The trouble is that the sense of powerlessness is overwhelming. It seems to me reasonable to suspect that it's rivalry within the various players involved in the internal politics of Israeli that's driving this particular circuit of human misery, and there's not a lot any of us can do about that.
Another trouble is that the long term consequences of all this are likely to be dire for all concerned, not least the Israelis themselves.
The pain has been getting steadily worse since mid-November. Whenever I went walking in Manchester the less-than-dignified sensation of having a buttock in spasm convinced me I'd pulled a hamstring muscle and the cold was making it worse. Since starting work, in a hot climate, the spreading of the pain to my lower leg made me realise I had to get to see a doctor, yet failed to ring the alarm bells regarding what might be going on in my back. I suppose this was because I haven't got the slightest sense of discomfort actually in my lower back, but equally I guess I was in spectacular denial.
Anyway my target now is to survive a week of work and get to an expert next Saturday and see where we go from there. Fortunately I'm still on my feet and usually able to handle the discomfort of being upright long enough to negotiate the day. However, the steadily advancing increments of disability do make me wonder if some kind of catastrophic state is just around the corner. I've been there before, though a long, long time ago, so I'm all too aware of the possibility.
In the meantime, the fact that there are lots of folk a lot worse off than I am doesn't so much offer comfort as a healthy dose of perspective.
I'd suggest that this is well worth a look, particularly by anyone who happens to be engaged in the teaching or study of Theory of Knowledge. There's much to be enjoyed about finding out what has been passed off as knowledge by those who have a vested interest in convincing us they really know something and have the scientific evidence to back them up. Reading Mr Goldacre's fizzing book Bad Science, which I spotted in a bookshop a few days after reading his column, was one of the most satisfying, though sort of alarmingly so, experiences of my holiday and also to be recommended to those who suspect the truth is out there and might be accessed by rational means given enough clarity of thought.
The book does two things, amongst others, extraordinarily well. It explains the abuse of statistics in an accessible manner and alerts the reader to the extent of such abuse in the media. It shows the extent of what individuals stand to gain from deliberate misrepresentations of research bringing home the importance of knowing how we know what we know. In a world that sometimes seems to spin around the twin axes of greed and mendacity the study of Theory of Knowledge suddenly seems extraordinarily relevant.
There's a coldness, a lack of affect (I think that's what psychologists call it) to his teenage protagonists Enid and Rebecca that paradoxically manages to be quite touching, I suppose because it is so obviously willed. They stare out at the reader challengingly, blankly on the back cover, an image that sums up Clowes's strength as an artist - his highly stylised faces evoke rich yet mysterious inner lives in counterpoint to the icily accurate dialogue he gives his characters.
You feel that Clowes knows his characters through and through but carefully selects what he allows his audience to learn about them. There's so much going on in the margins here. This economy gives his stories, insofar as there are actual stories, a kind of pace and leaves you wanting more, yet oddly satisfied that you're not going to get it.
There's a quote from a review on the back cover referring, inevitably, to teenage angst but that doesn't come close to doing justice to the genuine melancholy of the lives on show here or, for that matter, to the reality of people's feelings regardless of their age. The page where Enid finds out she's failed her entrance test to Strathmore (which, of course, she's not supposed to care about) calls out to be read by anyone who's ever celebrated acing their exams.I preferred the first half of the novel, I suppose because of its exhilarating sense of youthful vigour, its evocation of the can-do spirit that marks the real America of the mind. That's not to say that the later part was disappointing - it remained unputdownable, which was a good job considering the multitude of distractions I had at hand once we'd arrived in Manchester with still a good half of the novel left to read. But I must admit I never quite got the point of the ins and outs of the protagonists' romantic and family lives. However, Joe (Kavalier) and Sammy (Clay) were instantly engaging, likeable characters so there was always that sense of wanting to know what would become of them simply for the sake of knowing.
The first half is also where the heady glory of comic books is evoked. Chabon makes more than a case for their importance as an art form: he utterly convinces the reader that they were probably the premier form of expression in the visual arts of the period. He is also convincing on our deep-rooted need for adventures we can escape into, and I was grateful for the ride.
It's not a terrible show. The girls and Noi and myself had a passably enjoyable afternoon. But it was all very ordinary. The performances were good (well with Lea Salonga in the title role you're not likely to be watching amateurs), the costumes fine, the orchestra first rate, the sets pretty (but for the price of the tickets I would have thought we might have got something that looked expensive. With the exception of a single interior, it didn't.) But the show itself didn't seem to know what it wanted to be. It felt like panto, but lacked the energy. There were (long) stretches of romance & yearning, but it wasn't in any real sense trying to be romantic. Actually it felt lazy.
Most disappointing of all, and I never thought I'd find myself saying this - as far as I could tell Richard Rogers's score had nothing outstanding about it. Most of the songs felt like generic syrupy late-fifties ballads. Whenever the music came in, the oumph went out. It was all so ordinary. I just kept wishing I was at Carousel again.
Burslem's glories were fading then. The rather grand town hall stood empty, but next to it was a modern building named Ceramica, a kind of museum of the Potteries. There was a sense of something remaining and the faint possibility of renewal. Now those glories have gone completely. The factory outlet closed at least four years ago, but the closing down sign remains. Ceramica was empty when we went just before Christmas. (For refurbishment? No information.) The antique shops are boarded up and the boards themselves are decaying.
Three years ago we went into an arts centre there. On display were poignant photographs of workers making their way home form the final shift when the last working factory for Royal Doulton in Burslem closed. That had been just a year or so previously. This year the centre was closed (or looked it. We didn't try to get in. I didn't want to see the same pictures still there, just older.)
We stood on the hill that rises above the empty town hall. A cliched but all too real chill wind was blowing. Two days before Christmas and hardly a soul around. Still, I suppose this is what comes everywhere in the end, at that moment when history has passed you by.
We didn't notice the full glory of the shop sign above until just before Christmas, when we were picking up some Christmas wrapping (cheap!) from a store across the road. I suggested to Noi that it might be a good thing to demand that all shops display similar lengthy statements of their underlying philosophies. Perhaps doing so might render the world of retailing just a little less bland? Anyone capable of seeing paradise in Longsight would get my custom.
It's easy to make my case. The first week we were there Radio 3's Composer of the Week was Olivier Messiaen. Can you believe it? Everyday, for an hour, in-depth coverage of the great man's life and music, expertly illuminating comment, illustrated by choice excerpts. And the week after Messiaen featured heavily in various concerts, along with music that influenced him. And this was just a small part of what was on offer. It's not just that the music gets played, but also that the listener is being educated concerning what the music is doing by the accompanying commentary. Suddenly I felt not quite so alone in my tastes.
And not just music. What about Adam Phillips's series of late night essays on Excess run a week or two before Christmas? There were more insights in each 15 minute programme than you might get from a year of back-to-back documentaries on the Discovery Channel.
Then there was the half hour feature on Radio 4 about Ezra Pound's caging at the end of the war and the resulting Pisan Cantos. We listened to that on the way to Paul and Joy's and I didn't want it to finish. And then there was Radio 2's broadcasting of the gems constituting the Bob Dylan Radio Hour. Possibly the most joyful material ever committed to the airwaves, anywhere, anytime.
And all this is, to all intents and purposes, free.
The result of our little colloquium has been to knock the wind out of my sails at the time I was considering my Resolutions for the year ahead. I had been thinking of recycling, in modified form, the three from last January, but I'll settle for the following to be at one with the prevailing mood: Hunker down. Stay lean, possibly mean. Keep going.
