenable stuff which I used to pretend to like. Black-Star Liner spring to mind. None of this is anything to the hours I used to listen to Peel’s show when it came on after Kid Jensen in what must have been the late seventies and early eighties. It was only on medium wave and faded in and out as radio Moscow used to get the better of it and I am sure my uneducated ear must have found a lot of the stuff quite strange, far more than it did the last time I heard the show. There is a wonderful picture of PJ Harvey at rest between tracks for a gig played at Peel Acres, beaming at John as he comes out with an obviously bluffed tale, a real gem, like finding Ian McCulloch smiling or worse still, without his sunglasses. Rock and Roll with the back off. Read it and truly weep.

Freud Egg

I'd just thought I'd better give my analysis of one of Ed's dreams over at The EDitorial.

The spider is obviously a sublimation of fears about our chances of getting more gold medals in the Coxless fours. There are eight eyes and eight legs on both a spider and a coxless four. There is also hope in the resurrection of the spider, that we may find a replacement for Pinsent, Redgrave and the other two who no one can remember the names of.

Of course it would have to have been a lady spider.

Something Beginning With Z!

So long away – so little done! Daughter and I went to see W&G Curse of The Were-Rabbit on Sunday. Much laughter and no slow bits. Go and see it. As the Guardian said, it does seem to push the ceiling of its U certificate but no matter.

I seem to have been working continuously, starting the minute I hit the desk and skipping lunch times. It is one of those times when all days seem to run into each other, leading to fear of the future and where it is all going to fit. Having said that, nothing seems to get done. The panic which seems to be all around at the moment is no help either. We are all going to get Avian Flu and start coughing like chickens. Give the fowl identity cards and that’ll stop ‘em! Interesting comments regarding this at the The Woolamaloo Gazette.

Saturday was a good day for documentary (which allowed my wife to get on with her weekly email report to Scotland as neither of the shows below appealed to her). I rang my dad just before the start of BBC2’s history of drawing show and he said he was about to watch it. It was all about comic book art and animation which made me wonder how long my dad lasted. He managed to make it to the end. Interesting that it started with Daniel Clowes – Ghost World etc. The film was good and I have been meaning to read the book. The last comic book I bought was Tank Girl on the back of buying Deadline magazine in order to seem cooler than I actually was.

The drawing was followed by the writing in a BBC 4 Lost decade show about John Wyndham. My wife was actually half listening to this and got a bit annoyed with its spoilers or all the books; she has been threatening to read The Midwich Cuckoos. I did try to persuade her that the intelligent writing was what mattered rather than the splatter-gun of the plot but I think the delights of this very British Sci-Fi are lost to her. While interesting in its revelations of various unknown things about Wyndham, it did simply seem like a long set of drama docs strung together. Nice to see Chris Langham in it (does he ever not work) but not really something that needed to be made. What does need to be made is a version of Trouble With Lichen , a very laid-back book with much to say about tabloid and trash TV culture.

MIA



Nuff Said!

Six-Three-Three

It was bright and lovely, my first day at school; a great wide expanse of playground took the light from the September sun and bounced it back at me, like some vision of the future, of all that I could do know that the professionals had hold of me. The bit of the school for us infants was simply a number of wooden huts on stilts, the doors of which were up steps at the front, where I am sure we would have sat had we been allowed. I was four and free and of course, homesick. One day, the big school was closed and we had the whole playground to ourselves so we stuck out our arms and turned into planes, skimming over the white line that marked our border, like Mosquito bombers- the Timber terrors, hugging the contours of the French countryside on their way to flatten something. We made the right noise, the throb and gritty crackle of Merlins, something all boys knew then, only 25 years after the end of the war.

