Ants and Grasshoppers

A university is a big organisation, employing a lot of people.  I think I'm right in saying that, in most university towns, the "uni" is usually second only to local government as an employer. Where a typical large school might employ a few Jacks and Jills of all trades to do the maintenance and the financial and clerical support, a university will have large teams of "support staff".  Our library system alone employs around 200 staff across five sites.

So, if you're a dedicated and curious people-watcher and all-round nosey devil like me, there's a lot of activity to observe and eavesdrop on, ranging from bawdy exchanges between the cleaners who congregate beneath my office window early in the morning, to high-table gossip over a coffee between senior professorial types.


I learn many things from observing this sample of humanity, but I am often struck by the difference between intelligence and achievement, and how one doesn't necessarily lead to the other.  There are some very stupid professors, and some very bright maintenance men.

There is much talk at the moment about the decline of social mobility in Britain since the 1970s.  This always means, of course, people going up the social scale, never down.  To my mind, a few more public-school-educated binmen would do a lot more for social solidarity than any number of comprehensive-school-educated merchant bankers.

But, politicians being people in search of a quick fix, they don't really want to understand the nature of the problem represented by "social mobility".  Someone has to empty the bins, obviously, though I think we're all now less convinced of the need for merchant bankers.  But the basic assumption seems to be that an intelligent person should not be emptying bins and, given equal opportunity with an Etonian, would choose not to.


My humble suggestion is that this assumption fails to take into account the way your social class can trump your intelligence, when it comes to [under]achievement.  The crux is one's relationship to authority, to deferred gratification, and to work.  Obedience, a willingness to accept on trust the desirability of long-term goals, and a belief in the inherent virtue of hard work are the ant-like hallmarks of the "achieving" classes.

You only have to look at the groundsmen and maintenance guys around campus, to see that the spectrum "dumb binman to smart banker", that wants to correlate intelligence with social position, is too simple.  Some of these guys are considerably smarter than the well-qualified middle-management halfwits who tell them what to do.  And their view of life is often far more mature than that of the self-regarding, narrowly-focussed academics whose offices and essential services they maintain.


But do these "smart guys in dumb jobs" look on the work of middle-managers or of academics with envious eyes?  Do they resent being "managed" by fools?  Do they regret now the choices they made in early life?  Do they wish their parents had made them stay in and do their homework when they wanted to play football, or just hang out?


Of course they don't.  And their heart won't be in it when they try to persuade their own kids not to give up too soon on their schoolwork. This is the core issue of social mobility: horizons of ambition and "pain-to-gain thresholds"* are, for whatever reasons, set low in many working-class families. After all, society has put centuries of effort into persuading people not to get "above themselves", up to and including public hanging and deportation to Australia.  It will take more than a relaxed policy on Oxbridge admissions to counter that.


If you come from a "regular" background, you will know that some of the brightest of your fellows will have left school at the first opportunity (if not well before, mentally).  They did not like or see the point of school.  They did not like or understand teachers.  Luckily for them, neither did their parents.  This situation has got worse, not better, since I was at school.


A few do go on to success in business: my old primary school playmate John B. failed the Eleven Plus but, after an apprenticeship, went out to South Africa to start various metal-bashing businesses and, I discovered recently, is now CEO of a multinational company.  Wow! But, mostly, they just wanted to start earning proper money, or to work outdoors or with their hands, or perhaps had ambitions in sport or the creative arena, or even just wanted to sign on the dole and live a life of hand-to-mouth hedonism.  To have ill-defined, "grasshopper" goals that do not demand three hours' homework a night is hardly incompatible with intelligence.


Such goals, however, are completely incompatible with acquiring qualifications.


The ones who do stay on at school will always include a few truly bright, self-motivated, and creative youngsters.**  But the majority will be earnest, unimaginative plodders who will rise without trace and, if they can afford it, will have their own children privately educated, and vote for policies that reward hard-working ants and punish freeloading grasshoppers.


Grasshoppers, of course, rarely vote.  But, as the grasshoppers say, whoever you vote for, the government always gets in.

*  I've just invented that expression


** I reckon there were probably fewer than 60 in my cohort out of a town with a population of 65000; I doubt this ratio has improved.

The First and Natural Station

There is often a long way and a short way to the same destination.  Sometimes you're in the mood for the scenic route, with many diversions and frequent stops to admire the view, sometimes you just want to get there as quickly and efficiently as possible.


