Utterly Juvenile

I have just one Australian colleague, the estimable Blake, and, astonishingly, it turns out he knows nothing about cricket. He genuinely had no idea at all of the Aussies' recent Ashes humiliation at the hands of the English tourists. Can you believe that? There was absolutely no point in rubbing it in as it meant nothing to him. A glorious and, let's face it, rare opportunity wasted.

Fortunately there are lots of Liverpool fans around in the staffroom. Hah!

Looking Back - Book Of The Year

If I had to nominate a single tome as my book of 2010 it would have to be Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, her Booker-winning novel about that wily young/old fox Thomas Cromwell. I started to read it on the plane going to England, finishing it about two weeks later, having deliberately taken it as slowly as possible just to savour its delights. Finally the ins and outs of the tyrant Henry's reign made sense.

And what a creation her Cromwell is! A convincingly Tudor man (I almost write gentleman, but he isn't - well not in Tudor terms) allied to an almost modern sensibility, the result of his being just about as self-made as it's possible a man might be. I think that Ms Mantel is more than a little in love with him herself, and no wonder. Her Thomas More is equally convincing - convincingly repulsive. I felt an urgent need to re-read Ackroyd's biography, and the saint's own Utopia and A Dialogue of Comfort, just to check how accurate our Booker-winner is. I suspect she's spot-on and I need to seriously reconsider just about every one of my original opinions.

The marvelous thing is that whilst Wolf Hall is a distinctly literary read, being literate in the very best sense, it's also easy to see it as a genuinely popular novel. It's simply a great read. And there's going to be a sequel! Yowza!!!

Looking Back - Travelling Tunes

In the interests of full disclosure, and because I like lists, here's what I brought back from Manchester on the music front: Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes (already the subject of a confession in a previous post); Arthur Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire by The Kinks; The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys by Traffic; Lennon's Plastic Ono Band; Springsteen's The Promise; K.T. Tunstall's Tiger Suit; All Delighted People and The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens; and, gulp, the Original Movie Soundtrack of Grease. The last of these was a birthday present for the missus. Honest.

No spoken word stuff this time. It's largely dried up in the shops. The Waterstone's on Deansgate used to have several shelves devoted to the same, as did HMV. Now it's hard to spot. I suppose interested parties obtain it on-line. In fact, generally the range of books available seems to have been reduced. Fewer philosophy shelves at the aforementioned Waterstone's, for example, though, in fairness, the poetry section has not shrunk.

But, going back to the music, I was pleased to note that the big HMV in Manchester is making some kind of attempt to provide a fair range. I was heartened to find the Traffic, Yes and Kinks' CDs there and could have bought a few more if I'd had room in the luggage - though not the full catalogues by any means.

I'm a bit concerned by my retreating into the past though. That's why I bought the K.T. Tunstall disc, to get something reasonably current that I wasn't familiar with. I heard her live on Radio 2 and was quite impressed so I thought I'd give it a go. Toe-tapping stuff, but a bit light. I may see what Fifi thinks of it. It's nice that the BBC goes out of its way now to promote live coverage of bands.

And, of course, you can't get more current than the wildly eccentrically creative Mr Stevens. The Adz album is like a huge, multi-layered cake of extraordinarily sweet delights. Everything seems to be in there, including the tuneful kitchen sink. Does this kind of thing ever win Grammys? Does it need to?

Looking Back - Speaking Freely

A comedian called Frankie Boyle got himself into a bit of bother when we were in England as a result of comments he made (on tv, I think) regarding the backward child of a rather vacuous celebrity model, followed (a couple of weeks later) by his use of some pretty unpleasant racial epithets. Mind you, I'm not sure it would be appropriate to say he'd got himself into trouble. Based on the maxim that any publicity is good publicity he'd probably made an astute career move.

I've seen the guy now a few times on one of the many programmes that feature fast-talking, witty comics doing their bit with their fellows in an improvisatory setting - commenting on the news, that sort of thing - and he struck me as pretty clever, sometimes quite funny, generally entertaining and not terribly pleasant. (Think Thersites in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.) But then few of these chaps are. The humour involved in such programmes is nearly always less than generous, indeed essentially reductive in nature with a slightly desperate, competitive air about it.

Having said that, I'm broadly in favour of allowing this kind of thing air-time. Sometimes a bit of nastiness is good for us. Sometimes it's a way of approaching the truth. And I'd rather people be allowed to think these issues through for themselves rather than being told what they're allowed to expose themselves to. Eventually you can simply turn Mr Boyle off if you want and I don't really buy into the idea that somehow this kind of thing poisons a society.

Except: where is the line between honest outspokenness and hate-speech? I think there is one. What I found interesting about this particular fuss over Boyle's comments is that he seems to be treading that line. The devil here really is in the details - he's always worth looking out for - and that makes the fuss worthwhile. I hope.

Looking Back - The Other Side of the Coin

On recent visits to Britain I've found myself critical of the coinage. Basically it's a mess. There's no sense of order or logic to the size, shape and colour of coins there; at least, none that I can see.

This year, however, I found myself rather enjoying the mess, finding it a refreshing change from the predictable neatness of, say, the coins here, or those in use with the Euro. The sheer bloody-mindedness of British coins points to something deeply comforting (and disturbing) in the national character. Now, if only they'd bring back the old threepenny bit and tanner...

Looking Back - Slightly Chilled

I didn't get as much reading done in Manchester as I would have liked. But this is always the case when there's so much for us to do over there and only four weeks to do it in. I read a lot in terms of newspapers and magazines as there was an awful lot of good material available, but that seemed to interfere with the usual flow of my regular reading.