Skimming fast over the asphalt, we are up against the brick and glass of big school, dropping our 500 lb bombs as we wheel and pull up round the bike sheds and then back as fast as possible to our bases on the other side of the channel to be refuelled, rearmed and sent back to crush the krauts. Think of the Dambusters speeding over the grey of the channel, lifting gently over the southern coast and then along the canals to do their worst. We knew all that, we had all the history of a war that was like yesterday to our parents and it was good and great and we couldn’t imagine anything being better. Stick those silhouettes up on the wall and I can still tell you what most of them are, Dornier, Typhoon, Heinkel and the Meteor from the future. We could tell you all of those and all the more common dinosaurs. A fried of my mother’s can tell you the time he first saw a meteor, and one of my aunts will complain about being left alone as a Doodlebug hit the cliffs over which she was standing while all the men in the troop hit the floor. And maybe these are separate stories but in my head I see the Meteor chasing and tipping the Doodlebug with its slipstream, sending it to nothing more than a noisy, wet end in the surf and gravel. Its not the same today; the death and injury is more real these days and, quite rightly, small boys want to be David Beckham rather than Douglas Bader. The result of a laser guided bomb going off is a bit more in-your-face than the voiced explosions of our pretend bombs chipping away at the school walls. I’ll paint my face black and sit in the bushes, guiding my mates into the target area by swinging a torch at them. The grey of today makes me think of all those war games, the sky like the skimming sea as it speeds under and over us, like hanging upside down with the river below us.

Four Candles In The Wind

Poor Dr Porter! They replaced yesterday’s Case Notes show with a tribute to Ronnie Barker. That said, I spent the entire drive home with a big smile on my face. Someone said that the beauty of The Two Ronnies show was the sheer professionalism of the writing and the execution without it seeming to be anything more than a couple of guys in the pub doing a turn. People just cannot do that in shows today. Comedy is either weak and badly made or produced to the utmost level of detail, thereby removing the spirit that comedy needs to stand out. We can all laugh the embarrassed or dirty laughs at some of the more extreme sketch shows but nothing comes close to the spiritual uplift of old-style shows. Monkey Dust is very inventive but sometime you just worry that the writers have run out of society pillars to rage against. The targets now are just those that will bring out the most outrage in the Daily Mail Crowd and the most admiration from the couldn’t-care-less brigade.

Interesting sketch of Ted Hughes by Sylvia Plath on the BBC site. There are some of Plath’s drawings in my hardback edition of The Bell Jar but they are of buildings and markets rather than close-up portraits. This sketch seems to have spirit if not accuracy rather than the architectural verité of the book pictures. Anyway, it is a nice complement to the collage with the Plath drawing on the side of the filing cabinet.

There were thousands of Starlings on the buildings of the new estate behind the office this morning. I saw a fat man with a big cigar walk along the main road.

Don’t worry! You can listen to Case Notes from the website.

Niffs

It is common that often the most evocative things that stimulate our senses are smells. An exact aroma can take me back to very specific locations, not just buildings but individual rooms within them. Over the last few years, I have noticed that arriving back at home after being out for the day, it smells very pleasant in an unexciting sort of a way. The smell reminds me of visits to various other kids in the neighbourhood. I am sure I have often mentioned how a change in the polish used to clean the office can bring out memories of all sorts of various things from school days. Those polished woodblock floors with the herringbone pattern seem to soak up smells, like a sort of aromatic recording device. A school my wife once taught at was closed down and we used to drive by it occasionally. I would imagine that even with the broken windows letting in the rain and wind, the polished floor would still be there, still smelling the same as when the kids used to sit on it cross-legged, getting dirty and trying not to sing the “alternate” words for the hymns. I am sure that all the modern schools built under the PFI scheme (Jarvis anyone?) don’t have herringbone-pattern, woodblock floors any more; they’ll all have tasteful light-oak or pine wood floors. The woodblocks are all going into period-furnished houses on the back of the recovery boom. So not everything Dan Cruickshank does is good.

My all time favourite smell is that of my aunt’s house. It gives a deep sense of calm, all baskety and woody, a sort of academic refuge, a smell that I would expect in an old university library, though I have to say that the only time I was in an OLD university library, it smelled of the previous night’s dinner and not a very appetising one either. All this has been prompted by the mix of smells that fill the kitchen here at lunchtime. Many people bring microwaveable meals and the smell of all those different things cooking makes for a very strange and sometimes overpowering atmosphere, not at all reminiscent of anything I can think of, though in years to come, the smell of here will have become a memory trigger for this time. I don’t mind hospital smells though I can’t actually remember the smell of the ward I was in last year. The autumn smells good as well.

