Stating The Obvious (Sometimes Useful)

Expect the unexpected.

The obvious truth of the seemingly obvious cliche revealed itself again today, when I genuinely didn't expect it. If I had known in advance how bad it got for around five hours I would have panicked, which, of course, would have been worse than useless. As it was I had no choice but to grin and bear it  which I just about managed to do. I think.

The Beautiful Game

Checked my phone for the overnight footy results on waking at 5.55 am, and the world came alive with light, a burden lifted. But where do Liverpool fans disappear to when you spend the day looking for them to taunt? - that's what I'd like to know.

By the way, Gentle Reader, I know you're thinking: This old man only posts about the beautiful game when it goes well for his team. And you're right. Utterly childish - so, deal with it.

A Wry Observation

It's good to be busy, I said just now to the Missus, but perhaps not quite as busy as this. 

Strong Stuff

I enjoyed the first half of Ken Follett's A Column of Fire more than I did the second. Don't get me wrong, it's a good read from start to finish, keeping up pace and energy, but I couldn't quite buy into the main characters' close involvement in just about every key event of Elizabeth's reign, and the treatment of the gunpowder plot in the final segment struck me as a coincidence too far. But a great way for a young reader to get acquainted with the period.

Funnily enough the Parisian segments struck me as having some of the raw power of The Pillars of the Earth. The chapter on the St Bartholomew's Day massacre generated a real sense of dread - and dreadful loss. I suppose not knowing all that much about the episode was helpful in my case. For some reason I kept having flashbacks to a very early episode of Doctor Who which had a considerable effect on my younger self. Strong stuff for an eight-year-old. The BBC didn't hold back in those days.

At Ease

We found ourselves late this evening in one of those slightly upmarket coffeeshops characteristic of the times in which we live. The sort of place one tends to take for granted, yet which would have seemed exotic in the extreme when I was a callow youth. I'm told it opens for a full twenty-four hours a day - which, even today, seems a touch exotic. Just round the corner from this hostelry was a large supermarket, which we popped into before heading home, just to check-out the bananas. Closing time was a more-than-reasonable 11.00 pm. Again, unimaginable in days of yore.

In the event we gave the bananas a miss since they weren't up to expectations, and drove home from the north of the island in a comfortable twenty-five minutes or so on the excellent highway.

This all sounds a bit like an advertisement for this Far Place, and in a small way it is. It's useful to remind oneself occasionally of how much can be available to us simply by the good luck of being in the right place at the right time.

Far Away

It's Maureen's birthday today. Not sure how much that will mean to her, given her current circumstances. Hope she's achieving some decent quality of life in the home and is longer retreating into the solving emptiness she's seemed to look for in recent years.

It occurs to me that we actually got on very well as brother & sister, and rather took that for granted. Those days seem a long way off.

In Response

I'm into one of those phases when I'm not really interested in listening to much else than Messiaen. This came upon me over the weekend when I gave a spin to Des Canyons Aux Etoiles and realised just how much I loved the piece, possibly even more than the Turangalila Symphony. It was the humour of the music that got to me, something I've never quite taken in before. The bursts of birdsongs are often funny in a kind of charming, Disneyesque manner. At least, that is, to this listener. Since I don't quite know what the standard response is meant to be, I'm sort of inventing my own. 

Still Sad

I remember reading Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey in one of Jack Connelly's lessons and feeling the impact of But hearing oftentimes / The still sad music of humanity. Suddenly I understood why Jack thought of WW as a genius. Odd to think that even at a callow 17 years old I thought myself capable of hearing that music. 

Heard it again today. And thought of myself, Peter, Simon and Sam the dog walking in the great poet's steps in the Wye Valley, in another life.

A Bit Sad

A funny sort of day. For the most part it went well for me, though I needed to deal with a sore back. Even then it was just sore, which is a lot, lot better than painful, and easy to live with. Yet somehow it felt like a sad day. Not my sadness, exactly, but my dispiriting awareness of the sadness of others.

Case in point, a devastating report on Sky News in the early evening about the dire state of hospitals for children in Afghanistan. Trying to count one's own many blessings in the shadow of such truth just feels monumentally selfish. This is territory that goes beyond words. They don't just fail; they become obtrusively irrelevant.

Taking Sides

Have been enjoying reading Ken Follett's A Column of Fire and will be continuing to do so, since I'm only just over the half-way mark. Well-crafted story-telling with some genuine insights into life in Elizabethan times. Having said that, it lacks the almost mythic power of The Pillars of the Earth. There were moments when the earlier novel transcended craft but it would have been foolish to have expected that level of inspiration to be replicated, and I didn't. But I did expect a good tale, and definitely got that - in fact, several neatly inter-woven stories.

And another thing I like about Follett: he does decency so well. Sometimes it's nice to know whose side you should be on.

