In Tenebris

In the darkest watches of the night belief and unbelief are indistinguishable.

Production Values

I've been playing An Other Cup by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens as was) quite often lately. It sounded extremely good on the system in KL and I got over my initial prejudice against it as being somewhat over-produced. That's something I felt even of the classic early Cat Stevens's albums - rather than paring the music down to its bare essentials, all that was really necessary with such fine material, there seemed a tendency to add a little too much sugar. However, it's impossible to deny the classic status of these albums and surely the production contributes something to that - and I'm finding the same about this latest offering as it steadily grows on the ear.

I wouldn't describe An Other Cup as consisting of vintage material. In fact, the use of earlier songs (stuff from Mona Bona Jakon - I Think I See The LIght, Foreigner - Heaven/Where True Love Grows, and a previously unrecorded number from 1968 - Green Fields and Golden Sands) suggests Yusuf is not exactly awash with new tunes. But it hardly seems to matter. One new song, The Beloved, is worth the price of the album, and the wonderfully relaxed vibe of the enterprise suggests a man at peace and communicating that peace seemingly effortlessly. The curiously harsh, strangulated vocals of some of the early albums (think Catch Bull At Four) have obviously gone for ever, and that's great for both Yusuf and the listener. The tender vulnerability of the vocal on Green Fields is, I think, the best thing he's ever done in terms of unadorned intimacy, something the early albums seemed to strive for but always fell short of somehow.

Given the negative press that has accrued to his name in recent years (but what can you expect given the range and depth of Islamophobia in British society?) I don't expect that An Other Cup will constitute any kind of breakthrough for Yusuf, but I suspect it will win over more than a few neutrals to his corner of goodwill and its accompanying good music.

The Long Road Home

We've been very lucky over the last three years or so in terms of having easy journeys to and from Malaysia, so it was only fair, I suppose, that we should suffer for once coming back to Singapore from Melaka today. Our journey to Melaka late on Saturday afternoon was uneventful, but we'd noted the long queue of traffic coming from the south to Kuala Lumpur, and this was an omen of things to come.

The highway down to JB was crowded with bumper to bumper traffic and made even slower by the fairly frequent accidents, marked by cars pulled over onto the hard shoulder. Then it was time for the crossing at Tuas. As usual the Malaysia side managed things highly efficiently with the big jam taking place at the Singapore end. For some reason the papers here rarely mention this state of affairs and it certainly goes against all the usual stereotypes.

Anyway we endured a four and three quarter hour epic, only to arrive back for what is looking, at the time of writing, like a major disaster at Old Trafford. It's certainly good not to be in Manchester at this moment.

A Dog's Tale

Back into full exercise mode I completed eight laps of the taman yesterday afternoon, though not without incident. Said incident revolved around a dog, more accurately a bitch, the one that seems to reside outside the big corner house on the downwards slope of my run, the house with the warning sign about a guard dog. The brown bitch seems to assume the sign refers to her, which is clearly not the case as she wears no collar and roams freely round the estate when the fancy takes her. Back in December she chased Ayiem for a few metres when we were jogging by the house much to his alarm and my amusement.

Now she has obviously graduated to bigger fry, for having ignored me passing by on the first two laps she decided to snap at my heels on Lap 3. I was rather surprised about this as 1) she has never dared do this before, and 2) it required her to cross some ten yards or so to the road parallel to the path that snakes around the taman as I’d previously ran up the slope onto that road, just for the fun of it.

Coming down the road again on Lap 4 I wondered whether she intended to keep this up. She did. And by Lap 5 she was actually trying to hide behind a car parked on the space between the taman path and the parallel road in order to jump out and add the element of surprise to her attempts to intimidate yours truly. By this time I’d had enough. Instead of simply ignoring the pooch, as I ran I took a quick step towards her and growled, quite dramatically, even if I say so myself. I saw uncertainty in her eyes though, to do her justice, she continued to bark manfully or, rather, dogfully. (Bitchfully?)

I spent the first portion of the sixth lap devising a cunning plan. This time on my approach to the mutt I didn’t bother to leap the slope. This meant I was moving right into her territory. She warily tried to face me, but her heart clearly wasn’t in it, and as she seemed to make herself at least attempt a show of aggression I pointed dramatically in her direction. The canine faced with an obvious, and unpredictable, madman dropped her shoulders and shut her mouth.