Compare and contrast:

A man may say with some colour of truth that there is an Abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it: an ignorance that knowledge creates and begets, at the same time that it despatches and destroys the first. Of mean understandings, little inquisitive, and little instructed, are made good Christians, who by reverence and obedience simply believe and are constant in their belief. In the average understandings and the middle sort of capacities, the error of opinion is begotten; they follow the appearance of the first impression, and have some colour of reason on their side to impute our walking on in the old beaten path to simplicity and stupidity, meaning us who have not informed ourselves by study. The higher and nobler souls, more solid and clear-sighted, make up another sort of true believers, who by a long and religious investigation of truth, have obtained a clearer and more penetrating light into the Scriptures, and have discovered the mysterious and divine secret of our ecclesiastical polity; and yet we see some, who by the middle step, have arrived at that supreme degree with marvellous fruit and confirmation, as to the utmost limit of Christian intelligence, and enjoy their victory with great spiritual consolation, humble acknowledgment of the divine favour, reformation of manners, and singular modesty. I do not intend with these to rank those others, who to clear themselves from all suspicion of their former errors and to satisfy us that they are sound and firm, render themselves extremely indiscreet and unjust, in the carrying on our cause, and blemish it with infinite reproaches of violence and oppression. The simple peasants are good people, and so are the philosophers, or whatever the present age calls them, men of strong and clear reason, and whose souls are enriched with an ample instruction of profitable sciences. The mongrels who have disdained the first form of the ignorance of letters, and have not been able to attain to the other (sitting betwixt two stools, as I and a great many more of us do), are dangerous, foolish, and importunate; these are they that trouble the world. And therefore it is that I, for my own part, retreat as much as I can towards the first and natural station, whence I so vainly attempted to advance.
Michel de Montaigne, Of Vain Subtleties (Essays, tr. Charles Cotton)

  

Sell your cleverness, and buy bewilderment.
Jalaluddin Rumi, The Masnavi

 Both sages, I think, are trying to persuade us of the wisdom of rediscovering idiocy.  They'll get no argument from me.

My Aim Is True

Things are very rarely what they seem, or to put it another way, they are usually different to what you had thought.  The trick is knowing when to adapt, and when to persist in your delusion.  As the man says, "You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em".

A couple of months ago I was invited to give a talk to a group of photographers and quickly realised they were less interested in hearing about my work, as such, than in hearing about the experience of blogging about it.  Ah... Persist or adapt? No problem: I'm nothing if not adaptable.

One of the questions I was asked was, "How can I increase the number of visitors to my blog?"  Well, frankly, this was a bit like asking me, "How can I be taller and richer?"  If I knew, trust me, I'd be doing it.  But, really, the bad news about blogging is that it's just like any other form of communication: even if you think you have something to say, and the means to say it well, there's no guarantee that anyone will read what you write.  After all, there's no guarantee that anyone will ever stumble across your blog.  Viewing numbers that regularly reach double figures are an achievement to be proud of, given the competition.  There are millions -- literally millions -- of English-language blogs out there.

So, down here among the bottom-feeders, any significant increase in readership is notable, and worth analysing. This week, for example, I noticed that my normal page-hit tally was being trebled.  On one day, I came close to breaking into four figures for only the third time in four years. Being wise in the ways of the world, I knew this would turn out be some kind of freak.

Now, the semi-facetious answer I gave to the question, "How can I increase my visitor numbers?", was "Write about camera kit, or write about sex, or ideally both".  Of course, you don't even have to do this on purpose.  One of the things Blogger's statistics will show you is what keyword searches have caused strangers to wander through your pages, and I get a regular insight into the sad people out there looking for a taste of something rather gamier than they will ever find on my blog.  Given how much of their time must be wasted like this, someone could probably make a fortune running courses on "effective Google search strategies for perverts".

But, to return to my page-view bonanza.  Had I written something particularly zeitgeisty, or had I perhaps picked up a mention in one of the über-blogs?  No, of course not.  A picture of my grandfather in his WW1 uniform had been linked to by some weapons-and-survivalist website, as an illustration for a piece on the admirable fire-rate of the BEF in 1914.  Well, at least they did acknowledge the source of the image, but I seriously doubt whether any of those hundreds of gun-toting visitors will have found much to detain them here.

Collect your pieces on the way out, gentlemen.

Bullseye, nice grouping...

A picture I never tire of taking

The Quarrel of the Universe

On campus, I overheard something recently that touched a nerve.  Two overseas students were in an exchange with a British student.  One of the two was saying, "... and the English have always done it.  No, it's true!  The English ...  the English have always fucked over everybody".

The British student's reaction -- he was tall, lean and ginger-haired -- was to double over and laugh, loud and exaggeratedly.  "Yes", he seemed to be acknowledging, "That's us, perfidious Albion, world leaders in duplicity and treachery!  I love it!  Don't you love it?"  Though, actually, I doubt that he had ever heard the expression "perfidious Albion", much less given it any thought.

"Why do you laugh so much?  Do you think it is a joke?" asked the earnest overseas student, reproachfully, with a hint of contempt, even menace.  It was the edge in that remark that touched the nerve in me.