Endings

Watched the ending of Shakespeare's The Tempest twice today, switching between two productions on DVD I've been showing to a class to whom I've been teaching the play. What a strange play it is. We know perfectly well how it will end from the beginning: Prospero will reveal himself to all and be acknowledged as the true Duke of Milan, and will marry his daughter off to the king's son in the process, and all will be well. Except it won't, will it?

Nothing has really changed at the end. Perfidy is acknowledged, but hardly punished. Indeed, it's kind of accepted as being an inherent aspect of what it is to be human. Art changes nothing, but eases our passage through the storms that necessarily assail us. There's nothing remotely uplifting about the end of the comedy. Yet it offers a melancholy satisfaction in its absolute honesty.

By the way, the two Prosperos I've been watching, Roger Allam in one of those productions at the Globe and Simon Russell Beale from an RSC production at Stratford, could hardly have been more different in their approaches - Allam being wonderfully crowd-pleasing and Beale disturbingly intense. And I loved both.

Beyond Compare

It suddenly occurred to me the other day that there were likely to be a number of videos featuring Ella Fitzgerald singing live available on the Internet. Funnily enough my listening to the greatest female singer of the twentieth century has tended to be restricted to material recorded in the studio, though the live stuff I managed to hear was deeply impressive.

Anyway, I've put things right of late by watching and listening to a great deal of the great lady live and I can tell you it's stunning. Utterly flawless. A complete joy. My favourite at the moment is an improvised sequence with the Count Basie band at Montreux from 1979. Quite late in her career, but her voice has lost none of its youthful exuberance. Not quite sure why this is entitled A Tisket a Tasket since she doesn't actually sing her first ever hit, but who cares when something sounds this good?

(By the way, here's a link to the actual song, and if it doesn't make you cheerful you need serious help.)

At Random

Struggled big time with back pain today, the ache being, unusually for me, centred on my lower vertebrae, right in the middle of my back. Sitting down for any length of time proved uncomfortable, but trying to stand up took on the proportions of a considerable ordeal. Fortunately, once on the move the discomfort was comparatively mild, so I was able to function reasonably well at work.

I suppose the most annoying thing about all this is that the pain came yesterday out of nowhere, as I sat to do some work with no undue rushing that might have served to bring it on. It just seems so arbitrary and impossible to protect against. But there's a good side to that; sometimes we need a reminder that life isn't fair, especially when it's generally been more than fair to us in the big things. As I've said before, with ironic clumsiness: A little suffering never hurt anybody. How dumb, eh? But how strangely true.

Looking Ahead

Contrived to keep myself busy, despite this being a holiday for schools for National Day, by taking a group of students to SolarLand at the Changi Business Park. It's Singapore's largest ground-mounted solar farm and gently impressive in its way. I had a feeling I might be looking at the future, and not a bad one all told. Certainly better than the one I tend to imagine in bleaker moments.

In Celebration

Time was we'd invariably escape to Malaysia when the National Day holiday came. But the pandemic has changed everything. We didn't think at all of going north this time round, choosing instead to spend much of the day in a hotel on Sentosa for a birthday celebration of one of our nieces.

To be honest, I was happy to escape a long drive in heavy traffic and spend time scoffing pizza and birthday cake. Also managed to watch some of the National Day parade on the telly. Not exactly gripping viewing, but nice to see folks enjoying themselves. It helps that so much of the celebration emphasises the need to transcend the loyalties of race & religion, with a firm stress on inclusivity. Much as I distrust nationalism, this version is at least fundamentally sane.

In The Moment

Feeling - happily tired after a day of not doing very much of anything;

Complaining - about a stiffness in my left leg and on my left side at the back which has prevented me from getting to the gym;

Wondering - why I haven't listened to any music today, except for a Bach chorale I tried to get to the grips with in SAC earlier today, but which got drowned by by the ambient noise, of which there was lots;

Listening - to the telly in the background;

Speaking - only when necessary;

Eating - well, and thinking of grabbing a couple of pieces of bread before I hit the sack;

Writing - this. All very spontaneous.

Still A Bit Mundane

Did a bit of marking, including that pesky Oral I've been moaning about, but generally the day was dedicated most effectively to relaxing. This involved a bit of reading - now well into Follett's A Column of Fire, and just starting out on a rereading of Archie Ammons's Garbage, my personal favourite long poem of the twentieth century - and listening - to 4, 5 and 6 of the Brandenburgs this morning, as essayed by Trevor Pinnock and his merry men and women of the English Concert on a disk that's now some forty years old and still sounds fresh, and Sufjan Stevens's Carrie & Lowell this afternoon.

Then it was off to West Coast Park to enjoy a walk and a sunset. Lovely to see the barbecue pits open again and the tents littering the grass with the place now fully alive. And after that: tasty prata at Clementi Road.