The question now was whether my triumph could be regarded as complete or whether she would try and save some doggy face on my next circuit. Playing the unpredictability card once more, this time I moved back up to the parallel road. My adversary, clearing assuming it was back to business as usual, resumed the hiding behind the car routine, but this time she emerged somewhat less sure of herself and I let her have it with the dramatic left hand point, looking her squarely in both eyes. Her shoulders dropped once more: there could be only one victor. Me.

The final lap was entirely and rightfully uneventful. Man had asserted his dominion over dog, which had now gone sensibly to sleep outside ‘her’ house.

Oddly enough for some reason, when I told the story to my wife she was not terribly impressed.

Lost Worlds

I phoned Mum last night and she was in good spirits, recording yet another big win at bingo: fifty quid, no less. We also touched upon the recent anniversary of the Munich air crash which destroyed the Busby Babes and talked about May Whalley. For years I’d heard the name of this lady simply as someone Mum ran across when playing bowls, the crown green variety. It was odd to discover, and I’m not quite sure how I did, that May had been married to a certain Bert Whalley, who had occupied the seat next to Matt Busby himself on the fated flight. Bert had been one of the coaches for the legendary team and was occupying the seat that should have gone to assistant manager Jimmy Murphy, himself a legend in Manchester for his part in the rebuilding of the shattered team. Small world. And that world was, small and local and good.

You grew up with the Munich story as a standard part of a Manchester boyhood. Teams were local teams. Men wore hats. Priests mentioned match results on Sunday morning. Duncan Edwards would have been greater than Pele. You stood on cold bleak terraces to support United and marveled when they built the covered stand. The reserves would top the Central League and most would end up playing for the first team because that was the way things were done.

Things change. Men stopped wearing hats, and put Dad and most of Denton, based on the hatting industry if you can imagine such a thing, out of a job. Most, then all, of the ground was covered. It’s difficult to find anyone to talk to who actually watched Duncan Edwards play. And they haven’t heard of him in Singapore.

Things got better and a world was lost.

What To Say

In yesterday’s brief recap of Monday night’s gig I forgot to mention the performance of Invisible Sun. It was the only song for which a kind of video was used on the video screens otherwise employed for the usual images of the band in performance. I say video, but actually the film was a series of stills of children’s faces, beautifully photographed, reflecting the simple message of hope, or rather the need for hope, in the song. The performance was the tightest of the night, I suppose the need to synchronise closely with the images dictating a controlled performance of his nature. It certainly constituted ensemble playing of a high order.

But for me it also served as an reminder of the fact that, despite being a major hit single, the song received little air-play on the BBC, and the video itself was banned owing to the images connected to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. How odd that seems today when the song itself seems beyond reproach in terms of any ‘message’ involved. And how strange the BBC should have felt the need to protect British citizens from those images of conflict, almost as if reluctant to admit that any such thing was taking place.

As a general rule of thumb it might be useful to suggest that when the great and good decide what’s best for us we remember the words of a wise though rather feisty old Roman: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. This might be very, very loosely Englished as: Whatever you say, say nothing (at least in its implications) but you’ll find a more accurate translation here.

Middle-aged White Men Rock Out

We’re now in KL where I’m relaxing a little after a ferociously busy run to the Chinese New Year. I made things even busier for myself by attending a concert on Monday evening, which in some respects wasn’t terribly wise. However, as Dickens wisely makes clear in Hard Times we muth be amuseth so it was off to see, and more importantly listen to, The Police on the Singapore leg of their world tour at the Indoor Stadium.

We were never going to pay silly prices for good seats, so we were seated behind the band, in roughly the same spot we occupied at Sting’s previous show some two or three years back. This makes me sound like a big fan of Sting, which I’m not, though brother-in-law Fuad is, which helps account for our presence on both occasions. However, there are aspects of the solo work I enjoy and I was a fan of The Police on their original emergence as a sort of super group so I wasn’t exactly unhappy to attend the concerts, especially Monday night’s.

If anything I was more looking forward to hearing Copeland and Summers play live, and in this respect I must say the band delivered big time. Copeland is one of those drummers with a rhythmic flexibility leading to genuine funkiness rather than powerhouse pyrotechnics and he was in tremendous form – especially when abandoning the main kit for the percussive fusillade surrounding him, as on Wrapped Around Your Finger, probably the best single piece of the night.

