Strong Stuff

I enjoyed the first half of Ken Follett's A Column of Fire more than I did the second. Don't get me wrong, it's a good read from start to finish, keeping up pace and energy, but I couldn't quite buy into the main characters' close involvement in just about every key event of Elizabeth's reign, and the treatment of the gunpowder plot in the final segment struck me as a coincidence too far. But a great way for a young reader to get acquainted with the period.

Funnily enough the Parisian segments struck me as having some of the raw power of The Pillars of the Earth. The chapter on the St Bartholomew's Day massacre generated a real sense of dread - and dreadful loss. I suppose not knowing all that much about the episode was helpful in my case. For some reason I kept having flashbacks to a very early episode of Doctor Who which had a considerable effect on my younger self. Strong stuff for an eight-year-old. The BBC didn't hold back in those days.

At Ease

We found ourselves late this evening in one of those slightly upmarket coffeeshops characteristic of the times in which we live. The sort of place one tends to take for granted, yet which would have seemed exotic in the extreme when I was a callow youth. I'm told it opens for a full twenty-four hours a day - which, even today, seems a touch exotic. Just round the corner from this hostelry was a large supermarket, which we popped into before heading home, just to check-out the bananas. Closing time was a more-than-reasonable 11.00 pm. Again, unimaginable in days of yore.

In the event we gave the bananas a miss since they weren't up to expectations, and drove home from the north of the island in a comfortable twenty-five minutes or so on the excellent highway.

This all sounds a bit like an advertisement for this Far Place, and in a small way it is. It's useful to remind oneself occasionally of how much can be available to us simply by the good luck of being in the right place at the right time.

Far Away

It's Maureen's birthday today. Not sure how much that will mean to her, given her current circumstances. Hope she's achieving some decent quality of life in the home and is longer retreating into the solving emptiness she's seemed to look for in recent years.

It occurs to me that we actually got on very well as brother & sister, and rather took that for granted. Those days seem a long way off.

In Response

I'm into one of those phases when I'm not really interested in listening to much else than Messiaen. This came upon me over the weekend when I gave a spin to Des Canyons Aux Etoiles and realised just how much I loved the piece, possibly even more than the Turangalila Symphony. It was the humour of the music that got to me, something I've never quite taken in before. The bursts of birdsongs are often funny in a kind of charming, Disneyesque manner. At least, that is, to this listener. Since I don't quite know what the standard response is meant to be, I'm sort of inventing my own. 

Still Sad

I remember reading Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey in one of Jack Connelly's lessons and feeling the impact of But hearing oftentimes / The still sad music of humanity. Suddenly I understood why Jack thought of WW as a genius. Odd to think that even at a callow 17 years old I thought myself capable of hearing that music. 

Heard it again today. And thought of myself, Peter, Simon and Sam the dog walking in the great poet's steps in the Wye Valley, in another life.

A Bit Sad

A funny sort of day. For the most part it went well for me, though I needed to deal with a sore back. Even then it was just sore, which is a lot, lot better than painful, and easy to live with. Yet somehow it felt like a sad day. Not my sadness, exactly, but my dispiriting awareness of the sadness of others.

Case in point, a devastating report on Sky News in the early evening about the dire state of hospitals for children in Afghanistan. Trying to count one's own many blessings in the shadow of such truth just feels monumentally selfish. This is territory that goes beyond words. They don't just fail; they become obtrusively irrelevant.

Taking Sides

Have been enjoying reading Ken Follett's A Column of Fire and will be continuing to do so, since I'm only just over the half-way mark. Well-crafted story-telling with some genuine insights into life in Elizabethan times. Having said that, it lacks the almost mythic power of The Pillars of the Earth. There were moments when the earlier novel transcended craft but it would have been foolish to have expected that level of inspiration to be replicated, and I didn't. But I did expect a good tale, and definitely got that - in fact, several neatly inter-woven stories.

And another thing I like about Follett: he does decency so well. Sometimes it's nice to know whose side you should be on.

Endings

Watched the ending of Shakespeare's The Tempest twice today, switching between two productions on DVD I've been showing to a class to whom I've been teaching the play. What a strange play it is. We know perfectly well how it will end from the beginning: Prospero will reveal himself to all and be acknowledged as the true Duke of Milan, and will marry his daughter off to the king's son in the process, and all will be well. Except it won't, will it?

Nothing has really changed at the end. Perfidy is acknowledged, but hardly punished. Indeed, it's kind of accepted as being an inherent aspect of what it is to be human. Art changes nothing, but eases our passage through the storms that necessarily assail us. There's nothing remotely uplifting about the end of the comedy. Yet it offers a melancholy satisfaction in its absolute honesty.

By the way, the two Prosperos I've been watching, Roger Allam in one of those productions at the Globe and Simon Russell Beale from an RSC production at Stratford, could hardly have been more different in their approaches - Allam being wonderfully crowd-pleasing and Beale disturbingly intense. And I loved both.

Beyond Compare

It suddenly occurred to me the other day that there were likely to be a number of videos featuring Ella Fitzgerald singing live available on the Internet. Funnily enough my listening to the greatest female singer of the twentieth century has tended to be restricted to material recorded in the studio, though the live stuff I managed to hear was deeply impressive.

Anyway, I've put things right of late by watching and listening to a great deal of the great lady live and I can tell you it's stunning. Utterly flawless. A complete joy. My favourite at the moment is an improvised sequence with the Count Basie band at Montreux from 1979. Quite late in her career, but her voice has lost none of its youthful exuberance. Not quite sure why this is entitled A Tisket a Tasket since she doesn't actually sing her first ever hit, but who cares when something sounds this good?

(By the way, here's a link to the actual song, and if it doesn't make you cheerful you need serious help.)

At Random

Struggled big time with back pain today, the ache being, unusually for me, centred on my lower vertebrae, right in the middle of my back. Sitting down for any length of time proved uncomfortable, but trying to stand up took on the proportions of a considerable ordeal. Fortunately, once on the move the discomfort was comparatively mild, so I was able to function reasonably well at work.

I suppose the most annoying thing about all this is that the pain came yesterday out of nowhere, as I sat to do some work with no undue rushing that might have served to bring it on. It just seems so arbitrary and impossible to protect against. But there's a good side to that; sometimes we need a reminder that life isn't fair, especially when it's generally been more than fair to us in the big things. As I've said before, with ironic clumsiness: A little suffering never hurt anybody. How dumb, eh? But how strangely true.