A book I made reasonable progress with, however, was the American Fantastic Tales volume edited by Peter Straub, the one featuring material From Poe to the Pulps. Every story had something to recommend it but, interestingly, hardly any proved to be genuinely frightening. It wasn't until I was some two-thirds of the way through that I read something that actually got under the old skin, the story in question being Edith Wharton's Afterward. The slow, steady building of unease was done to perfection and I reminded of reading M.R. James as a kid, wanting yet not wanting to read on, knowing that bad dreams would follow. But there wasn't much else that chilled me in that way.

Having said that, the 'pulp' stories at the end of the volume - Derleth, Lovecraft and that mob - which I finished over here in the last few days, were tremendous fun simply as tales. I just enjoyed the sheer verve of the telling.

I'm contemplating moving on now to the second later volume with Straub providing lots of contemporary stuff - including himself and his old mate Stephen King. I suspect there may be some genuine shocks in store. It would nice to be comfortably frightened again.

Looking Back - The Big Chill

Sweltering my way through a soggily humid afternoon in Singapore it's difficult to believe that a couple of weeks ago I was chilled to the bone, nay, the very marrow. But I was, as the pictures above bear silently shivering witness.

Looking Back - On The Street

I surprise myself when I report that two of the most memorable programmes we watched on television back in England related to that most venerable of British 'soaps', Coronation Street. The series has now been going for fifty years and was the centre of its own little nostalgia fest in December. We watched the episode in which the script writers arranged the demise of a fair number of the cast through various explosions and a train plunging from a viaduct, but this was not terribly memorable, except for provoking Noi to laughter when various of the denizens of the street started running towards the scene of the disaster in ungainly fashion. The acting's as bad as Malaysia, she chortled.

No, it was the re-broadcast of the first ever episode, from 1960, that really stood out as fine television, along with a BBC drama entitled The Road To Coronation Street which was a kind of celebration of that event, focusing on how the creator, Tony Warren, moved heaven, earth and Granada TV to get his work on screen. And celebrated it should have been. As a little boy I took the Street for granted as something rather old-fashioned that adults enjoyed because it was all a little dull - like real life. The point I missed then was that that was what was revolutionary about the enterprise. Ordinary Manchester people, speaking in an ordinary Manchester way, about ordinary Manchester stuff. It was us on screen.

And that first episode was genuinely good stuff. Tony Warren's script really caught the rhythms, the poetry of everyday speech. And the characters immediately suggested something of the archetypal - especially Pat Phoenix's brilliant Elsie Tanner. No wonder it ran and ran.

Noi was disappointed because they didn't broadcast the second episode. She wanted to know what happened next. But I suppose it would have been a bit much to have repeated the whole fifty years.

Looking Back - On The Ocean

I practised quite a bit of the old teeth gritting whilst in England and restricted my purchases of CDs to what any reasonable person would regard as the bare minimum. Evidence of this is the fact I didn’t buy a single John Martyn CD despite there being plenty on offer, including the wonderful Live at Leeds, and despite the provocation of having listened to the great man at length whilst dining with Simon and Judy.

But I wasn’t able to resist shelling out for Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes. This isn’t because it ranks as one of my favourite pieces, however. In fact, I hardly know it all. When it came out I was a fairly big fan of the band, though I never rated Close To The Edge quite so highly as others did much preferring Fragile and The Yes Album. Also Tales was way too expensive for my pocket. I heard it, or a fair bit of it, once at a friend’s house, didn’t find it terribly stirring, read a number of tepid reviews and decided it was not for me. After that my musical interests drifted away from prog rock generally. In recent years I have found myself thinking over why I felt out of love with groups like Yes and became particularly intrigued by what Tales was actually like, especially since it has, if anything, accumulated more critical flak than anything else by the band over the years, becoming a bit of a by-word for prog excess.

I’ve listened to it a couple of times now and really don’t know what all the fuss was about. Musically it’s unexceptional. It sounds like fairly good though not brilliant Yes of the period. (There’s nothing as exciting as Roundabout, for example.) Pleasant to listen to if you enjoy listening to musicians who can genuinely play, and not much of the aimless noodling and filler I was half expecting.

So why has it attracted such opprobrium over the years, and, indeed, when it was released? My guess is that the audience expected too much. An album full of Roundabouts. And the group didn’t help matters by being so ambitious in terms of the sheer scope of the thing. It’s curious just how often musicians are drawn towards the expansive epic when their talents really lie in shorter, crisper forms. But I don’t see much wrong with ambition if it results in something that can be listened to and enjoyed – and I have enjoyed the voyage, now that I can afford to go on it. Will sail again, soon.

Looking Back

I’ve brought a box of old diaries to Maison KL, to clear these from the Mansion since we’re moving to smaller premises this month. These are simply my appointment diaries stretching back to 1988. I am none too sure why I’m keeping hold of them, actually. Most are showing signs of decay. But I’m finding it difficult to simply throw them out. A sort of clinging to the past, I suppose. I’m reminded of that peculiar genre of reality tv programmes dealing with people enduing cluttered houses due to their inability to part with objects of ‘sentimental value’.

This inability to let go of the past seems to me connected to the kind of wallowing in nostalgia I noted on British television at Christmas time (and possibly in general – I’m only ever there in December so that’s the only time I know.)

But I’m also reminded of another kind of programme I watched back in Manchester. On one channel devoted to the idea of looking back to the past (I forget the actual name of the channel, but it wasn’t the History Channel, though something along those lines) just after Christmas, I caught a series of documentaries one day being run back-to-back on the development of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, with a particular focus on Auschwitz. Needless to say it was uncomfortably devastating stuff. But what was particularly striking was the extraordinary detail given regarding the day-to-day nuts and bolts of the whole ghastly enterprise. Names were named, dates were given. At moments you were back in the meetings in which mass murder was under discussion by ordinary functionaries of the state, a lot like you and me.

This is worth looking back to. This is what we must remember.