Greatness

Listened this afternoon to the Enigma Variations. Was struck, as always, by the beauty and nobility (what other word is there?) of Elgar’s tribute to Jaegar. Okay, I’ll admit it, I can’t listen to Nimrod without a few tears half appearing, and I’d be suspicious of anyone, especially someone English, who could. Or does this most Albionic of tunes appeal to all regardless of nation, race or religion?

This afternoon I suddenly found myself wondering what Jaegar thought when he first heard it. I don’t know enough about the circumstances to know whether he was first exposed to it in the concert hall, or just in the score, but what an incredible shock it must have been. If it had been me I know I’d have been wondering how on earth I could ever match up to something so wonderful as a kind of description of me.

It’s a little bit like the way you feel (or I do) when you get one of those nice tributes students are wont to render around Teachers’ Day, the ones in which it turns out you are the bee’s knees of the profession, and you wonder how on earth you can keep that up for the rest of the year. I always feel highly intimidated. Talk about having greatness thrust upon one.

Then again I suppose old Jaegar might have just put it down to the wonderful generosity of Elgar himself (as one recognizes the charity of one’s students.) Certainly once someone has made something as wonderful as Nimrod because of you I’d think it pretty much would stand as a justification of your existence.

From A New Place

I have 'issues' getting on-line from Maison KL - basically because our phone line is not working for reasons the phone people don't seem to be able to explain (except to say it's a 'technical problem') - so I'm typing this in the Indian restaurant on the hill. The restaurant seems to have had a make over and is hardly recognisable from the last time we were here, proving that everything changes. And change is always good. Except when it's not. Good.

Thinking Ahead

Now planning for a trip tomorrow evening and then over the weekend to our house in KL. We've not been able to get up there for quite a while and this will be our only chance to sort things out before we head off to England In December.

Noi is in charge of the sensible planning whilst I figure out what CDs to take and put in the car. The White Album is already in, as is Sticky Fingers, as I've fallen in love with both again. Oh, and Badly Drawn Boy's The Hour of Bewilderbeast, which I bought on the recommendation of old mate Simon (thanks!), makes the playlist as it is excellent.

Deception

Blimey! They told me that when the going gets tough the tough get going. But they didn't tell me just how tough the going was going to get or where the tough get going to. As far away from the going as they can, I would imagine.

Once or twice over the years (and there are plenty of them) I've been told I make it all look reasonably easy. Who is this imposter? Pure bluff, I'm afraid. Not drowning exactly, but hardly waving. Sort of treading water whilst holding on for grim life, I suppose.

Fragility, Again

Leaving work today I happened to ask a colleague, and friend, why I'd not seen him around last week. It turns out his mother had a fall, a bad one, and has sustained some degree of lasting damage - she remains bedridden. His father is not in the best of health and was depending on the mother for care.

Just when you think you've got problems you get a sense of perspective in a way that can only be painful for someone else.

Lest we forget how fragile we are.

Still Marking Time

I've spoken to Noi twice today: a refreshing call in the morning establishing we'd both got through the night and an early evening call to relay the not entirely unexpected news that she'd be late setting off - she usually is on these jaunts, given the reasonable demands of family - and I'd be best not waiting up. In between these highlights I've been marking, and have now cleared all outstanding scripts thank you, listening to Elgar, reading Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, thinking about what it is to be English, and nursing a mild headache, not necessarily in that order.

It's been a day singularly short of any conclusions, except for the fact I'm not likely to exchange affectionate greetings with the missus in its course. However, the likely connection of the English imagination with a certain melancholy madness has brightened things up and explained a lot. It certainly accounts n large measure for Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 4 which always makes me feel unaccountably cheerful in a he cannot be serious sort of manner.

Marking Time

Noi took off for Melaka in the late morning leaving me with a pile of scripts to mark, a flask of tea and some sweet potato for an afternoon snack, and a pile of rice cake and chicken rendang to be heated up for dinner. I've finished the marking, eaten the grub and am now watching Wolves vs Villa and missing her.

I also found time to finish Empire, finding the last forty or so pages the richest in terms of real thought. This is the part in which Ferguson defends empire, having been fairly (in both senses) critical of it in the rest of the book. I think it's reasonable to point out that the British version was a lot better than the other nasty ones that flourished in the first part of the twentieth century, but I don't think that's saying an awful lot considering just how irredeemably nasty the others were and how accidentally beneficial the Brits managed to be. But what I like about Ferguson is that he doesn't try to make his case any more strongly than that - you get a genuine sense of proportion, and dollops of irony, from his work.

Anyway I've now moved on to Ackroyd's Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination in a vain attempt to try and feel English. And because Ackroyd is authentically crazy in a way I can relate to, in between marking yet more scripts. There's plenty lying in wait for me tomorrow.

Nightmares

This via Niall Ferguson's Empire: from Boys of the Empire (a magazine for kids) October 1900: The native problem has never been acute in… Australia… The Aborigines have been driven back and are quickly dying out. And this is only just over a hundred years ago - within a couple of lifetimes.

How does Stephen put it, in Ulysses? History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Ferguson's bit on the concentration camps devised by the British for the troublesome Boers should be compulsory reading in all English schools. After such knowledge what forgiveness? as an anti-Semitic yankee once put it.

Persistence

I've been phoning Mum everyday for the last couple of weeks and each call has ended in disappointment. The pain she's suffering from the shingles shows no sign of abating and it's obviously wearing her down. Phoning is all I can do and it isn't really doing anything. As far as I can tell the doctors treating her (there seem to be at least three who've paid visits) are baffled as to why this attack has been so prolonged. The original prediction was that it would be over and done with in three weeks at the most.

I've sometimes made the point that keepgoingness is something to be deeply admired in people. I'm seeing that, as I often have in the past, with Mum and my admiration knows no bounds. The problem is, that's not going to help in the current situation.

Disconnected

I started Niall Ferguson's Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World when I was stalled on Doyle's Paula Spencer and found myself getting through the opening chapters at a fair lick. I think I was expecting something in the nature of a tightly-packed, worthy well-researched tome of the sort that demands close, strenuous reading, so I was surprised to find myself enjoying what struck me as fairly light and fluffy popular history of an almost anecdotal nature. Later I realised the book had its origins in a tv series which explained a lot.

Now I've arrived at the last two chapters I think I've learnt something about the nature of the British Empire, but I'm still left with a sense of puzzlement that the whole enterprise ever was. I just don't connect with it on the simple level of it being a brute fact of history - there's a kind of underlying absurdity somehow. Oddly I think Ferguson captures something of that in his loopier tales. There a particularly telling moment when he describes various bits of statuary of the great and good of empire being left to rot in some dump in India that seems to sum up the whole enterprise.

If it were simply a matter of absurdity, though, I think I would be able to get my head around that. But there's also the horror. Using the Maxim gun to slaughter Matabele tribesmen, aka 'savages', who didn't have that kind of technology opens a window on the real heart of darkness that is painfully disconcerting, to put it deliberately mildly.