Great Moments In Literature No. 1

Making wonderfully slow, plodding progress on this reading of Anna Karenina. Just passed the bit near the opening of Part 2 when Tolstoy tells us what Laska, Levin's dog, is thinking as Levin and Oblonsky take their minds off their hunting for a moment as the sticky subject of Levin's proposal to Kitty is raised. Marvelously goofy stuff - almost childish. Fortunately my memory's so bad I completely forgot it was coming and laughed out loud, just as I did the last time I read the book.

Just how does Tolstoy manage to know everything about everyone? And, considering this, why was he so dopey about his own life?

All In The Timing

Huge good fortune fell my way earlier today when I managed to get myself to the mosque at Clementi without getting extremely wet in the process. I only noticed the darkness of the clouds over the area as I drove into the car park nearby, when it occurred to me that the heavens were likely to declare themselves open sometime soon. It takes me about three minutes to walk from the spot I park in to the mosque entrance - actually the back way, next to the HDB car park, of which about a minute is in the open, the last stretch to the mosque. I calculated that I would get there without any real problem and was very, very wrong.

Just as I stepped into the uncovered area the rain started, and it was obvious it was very quickly going to be of that monsoon quality that renders one soaked in two or three seconds. The three guys ahead of me also recognised the obvious signs and we suddenly became a small team of ungainly sprinters in a comical surge across the space. We made it with around three seconds to spare, getting quite, but not violently, wet in the process.

The monsoon lasted some thirty-five minutes, just slightly less than it took for the prayers to be concluded, and I stepped out into a newly-washed, rainless world. Lovely. Lucky.

Still In The Family

A couple of days back I wrote about not having major chest-related health problems as an adult despite my fears related to this in very early childhood. Today my focus is on not having to walk on crutches or get around in a wheelchair. I have never seriously considered the possibility of having to deal with such a situation - well, not until last December. I don't think it's likely to happen at this point in my life, but I'm now aware that I should have been considering the strong possibility of such for many years previously and it looks like I've been very lucky in this regard. The strange thing is that it took me until December to realise the obvious, which tends to suggest some sort of denial mechanism was operating - or that I'm fabulously obtuse.

The moment of realisation came in a conversation with Bob and Cynthia, when Noi and I popped in on them just before Christmas. Bob, who I always called Billy as a child, is a sort of cousin, but not really, for complicated and unimportant reasons I've never entirely understood. I've never actually wanted to understand them, the simple fact being he's a great bloke, with a much better understanding of the Connor family history than I have.

He was telling me about my late Uncle Jim's family and how they are faring - very sadly, not too well. Uncle Jim, by the way, was my Dad's twin brother. They were not identical twins though, fortunately for me, as I'll try to explain. Uncle Jim was a really nice guy with a much more obvious sense of humour than my Dad, and all the time I knew him was crippled. The family had it that this was a result of his experiences during the war in the Burmese jungle. (A terrifying place by the way for the ordinary English soldier of the period.) In fact, I think I still vaguely believed this prior to talking to Bob, though I'm pretty sure I'd been put right years ago.

Eventually it was determined that the problem was Multiple Sclerosis. Except it now turns out it wasn't.

My Uncle Bert, the elder brother of Jim and Jack, also developed problems walking and was eventually confined to a wheelchair. At this point more perceptive readers will have figured out the cases were most likely connected. But the family didn't, not for quite a while. Peter, my Uncle Bert's only son, who was a bit older than me and went to the same grammar school, died tragically young, in his thirties I think, following a terrible accident. Uncle Jim's children, four of them, are all alive today. But cousin David, the eldest, is crippled, as is cousin Martin, who's a bit younger than me. And recently cousin Margaret, who was in the same class as I was in primary school, has also had to start using crutches. According to Bob that came as a big surprise as it was obvious to all and sundry (except me) that something very nasty was being carried in the genes of the male branch of the family (which the docs had figured wasn't M.S., which is generally seen as non-hereditary despite the genetic factors involved) but the female side appeared to be safe. Until now.