It's all happening, in its quietly ordinary way. Most satisfactory. Some evidence above.

On The Mundane

Spent part of the day at the mosque for the solemnization of Udin's wedding and subsequently at Kak Kiah's for some nosh - though going home in between to get some marking done. Resolutely decided not to deal with the extra Oral from the IBO I was moaning about yesterday.

Was struck in retrospect by the complete triviality of my post on said Oral from yesterday evening and, in its way, the smallness of today's proceedings. We are blessed to enjoy the peace to make much of little. 

It Isn't Over Until It's Over

Recently I've been engaged in some re-marking for the IBO. This involves listening to various Orals from kids who've appealed for re-marking after getting their grades for English from the May examination. To be honest, this work doesn't come at a good time given all that's going on in my day-job. But someone's got to do it, I suppose. The really irritating thing is that you're never given notice of just how many reviews you'll need to do. I keep thinking I've cleared all the work, which has to be completed in under 3 days, only to find yet another Oral in my Inbox that requires attention. The funny thing is that since I'm now getting just one 'extra' each time it's hardly an overwhelming load, but just the one increasingly feels like one far too many. 

Sleepiness

I'm not quite sure why I felt so sleepy today, but I did. If I hadn't been sleeping terribly well, I could understand it, but I reckon I've enjoyed quite a few nights of solid, restful sleep lately, so when I started nodding over some marking in the early afternoon it came as a surprise. And it wasn't the fault of the essays I was marking. In fact, I'm at that time of year when marking becomes that bit more interesting since I'm seeing those more obvious signs of progress in individual scripts that signal genuine development, which has a kind of fascination all its own, moving beyond a predictable routine.

I suspected that once I got back home I'd find myself crashing out for an hour or so, and that's exactly what happened. Sadly I managed to do so listening to Mozart's Haffner Symphony which made me feel especially guilty since I'd recently been reading an article that pointed out how much modern listeners take for granted the accessibility of wonderful music and abuse that privilege. And here's something to reflect on: if I start moaning about a lack of concentration on the part of the young people I teach then it will more than a little hypocritical. I suppose I'll just have to claim my advanced years as an excuse. Come to think of it, that often comes in handy these days.

Satisfaction

There's something highly satisfactory about following a demanding session at the gym with a deeply fulfilling dinner from The Missus. Now feeling completely cream-crackered in the nicest possible way. 

Reading On

Forgot to mention yesterday that I've moved on from Ishiguro and my furrowed brow to the luminous clarity of Ken Follett. I came across a handsome paperback in the library at work of one of his follow-ups to The Pillars of the Earth, this being set quite a bit later in history but in the same location as Pillars, the fictional Kingsbridge. The opening pages of A Column of Fire rendered exactly what I needed, a solid story that I just know is going to grip me. A bit like comfort eating I suppose, but a lot classier and genuinely rewarding.

Some Consolation

Did a bit of reading online about The Unconsoled yesterday after posting about my puzzlement in regard to the novel. Was a bit relieved that I hadn't missed anything too obvious in relation to what Ishiguro was up to in his fourth book - after all, as someone who purports to teach Lit I'm supposed to be good at this sort of thing. In fact, most of what I read confirmed aspects of my own reading of the text - its nods to Kafka, the dream-logic involved, the sense of dread.

I'm very pleased indeed that I didn't try and look up anything about the novel whilst reading it since I'm sure that would have diluted my own sense of anxiety as I read, a response that seems to me (now, after reading around) central in terms of Ishiguro's curious achievement. I was haunted throughout by a feeling it would all turn out badly, that some dreadful humiliation was in store for Ryder, the narrator. And I think that's exactly what the writer wanted: to force the reader into recognition of the kind of vulnerability we all live with as part of the human condition, except here intensified, as it is in dreams. The contradiction is, though, that nobody would want to read the book twice - certainly I know I'd never want to repeat the experience, salutary as it was the first time around.

The most useful aspect of yesterday's further reading was the light it shone on the title. I came across the suggestion that Ryder is continually attempting to give consolation to the 'ordinary' people who cross his path as he prepares (or, rather, fails to prepare) for the big concert. In each case he fails the character and they remain unconsoled. That works for me, especially when extended to include the idea that his art fails to give consolation.

I had a nagging suspicion when reading the novel that Ishiguro might have been drawing on his own experiences, especially anxieties, on book tours having become quite the star, and rightly so, after The Remains of the Day. I must say, that feeling has grown on me since yesterday as I've been recalling various aspects of the work. Funnily enough, although I have absolutely no desire to ever reread the book I'm certain I'll remember quite a lot of it - which is unusual for me.

I remain perplexed by a number of loose ends in relation to the text that I just can't thread together, and in that sense I'm thinking of the book as a failure. But a brilliant and audacious one. What a risk to take after the success of Remains!