As a nation, we are in the habit of casting ourselves as the good guys.  Not without justification: we have much to be proud of, and our contribution to the improvement of life on the planet has not been negligible.  But there is, and there has always been, a Dark Side.  Anyone who thinks that the British Empire and its foreign policies were regarded as a benign force in the world by those who experienced them first hand is a blinkered idiot.

Dear readers, once again, I have to confess that in my youth I was a blinkered idiot.

Student radicalism is no longer the force that it once was.  When I became a student in that unsettling Dreamtime we call the 1970s, real "revolution" really was on the agenda -- the cobblestones thrown in Paris in 1968 were still, metaphorically, in the air.  This was the Baader-Meinhof era of kidnappings, communiqués and killings.  These were the years when striking miners managed to cut off Britain's power supply, forcing the Cabinet to meet -- by candlelight! -- to agree to their demands.  Not forgetting The Troubles in Northern Ireland, or The Birmingham Pub Bombings. This was also the time of Watergate, and the CIA-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende's elected socialist government in Chile.  Incredibly, there were still fascist dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece -- popular holiday destinations for newly-affluent Brits.

A lot seemed to be at stake.  History was visibly in a raw, malleable state.

To the committed student radicals I knew, the world was made up of many local instances of the same global struggle with Capital.  Revolution was the only solution.  It was important to be informed, to be international, to show solidarity with revolutionaries and activists world-wide.  It never ceased to amaze me how much more than me my fellow students already knew about the world -- names, places, dates, events -- and I was constantly shamed by my ignorance.

It was that disconcerting feeling of ignorance exposed that came back to me, overhearing that recent rebuke.

But, of course, in 1972 I was little more than a small-town boy who happened to be bright and good at taking exams.  My world was school, girls, music, and the dedicated pursuit of intoxication.  I knew what I knew about the world from my school lessons, but was otherwise astonishingly ignorant.  In our family no daily newspaper was read, and the TV news was simply an opportunity to get the kettle on, or a sleep-inducing sedative before bed-time.

I was happy to be British.  It seemed self-evident that, if not world champions at everything, we were always contenders.  But  -- to take just one example  -- back then I had never heard of Palestine, Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate, the Stern Gang, Black September, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, though I can recall supporting the Israelis in the Six Day War of 1967, as if were a cup final, and I knew there was a novel by Aldous Huxley called Eyeless in Gaza which I had not read.  "Gaza" was simply an agreeably exotic name, like "Zappa" or "Kafka".

It came as a surprise to me, therefore, that it was common ground among my new friends that to be British was not a source of pride but a matter for cynicism, guilt and atonement.  I learned that, as self-aware sinners, they had been sanctified by alignment with the struggles of the oppressed around the world.  They possessed a solemn sense of justification (in the theological sense) that was both deeply cool and intensely annoying.  As, in the main, they had been privately educated and were the privileged children of prominent members of the establishment, you could see the appeal of this particular theology.

My most transformative encounters were not with Oxbridge radicals, however, but with two African postgraduate students at the University of East Anglia.  One -- from Malawi, I think -- I only ever knew as The Native.  This, I hasten to add, was his own chosen nom de guerre, based on his perception that, to most Brits, the citizens of sub-Saharan African countries were still, simply, the natives.

For some reason, he would often gravitate to my table in the bar, and try to educate me about African politics and the evils of colonialism.  "Hello, it's me again, The Native!"   I think my main attraction was that I had learned enough by then to shut up, and had little to say on his pet subjects.  He was an angry man, delivering impassioned rants about places and politicians that meant nothing to me.  I think he took my beery silence as a form of solidarity, which I suppose it was.

Abdi, by contrast, was one of the serenest human beings I have ever met.  He was from Somalia, studying for a PhD in Oceanography.  He was tall and graceful, and resembled Peter Tosh of the Wailers, with incipient dreadlocks and an expression of permanent amusement.  He didn't drink alcohol, but had no objections to rendering himself horizontal with a chillum pipe.

His story was -- to me, with my conveyor-belt progress through life -- a fable.  When I asked him where his family lived, he replied that he could only give me some map co-ordinates: until the age of ten he had been a nomadic goat-herder in the Ogaden Desert.  The government had instituted a programme of identifying and educating bright children and, well, here he was.

His view of Britain's colonial villainy couldn't have been more different from that of The Native.  I got the impression that to an inhabitant of the Horn of Africa the long view of mankind's history comes naturally, and the to-ings and fro-ings of rulers and ruled, and the behaviour of one towards the other, are all explicable and forgivable as variable expressions of a constant: human nature.  To be "British" or "Somali" is a convenient label, a state in time, not an essence.