Sniff something today.

Death Of The Middle Class

He didn’t know his place!

Listening to Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle And Sebastian.

New blog roll entry today – read it – it won’t be easy but it will make you think.

I dreamed of going to the moon last night. We got there by various slingshot devices that would swing round and catch our capsule, each one sending it higher above the Earth until it came in to land in the dust. We stood there in a cubical capsule made rather like the tank in which Damien Hirst’s shark is decomposing. The door was open and yet we had no breathing equipment. I found some stamps on the floor, which we all thought rather valuable though using them to post letters home as we did probably would not have worked given the lack of post-office staff. Not sure how I got home but I did.

Big day for Poets everywhere – hopefully bigger than usual.

Further nature notes from next door to Bolton’s Training Ground.

It is getting like The Birds here in the mornings; every available car park light is occupied by big black crows, cawing and squabbling. Not sure why our car park is the avian night-club of choice for this area.

If You Can Get It

Currently reading Nice Work by David Lodge. (This is not the cover of my edition but it’s a good picture from the TV series). This was prompted by Andrew Marr’s assertion that he has read War and Peace 15 times though I am afraid I can only muster four goes for any novel. I suppose I might have read RJ Unstead’s History of Britain more than that but I was young.

Anyway, Nice Work does a great job of self-reference if only fleetingly when the author bemoans the fact that he is describing the character of one of his creations while she denies the existence of character itself. All the reference to de-construction of novels and post-structuralism leads you into believing that you are reading a book without plot and character when in fact it is so well designed and plotted that nothing is up for grabs. I first read it when I was in the midst of my transfer from college to factory and the relevance of this has only hit me now.

However, I have not forgotten Mr. Dawkins if only because the new Guinness advert reminded me of him. Apologies if you have seen it. It follows a trio of Guinness drinkers de-evolving very believably back through human history, pre-history and all the stages between now and when we crawled out of the water. They end up as mudskippers who don’t like the taste of the water. The standard caption about good things and waiting appears and in an instant, the whole strange show is clear. I wonder if the idea of running it backwards was there from the start or whether the filmmakers suddenly saw it would work better that way? Of course, running it forwards would have left showing the product until the end but either way it was brilliantly made with a great punch line. Back to the standard of the surfers/white horses again.

Nature Notes:-

There was a gang of crows mobbing a kestrel over the car park this morning. I stood and watched them for a while but they got too far away to see the outcome. It made me wonder who would actually win if it came to beak versus claw. My dad would know.

The Wind That Stalks The Rice Fields

The intended topic of this entry has been suspended. How delusional do you have to be? It will take a lot more that this to make the rest of the world collapse at your feet – where are the celebrations today and how far from the aims of a peaceful existence does celebration of this put you? I know that the result is oblivion not paradise. I believed in the gods swooping low over the rice fields, fattening the grains after eating their fill from the offerings given by grateful and peaceful families, slaking their spiritual thirsts from the Coca-Cola left out by the happy, smiling children. And the dead walked with the living, talking with them, just across a tiny boundary, not in paradise but walking with their families on this earth, through the water and volcanic rock that makes this island so fertile. And the sweeping destroyer of worlds is swept from his course across the forests, blown clear by damning madness from the real world, where my prayer is the only right one and no other belief can possibly explain where I come from. I know where all this comes from; the inevitable dark marks and lesions on the brains of everyone, the black swooping fear of future. As people spread the papers over the floor this morning, the same papers I read like some colonial white-suit in the foyer of my hotel, they will see the end result, the cells of skin and bone and brain separated from any chance of enlightenment, and clamour for revenge and more death, up in the sky. They will pray and save for a decent funeral, the beautiful white calf of the rich and the poor storage in the ground before the proper ending sends them over the edge to take the offerings.

And the children will smile and go more hungry, and no war will come, no return to the horror that this island has know in only the last 40 years. They always try the wrong places. A few dead after such terrible things have already gone before will only make it more wrong. And the gods will swoop and return, roaring down to make rice, to make food, to make life and take it in proportion. And who has lost?