An uncompromisingly wet day here, and it's still pouring down. Wouldn't be surprised if there were floods somewhere on the island.
I was happy to stay indoors, though I did need to brave the rain getting to Friday Prayers. Mind you, with The Missus providing a lift to and from the masjid that isn't quite the challenge it used to be. And praying in congregation in the safe dryness of Masjid Darussalam was probably the highlight of a gently satisfactory day.
When we were in the UK in December we managed to catch the excellent tv series, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, made in relation to the Post Office scandal. It made for grimly compulsive viewing. In a very limited sense there was a 'feel good' aspect to the dramatisation in terms of the courage and resilience of Alan Bates and the other falsely accused subpostmasters featured. But it left this viewer facing a genuinely puzzling conundrum: How could those at the highest levels of the organisation have behaved for so long in so thoroughly despicable a manner? What happened to their simple sense of decency?
And then today I stumbled across what I think is the answer, courtesy of a clip from the official inquiry on YouTube featuring the closing remarks of Edward Henry QC. He argues that the board wanted control of their employees and sought this through the Horizon software later shown to be full of glitches. At the point when they could have responded appropriately to the complaints about the failing computer system they did not want to accept the truth about how faulty the software was as this would deny them the control they believed it had afforded them.
This explanation works for me. The great danger for those who are successful is how easy it is to make the terrible assumption that they are genuinely superior to 'ordinary' folk, and fall into the trap of thinking how, somehow, those folk don't matter quite as much as their superiors.
In the final chapters of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning Laurie Lee really transcends the personal. The two chapters dealing with his experiences in the little village of Almunecar by the sea afford great insight into just how quickly Spain descended into civil war once the Republic was established and how horribly inevitable that must have felt at the time. Seeing this through the naively innocent eyes of the memoirist adds to the reader's sense of something close to despair as life in the archetypally Spanish village unravels. It's very much a powerfully unnerving contrast to the predominantly celebratory quality of the descriptions of life in the country in the earlier chapters, even when that life is being dealt with at its most poverty-stricken.
And what a wonderfully evocative writer Lee is, whether he's celebrating or casting shadows. There's something to savour in almost every paragraph in terms of striking imagery or fine phrasing, yet it never seems that he's trying too hard. It's clear that this comes naturally to him; it's the way he sees the world.
But I did take slight exception to one usage he employs. In the chapter dealing with the procession of the Virgin in Toro - a typically vivid set-piece - he recounts the townsfolk praising of the Saint thus: so comely, so linda, such an excellent colour... I like comely but since when was linda a word in English? I had to look this one up, and couldn't find it even in the big OED, but fortunately an on-line search pointed to the fact that linda means 'pretty' in Spanish (hence, the English name.) It's a pity he didn't go for pretty, I reckon. A rare misstep. Very rare though in a work that comes close to perfection as far as I'm concerned.
I'd had it in mind to write about my stint at the gym this evening before going there. I was intending to write about managing to get back into the swing of things in the week since re-starting regular exercise. The hypothetical post would sound mildly triumphant in a suitably humble and reflective manner.
In the event I struggled more than I did a week ago and was just happy to finish. Which tends to be the way of things these days, now I come to think of it. Reality, as it so often does, bites, and does so deeply.
As I get older (which seems to be taking place all too rapidly these days) I find myself ever more forcefully abhorring the idea of waste and wastefulness - especially my own. So why did it feel so good to throw away so many old, worn-out pairs of sandals, t-shirts and ties yesterday? Not to mention disposing of a fair pile of outdated paperwork.
I suppose it helped me feel lighter, leaner. Just hope the paper gets properly re-cycled and the shirts and ties end up in the possession of some folk who can reasonably make use of them. But the plastic sandals are honestly beyond all redemption.
As the new year got underway we were lacking both a television and CD player in our front room. Hakim took back the big tv we'd been keeping for him in order to install it into his newly renovated apartment and we'd previously thrown away the Samsung with the various blotches on the screen. Meanwhile the Bose system for playing CDs had been sturdily refusing to play any for quite some time and we'd taken it for repair before setting off to the UK. We'd thought about buying another player given the high cost of repair but in our Brave New World such players can't be bought in shops any more it seems and I didn't fancy an on-line purchase. We picked up the repaired player again yesterday and bought a new tv, a good deal smaller than Hakim's monster set a day or so earlier. So now we are fully equipped.