It looks as if my sister and myself have been spared. So, again, I'm writing about a kind of non-experience, and gratefully so. Except that somehow in blithely ignoring the threat to myself I've contrived not to care enough for those who have and are suffering from the terrible reality of that experience.

Feeling Superior

For connoisseurs of the monkey mind out there, I caught mine engaged in an interestingly shifty mental-cum-moral manoeuvre earlier this evening. This was in relation to the unfortunate Charlie Sheen, a celebrity who's in the process of messing up his life in full public view. I happened to catch the last five minutes of a piece on his case on one of the news channels. Actually it wasn't so much about him as about the morality of allowing, nay encouraging him to screw up so spectacularly on air, as it seems he is doing. (I haven't seen any of this, and I don't want to, but his story has featured enough in the papers over here for me to know the broad outlines thereof.)

The programme made the dilemma quite clear: there's an impeccable logic to allowing this sort of thing (a celebrity painfully going to pieces in full view, as it were) to happen, but those involved are not behaving with any sense of decency at all. And that's about as far as you can go, other than to feel, as I did, morally superior for not wanting to watch or get involved in any of this.

At that point I got involved in a little thought experiment. Let's say I had a particularly compromising photo of the actor and could sell this to a newspaper. At what point would I be tempted to actually do the dirty deed? I got to the answer quite quickly. Not a thousand. Not ten thousand. But as soon as the money became 'life-changing' I knew I was more than likely to bite. I reckon two hundred thousand might well do it - especially after a bad day at work.

Now here's the point. In the middle of all this I was still managing to feel morally superior. Here's how it went: not being tempted by relatively small amounts was proof that I wasn't greedy as such amounts involved greed. Larger amounts went beyond greed into new territory - a fine concern with one's actual quality of life - and such temptation was, thus, quite laudable really. I know this utterly specious reasoning is daft, but I equally know that something suspiciously like it was in my mind.

So it's quite simple really. If I have my price, and I rather suspect I have (though I hope I don't) I'd better get off my high horse and onto the same low one that your average gossip columnist rides on. Meantime I'd better pray that temptation doesn't come my way.

In The Family

When I was a little lad, a very little lad, I think, I formed the assumption that I would be something of an invalid when I grew up. It wasn't that I was a particularly gloomy child, but I was being sent to hospital with what seemed like reasonable regularity for some kind of checks on my chest, so I assumed I had a poorly chest and this was likely to have a marked effect on me eventually. This never came to pass and as I continued in the usual rude health of childhood I put such thoughts behind me. I almost said such anxieties, but they weren't really. I don't recall ever being at all worried over the possibility of some kind of invalidism Adulthood was a long way off and, if anything, I think I thought being ill when you grew up was quite interesting.

When we were in Manchester last December I asked my sister about all this and what she made of it. She's some seven years older than me and I needed some light shed on what I've been wondering was some kind of false memory. I think I'm talking about events, the hospital visits, that took place when I was around three or four years old. She was hazy about it all herself but reckoned it was somehow connected to Dad's emphysema, which had been diagnosed at some time earlier than this. The family seemed to blame his poor health on his experiences in the war, but it may have been suggested that it was some kind of hereditary condition and so they were running tests on me. Oddly we couldn't recall them checking my sister. And we guessed that the tests on me had been by no means extensive. Far from being subjected to a series of hospital visits we suspected there my have been just two or three and these had quickly given me the all-clear. I suppose the impact on me had been great enough in its little way to have seemed a lot more substantial than that.

Thinking about this - which I have rarely done over the years, the past being a very different place for me where they really, really do things differently - I feel lucky and mildly guilty. Which is strange because I'm writing about a sort of non-experience: the ties that didn't bind, as it were. Sometimes not being a chip off the old block can be very useful.

Sleep - Lack Of

I don't expect to sleep through the night, warbled a middle-aged Paul Simon some years back, and the old fogies listening like myself nodded and murmured, Yeah you got that right, or words to that effect. There was nothing terribly special about this - just an astute observation of the way things are, and sort of rightly so, following the natural order of things.