And Andy Summers, all sixty-plus years of him, emerged as one of the finest, most intelligent, guitarists I’ve ever heard in a band context, filling the space with textures that were both rhythmically and harmonically on the money. He took solos sparingly but nailed each one – especially a simple but gorgeous break on King of Pain, which followed the one on the original recording in spirit but blew it away in terms of presence.

The set essentially covered all the big hits, but it was the lesser known material that seemed to me to come off best, its simple lack of familiarity giving them more room to breathe. Driven To Tears and When The World Is Running Down were two of my personal highlights. And it helps that the lyrics for these actually work. For all his other considerable virtues, on occasion Sting has a tin ear for a line. Somebody should have told him how bad the Nabokov line is in Don’t Stand Too Close To Me, almost ruining an otherwise serviceable song. But I can forgive that in the guy who came up with Too many cameras, not enough food in Driven To Tears and got into words what it is like to read the papers on a bad day.

Stretched

I'm quite enjoying the sensation of being quite stretched at work since I still feel just about in control and unlikely to snap. The fact that we'll get a few days off in the week ahead for Chinese New Year is the reason that I'm optimistic regarding my resilience (though one unexpected 'issue' on Monday or Tuesday and the world is likely to hear the twang.)

But I can't help but think of colleagues who are, no doubt, as taxed as I, if not more so, and who are showing signs of feeling under the weather health-wise. I counted (in a manner of speaking) three or four sore throats over the weekend not to mention one or two other manifestations of less than optimal well-being. Yet the world of work (I include ways of earning a living of all varieties) seems to assume optimal health as a given on behalf of its all too human instruments. This is not sensible, to the point of being downright dangerous.

One interesting piece of advice for super high achievers: it's very useful to experience a break, one that comes with a resounding twang. I wouldn't say it necessarily makes you stronger, though that is possible, but it certainly makes you humbler, and as Eliot (Tom) observed: humility is endless. (I hope I got that right. I think it's somewhere in The Four Quartets. It'll certainly be humbling if I'm wrong.)

Rough Magic

I got back in from work at 8.40 pm. and will need to be back there tomorrow morning at 8.30. The odd thing is that, although extremely tired, I'm enjoying the weekend. It helps that I had the pleasure in the early evening of watching rough runs of two short plays put together by our ACSIS students, one of which we'll be selecting as a piece to develop further as an entry for the drama segment of the Singapore Youth Festival. Watching young people enjoy their acting is one of life's richer experiences and tonight there was a particular sense of joy about the proceedings. I suppose this was to some degree connected with the rough and ready nature of the performances - a sort of musical hall quality.

Of course we'll take this and refine it and come up with something slick and sleek (we hope) but we'll be trying not to lose that rough magic in the (tough) process.

Wetness

For a few months now I've noticed an odd feature of the weather locally. In the rainy season, which now seems to be a year-round phenomenon, you can generally expect rain in the late afternoon, I suppose as the humidity has built up during the day. (I know this is terribly vague, if not downright incorrect, but I've never claimed to be a meteorologist.) However, Fridays seem to be an exception to this pattern in that the rain regularly strikes around 12.30. How do I know this? This is the time I go to the mosque for prayers.

Now going to prayers might sound a straightforward sort of thing to do but, believe me, it often involves strategic thinking of a high order. Where do I park to be close enough to avoid a major trek, yet ensure a reasonably quick getaway in order to get back to work? Will I get a parking ticket if I'm on double yellow lines for forty-five minutes? Where can I put my slippers in order to be able to retrieve them in reasonable time? What time must I leave for prayers in order to comfortably get a place in the mosque?

So when it's raining, and raining hard, a whole new set of considerations arise to haunt one. If you have an umbrella (because it looked like rain) where can the umbrella be put on the way in? Is it likely to 'disappear' if the rain persists? If you don't have an umbrella, as I didn't today because it actually didn't look at all like rain only five minutes before the heavens opened, how wet are you going to get legging it across the car park to whatever cover exists on the way in? Will you be too wet to actually pray? And what about at the end of prayers? Is there going to be any chance of getting back to work without being drenched?

The joy in the middle of all this is to be in your place, with nowhere to go except where you are, with nothing to do except what there is to do, and nobody to answer to, except the only one ever really worth answering to in anything at all. The desert spring. Something blooming.