We'd not really had time to miss having a telly as we were without for just a couple of days but I was beginning to feel the lack of a CD player. It was easy enough to listen to music from various sources on headphones but I was missing getting up close to what I owned on CD, which weirdly continues to feel more real and there than stuff that's streamed or from YouTube. I'm aware, by the way, that that's a completely irrational notion, but weirdness reigns on that front in my case.
So it felt like a bit of a relief to hear the sounds from the CDs I'd got hold of in the UK filling the room this morning. All the work of old favourites - the Kid A Mnesia set from Radiohead, and the latest offerings from Peter Gabriel and Richard Thompson - with the older chaps very much sounding like themselves despite the newness of the material. An element of comfort listening here, I suppose.
Which reminds me that in the interests of keeping these old ears suitably keen I need to avoid bunging on music as background and must actively strive to pay full attention, even to what is familiar. Oh, and I must also keep said ears open to new sounds worth listening to wherever I can find them.
Leaving behind what seemed to me the astringent prose of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain (I assume it sounds such in the original Japanese) for the lush lyricism of Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was a very good idea for this reader. I'd forgotten just how brilliant Lee is in his memoirs in conjuring place and mood in vivid, convincing detail. The evocation of the relentless Spanish sun and parched landscape surely can never be bettered. He simply takes you there with him as a sort of invisible companion.
But here's a bit of a conundrum. Many years back, after teaching the equally wonderful Cider With Rosie for 'O' level - to English kids - I got hold of Lee's Selected Poems in a Penguin paperback. I thought I was in for riches, but nothing in the slim volume worked for me. And the same is true today. I read a few of the poems on the early pages, composed at the time of the poet's sojourn in Spain, and not a single one matched any of the paragraphs in the memoir. The poem Music in a Spanish Town is about Lee playing his violin on the streets of Cordoba. In As I Walked Out... every description of his playing the violin as a way of earning the pennies he needs to keep going is deeply engaging, yet the poem seemed to me simply okay-ish.
I suspect as I happily read on in the memoir that I'll hardly bother to cross-refer to the Selected in hopes of further moments of reading pleasure. I'm dealing with a surfeit thereof as it is.
Noi mentioned just now that she'd heard something about flooding in Stockport. Since I'd been there in December to watch County in action and we'd enjoyed the Christmas panto at the Stockport Plaza I felt sort of obliged to find out what was going on and came upon this in the on-line version of the Manchester Evening News. Must say, it doesn't sound good for those caught up in the mess created by the overflowing River Tame - which was never much more than a bit of a trickle in the Denton & Haughton Green of my childhood.
In fact, reading about floods in various locations in the land of my birth has become something of a feature of the winters of the last few years. Not sure what climate-change-denialists might make of this innocent but accurate observation.
When we were in Manchester Noi and I watched a documentary late one night about the floods of 2023 which had wiped away the happy Christmases of quite a number of folks. It felt like uncomfortably voyeuristic viewing, to be honest, reducing the misery of others to a sort of late night entertainment. It's funny to think that as a kid I was rightly reminded of how lucky I was to live in a country that didn't have to deal too often with natural disasters. Innocence lost, eh?
I didn't get all that much reading done in December. I'd intended to read Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain, which was leant to me by a colleague, but I only finished it yesterday and read the bulk of it on the flight back. I got stuck reading it on the outward journey, bogged down by my inability to sort out the relationships in the family of its protagonist, Shingo Ogata. I suppose I expected something lyrically poetic, in the vein of Snow Country, and felt thwarted initially by the simple ordinariness of the action, or lack of it, in Tokyo. It does have its poetic moments, but these are embedded in what initially seemed to me day-by-day flat dreariness. Later it came to me that that was precisely the point and things picked up in terms of my readiness to apply myself to detail and grasp what was going on. But even then I felt I was missing a lot in the way of nuance. Must say, I'm glad there's no danger of me ever teaching the novel.
My watchwords for 2025: Leaner and Keener.
Leaner, such that the unnecessary is to be discarded; keener, in that the necessary will be paid due attention.
(That sounds more determined than I really feel, but in an Age of Appearances at least I can seek to look the part.)