But I can’t see it as part of the order of things that many of the teenagers I teach routinely tell me they get only around five hours of sleep a night, and these are not guys wasting their time on computer games and the like. They are simply busy fulfilling what they see as being necessary to fulfil. I suppose I'd lose sleep worrying about this, if I had any left to lose.

High Energy

Here in late February 2011 I'm happily awaiting Noi's return from her little trip north, but a good part of me is locked in the April of 1781 with William Herschel pretty sure the tailless Comet he has spotted is the seventh planet of our sun and just waiting for the world to catch up with him. (Yet another part is celebrating the mighty Reds storming to victory last night over at Wigan pier, but we'll let that pass.)

The writer responsible for transporting me back to the eighteenth century is, of course, the incomparable Richard Holmes. I reckon The Age of Wonders has at least three to four exciting ideas on pretty much every page. And he's superb at communicating the ordinary humanity of the extraordinary thinkers he deals with. But what I've found overwhelming about the great astronomer so far (I'm now in Chapter 2) is his abundant energy - and that of his equally remarkable sister, by the way.

Which leads me to wonder (in more ways than one). Did folks back then simply have more drive than we do now as a result of the sheer difficulty of their lives? Did the relative lack of ways of idling away the time make for lives of greater accomplishment? Or is it just that we're looking at the most exceptional, those who made the best of the hands they were dealt? I get exhausted just reading about what Banks and Herschel got up to. I mean Herschel, an accomplished musician - that was his day job - found time to write an entire oratorio on Paradise Lost which only just makes it into Holmes's entertaining footnotes.

It probably wasn't a very good oratorio, but that's not the point (for me, anyway). Just as it is equally not the point that Herschel's ideas were sometimes spectacularly wrong. It's the drive to have the ideas, to create the music, to devise and assemble those beautiful telescopes (making one heck of a mess in the process) that counts.

Something Tasty

Noi has popped up to Melaka today as brother Hakim has put together some sort of barbecue for abah and she's lending cheerful support. Bogged down by the Toad work, I have remained here to consume the fine tuna sandwiches she so thoughtfully prepared earlier and strive to make inroads into the mountains of stuff that require reducing, scaling, mining.

Missing the missus, I've been seeking the company of Zappa with his Hot Rats, Louis Jordan & his Tympany Five in jump blues mode, and Papa Haydn with some of the Sturm und Drang symphonies. It sometimes happily occurs to me that I have odd (and loud) tastes in music.

In Judgment

More than a little alarmingly I've been asked to sit in judgment on those with genuine talent this evening. I'll be doing my best to avoid becoming overly pontifical. One of these days someone's going to see through me and the game will be up. As it will be for all of us eventually, I suppose.

Back On Track

I've felt oddly discombobulated over the last three months with regard to what I've been reading. It's particularly odd since I've enjoyed everything one way or another yet had to wrestle with a sense that I should have been reading something else, as if I've been somehow sidetracked. I suppose this might relate to the line of books on my top shelf waiting, rather deliciously, for my attention - these being the tomes purchased last year with the money my employers set aside with which I'm supposed to improve myself. Oh, and the equally enticing pile on my shelves at work that constitute the new course which we devised for the Year 5 class I'm teaching.

Anyway I finally feel I'm getting somewhere, though where that somewhere is I have no real idea, in that I finally got to open Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder (one of the (very) few books I purchased in Manchester on our December jaunt), which I'm reading in tandem with Anna Karenina.

But what's this? you cry. I thought you'd binged on the Tolstoy in very recent memory!? Yes, indeed. About a year or so ago. But that was before I knew that the good (or bad) lady was going to be the centre of attention in my classroom for the early part of next term. So I'm back for more, like the moth drawn to the flame. Now I know just how Vronsky felt, eh?

Having said that, the good news is that Holmes's 'romantic scientists' are giving her quite a run for her money. Joseph Banks has just left Tahiti in Chapter 1 and I suspect memories of that memorable visit will stay with me for a long time.