A Bit Frantic

I got up quite a bit earlier than usual this morning knowing the day was going to be not just unreasonably busy but close to impossibly busy. (The heading above is an understatement.) To be honest, days like this are rare, but they do happen and you've got to be ready for them if you're going to stay reasonably sane.

Now I'm old enough to appreciate the nature of these occasions I've developed the ability to put aside a very tiny part of my mind to sort of monitor what's going on. There's a kind of fascination in realising just how useful basic routines are in holding things together at the same time as being aware of how even the most routine behaviour is under threat of being derailed due to unforeseen circumstances (which manifest with an eerie certainty just when you can't afford the time to deal with them.) It's also very helpful to be able to walk at high speed and ignore urgent messages which aren't quite as urgent as the urgent messages that arrived 60 seconds ahead of them

I think tomorrow will be calmer, but I'm still getting up earlier because you never know. All quite exciting really!

Magnificent Self Control

I don't know about you but I get more than a little fed up when a remote control for some electronic device suddenly stops functioning because the batteries have taken it upon themselves to leak but the stupid thing gives no indication that the batteries are running down; in fact in darker moments I find myself harbouring the thought that our mighty Tech Overlords those nice people at Starhub may have designed the stupid thing to fail so you have to buy a new one. And don't get me going on the fact that when you try and start the set-box it's incredibly difficult to find the manual controls on it and when you try to change channels it's, again, incredibly difficult to do so because you can hardly see the stupid controls on the stupid box and they work at an incredibly slow speed. First world problems eh?!

So I'm not going to rant about this stupid situation. Except for just a bit.

Over and out.

At Ease

Life is never exactly easy, is it? I don't think it's really meant to be. But after hot lentil soup and accompanying crusty bread it gets pretty close.

Out Of Nowhere

Listened to Crimso's improv Starless and Bible Black for the first time in years today. When I first heard it, as the title track off the album, I thought it was an actual composition, as opposed to an improvised piece, which I'm guessing would have been true for the vast majority of listeners back in 1974.

And even though I know it was improvised on the spot I still can't get away from the half-belief that it was carefully composed. Astonishing. The way those guys somehow knew what each of the four was about to play. 

Also astonishing to think that David Cross came to be regarded as the weak link in the band. His work on the keyboards and violin, so sympathetic to everything else that's going on, is what elevates the whole to the next level, the highest level.

Above all, this is a brilliant example of what can happen when people listen to each other.

Reading Lists

I think I first read E.P. Thompson's magisterial The Making of the English Working Class around 1978, just after leaving university. I know it made a huge impact on me in terms of its explanatory power. But I suspect I rushed through it somewhat, driven by the excitement of the discoveries I was making.

I say this since I have a strong sense on rereading it some forty-something years later that I'm taking in a lot more of the fine detail this time around. This is particularly true of the various lists that Thompson provides. Reading Perec's Life: A User's Manual taught me the immense value of even the most random-seeming list, and I find myself deliberately slowing down when I encounter a list like that enumerating some of the products of Birmingham's skilled artisans around 1807: buckles, cutlery, spurs, candlesticks, toys, guns, buttons, whip handles, coffee pots, ink stands, bells, carriage-fittings, steam-engines, snuff-boxes, lead pipes, jewellery, lamps, kitchen implements. As Thompson notes, the list in itself evokes an intricate constellation of skills. A sort of lost world, in its way.

Back in 1978 I suspect I would have just glanced at the list and impatiently took it in as a kind of whole with little or no sense of the particularities. Now the whip handles alone fascinate.

Over The Moon

I've been taken by surprise at the sheer number of poems Ted Hughes wrote for Moon Whales and other Moon Poems. I've never actually owned a copy of the collection, though I'm very familiar with a number of the poems from encounters in various anthologies, and I've always taken it for granted that the original book was about the same length as Meet My Folks. But reading the Moon poems as they are sequenced in Ted Hughes: Collected Poems for Children it's obvious that this book was not intended in any way as a kind of companion to the earlier publication.

Indeed, the general tone is quite different. I think it's reasonable to say that Meet My Folks is essentially comically cheerful. Moon Poems is often downright disturbing. The rhythms are more obviously galumphingly broken; the images surreally weird so that what might have been intended as funny isn't, except in a funny strange way.

As evidence, the opening lines of The Snail of the Moon:

Saddest of all things on the moon is the snail without a shell. / You locate him by his wail, a wail heart-rending and terrible...

