Some of Your English Pounds

I found myself dragged into some dark areas of the internet this morning, though it wasn't anything illegal and I suppose that the average teenager wouldn't even have realised why it was dark. What struck me was how close any website is to something that your mother might have warned you about all those years ago. Anyway, it started with this Stephen Fry entry about The BBC and the Future of Broadcasting which, I was pleased to see, mentioned The Men From the Ministry, which has happily gained a Wikipedia entry since I last wrote about it. I certainly recognise the gradual seepage of Radio 4 programmes into my memory as I was occupied with other things. Radio 4 is obviously middle-class but with a strange, radical edge which almost makes its fans into Heroes of the Revolution in a sort of tweedy way. It is rare that something on Radio 4 will not hold my attention for at least a little while; even if the subject is not entirely interesting, the general ambience of the way the sound is produced on every show from the Archers to Gardener's Question Time has a comforting affect, a link back to the carefree days of playing under the kitchen table with the radio on and the rain pouring down outside.

And it did rain a lot. So many people have remarked casually, without expecting any rebuff, about how Summer never used to be like this. They are wrong! Go out in a thunderstorm at night and what you remember most are the memories created by the dominant sense - sight - so you recall only the flashes of illumination created by the intermittent lightning. And with longer memories, you remember more of the hot and sunny days than the manky, grey ones. Most of the memories of our lives are interpolated from the short flashes of what we really do remember. And of course we remember what we want to remember. Seems I am right.

I am trying to write by these rules from a certain Mr Blair.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These come from this essay on Politics and the English Language. I'm not sure he followed his own rules for writing the last one unless it is meant to be a self-referential joke. I was going to say 'witticism' but that would be against the rules. The trouble is that most of what I write here is just wittering anyway and therefore in some meta-sense, ignores most of the rules. Just had to decide whether "therefore" should remain in that sentence.

So much of what I have been reading recently, reminds me of how much I write is in note form, with personal pronouns missing etc. I need to do some stuff which follows the rules and actually means something. I keep returning to a paragraph of Mrs Dalloway which is perfectly written :

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where—such was her darkness; when suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it, she said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that he was mad! Turning, the shelf fell; down, down she dropped. For he was gone, she thought—gone, as he threatened, to kill himself—to throw himself under a cart! But no; there he was; still sitting alone on the seat, in his shabby overcoat, his legs crossed, staring, talking aloud.

I have blockquoted it before but it is always worth reading again, historical, affecting and evocative and as far as I can tell, sticking pretty much to Orwell's rules. Argue with me if you like but it will not make me think any less of the piece. I've often said that good cliché, carried through robustly is sometimes very powerful. And of course I would suspect that the majority of people don't recognise cliché as being anything to suspect. We are stifled by our desire not to appear uncool though what the definition of uncool actually is varies and in fact switches between extremes in the same way that U and non-U word use switches as various classes adopt what they see as aspirational values and others abandon the use as... I was going to write passé but that is an unnecessary foreign phrase and I should expand the term. ... as attached to a class which they do not wish to be associated with. Oh dear - I think that sentence counts as barbarous. I thought of this today when I saw a picture attached to the web page of a developer. It could be seen either as a naff attempt to look cool - rugged pose, sunglasses, delicately poised guitar in the background or a joke.

I leave you with a phrase which hopefully* I will expand in another post and that is :

Imagining the exotic; a sort of paranoia.

* There is nothing in the rules about split infinitives.