Not sure I'd want to read that out to a class of ten-year-olds. But I love reading it to myself. 

Stepping Out

Covered over 22,000 steps today and now am feeling it. Deeply cream-crackered, which is not a bad way to be as long as there's nothing left to do but surrender to sleep. Which is exactly what I intend to do in the next five minutes.

An Impatient Patient

Had an appointment this afternoon at the Neuroscience Centre at NUH. It was scheduled for 3.00, but I didn't get to do the screening thingy that they always carry out prior to any procedures or consultations until 4.25, which was quite a wait - and very unusual for the hospital, in my experience, since they nearly always stick pretty close to the actual appointment time. Mind you, the place was packed and I reckon they were struggling to deal with the number they had intended to cater for in their afternoon session. For me it was no big deal as I didn't have anything to rush back to work for and Noi, who'd come along with me, wasn't terribly bothered either. Mild irritation was as much as I could muster.

But one guy, who also seemed to have been delayed, was really upset and started to create quite a fuss at the main desk around about ten minutes before my number finally got called. He was holding up his phone and loudly complaining that the staff had forgotten to notify him that his number had been called, so he'd missed his slot. Initially I thought there was going to be trouble and that the guy was just being more than a bit selfish. Then I realised that he was trembling excessively and in a very bad way. It was clear that he was deeply distressed by the crowds in the waiting area and just couldn't deal with the situation - hence taking himself outside earlier as a way of gaining some control.

The staff dealt with him brilliantly. No fuss at all, no attempt to subdue him; one lady took him to one side and allowed him to keep venting whilst helping him calm himself as much as he could. And somehow he did calm himself which considering his obvious sense of shaky panic took a lot of doing. It suddenly occurred to me that quite a few folk needing to see neurologists probably did need to overcome severe stress just to get themselves into the clinic at all. It turned out that he ended up being screened - essentially just a check on blood pressure - at the same time as myself, in the cubicle next to mine. He was still venting his concerns as that went on and my heart went out to the poor guy for everything he was dealing with.

Anyway, once they'd took my bp things moved very fast. I was supposed to do a memory test (basically a check for signs of dementia) before seeing my doc, but that was abandoned since the doc reckoned I'd most likely ace it so it was a bit pointless. And it was further decided that the medication I've been on related to my epilepsy could be terminated, basically because I was fairly brutal in letting the doc know how unhelpful I thought it was and she was prepared to listen. (It wasn't my usual neurologist, whom, I suspect, may have moved on to another hospital, or higher things, or whatever.)

So all in all not such a waste of time, despite the delay. Sort of a case of 'good things come to those who wait', if we're looking for some kind of message in all this.

Time Found

Managed to watch the entirety of the National Theatre production of Streetcar starring (and I use the word advisedly) Gillian Anderson. Did so by watching just a couple of scenes at a time, so didn't quite get the flow of it all. But that might have been a good thing since it was so astonishingly intense that keeping some distance was sort of healthy in its way. When I watched the final scene today it pretty much broke me up completely. I suppose Ms Anderson was largely to blame: she is so sensationally good that it's impossible for me to imagine a world in which she isn't Blanche Dubois, if you see what I mean.

Just one small example. Her drunkenness, broadly speaking increasing from scene to scene, is note perfect. When Blanche is hammered out of her head in Scene 10 (very difficult to watch, but impossible to turn away from) she just gets every detail of extreme alcoholism right. Depressingly ugly and distressing. It was like watching my sister at her very worst. Just devastating.

To be honest her performance is so strong in its weakness and pain and vulnerability that she blows Ben Foster's Stanley off the stage. But that works so well. This isn't a Stanley with the animal power of Brando. In some ways he's also deeply insecure, a reading that had never quite occurred to me before, but fully realised, as it is in this production, it just feels right.

Not sure I'm looking forward to watching the whole thing in one sitting when we screen it for the kids, simply because I know how overwhelming that's going to feel.

Sweet Sounds

Got up close and personal with the ondes martenot for a very good half-an-hour this morning, having discovered on YouTube Messiaen's sensationally mellifluous Fete des Belles Eaux which features no fewer than six of the instruments. Then moved on to a brilliantly informative account of how Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame sort of saved the ondes for a modern audience. To be honest, I think the very existence of Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, which, amazingly, gets regularly programmed in the concert hall to this day, is a guarantee that the instrument will survive, featured as it is so heavily in that great work. But it's good to know that manufacture of the ondes has considerably expanded since it's become something of a signature of the Radiohead sound post OK Computer.