This may be my inner "orientalist" speaking, but I felt there was something of Omar Khayyam about his view of life:

But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me
The Quarrel of the Universe let be:
And, in some corner of the Hubbub couch'd,
Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald

I'm still not much of a follower of current affairs, but whenever some fresh tragedy unfolds in that region, I remember Abdi.  My hope has always been -- for his sake -- that he never returned to suffer the subsequent history of his unhappy homeland.  It would seem a cruelly ironic punishment for his sunny, forgiving optimism, so different to The Native's glowering grudges. 

But to return to where we started, I sincerely hope that, when our many overseas students do return home, they take back with them a more nuanced view of this country than the one they came with.  If nothing else, yes, we are a people who find our own capacity for self-interested wickedness amusing, and that, my solemn friends, is a strangely redeeming feature, and one of the reasons we are still worth your best attention.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Sometimes, we all need to submit to that exercise traditionally known as "counting your blessings".  I'm not aware of a more modern, less toe-curling formulation for this process:  an "asset audit", maybe? I expect there is such a term, though: this is the territory occupied these days by "therapy culture", and therapy is all about labels.

I'm not a natural blessing counter, and resist most attempts to tell me how lucky I am.  I'm afraid that, for me, Nina Simone singing "Aint Got No / I Got Life" sits high alongside Richard Harris performing "MacArthur Park" in my Top Ten "risibly portentous songs" (not to mention "reasons to forget 1968").  You got no money, no class, and even (yikes) no sweater, but you got your liver?  Yay!  However, this is exactly why, sometimes, I need to assay my assets.

Top among my Reasons To Be Cheerful -- it's making me smile even now as I think about it -- is that I don't have to clean the fish-tank any more.  If you're a parent, you'll know where I'm coming from.

My children had very different attitudes to the Pet Question.  At a very early age, my son had decided that the inevitable upset of its eventual demise would outweigh any advantage gained from learning to love and look after some dumb beast.  My daughter, by contrast, was determined to have an animate companion, preferably a speaking dog.

Knowing her fantasist tendencies (she gets it from me), we started small with three goldfish -- two fancy and one plain -- Star, Poseidon, and Gemini by name.  The deal was the standard contract:  prove you can look after some fish, and then we'll consider the talking dog.

Looking after fish is dirty, dull, and rather smelly.  Mainly, it's unpleasantly wet.  In the end, I think she endured the water-changing, glass-scraping, pump-cleaning routine three times, maybe four.  I didn't blame her for giving up, but thereafter it became one of my household chores and, I'm afraid, I tended to neglect it until it was more of a rescue operation.  Can't see the fish?  Time to change the water.

First, a third to a half of the disgusting tank-water had to be scooped out with a cup into a bucket, carried to the bathroom, and discarded down the toilet bowl.  A similar volume of fresh water had to be prepared in a separate bucket with a measured amount of a chemical "conditioning" agent. Dead bits of waterweed and other debris had to be removed (there is an evocative term "mulm" used by aquarium owners, defined as "undecomposed fish waste and other solid matter that accumulates as a fine, brownish, fluffy material"*).  The glass had to be scrubbed clean of algae. The pump had to be removed, disassembled, cleaned of clogging weed, mulm, and other revolting impediments, and reassembled.  Finally the pump was returned to the tank, and the fresh water added, scoop by weary scoop.  Every step had its own hazards, and new opportunities for nausea.  Whole rolls of kitchen towel were sometimes needed to mop up the mess.  I loathed it.

Goldfish are prone to longevity, so this went on for years.  Eventually, however, when only Star was left, we found a new home for him/her with a colleague whose home is something of an animal sanctuary, and like Ariel I was suddenly free from enslavement to the needs of a lower life form. Free!  Yesss!  Merrily, merrily, shall I live now!

We won't talk about the reluctant experiment with a hamster, the egregious Cookie, which had a not dissimilar outcome.  On the plus side, hamsters breathe air.  On the down side, they're moody, spiteful little bastards.  Do you know the dictum about reciprocity, and the absence thereof?  "Men love women; women love children; children love hamsters; hamsters don't love anybody" (Alice Thomas Ellis, I think).  So true.

I'm afraid the price I pay for my freedom (there is always a price) is that I will never be forgiven.  All together now:

I'll be so glad when I get old
To do just as I please,
I'll have a dozen bow-wows then,
A parrot, and some bees,
And whene'er I see a little pet
I'll kiss the little thing,
'Twill remind me of the time gone by
When I would cry and sing --

Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow! Bow wow!

So be it!  But every time I see elderly neighbours, pooper-scooper in hand, walking some ancient family canine while their kids are out in the world living large, I count my blessings, and remember:  I don't have to clean the fish-tank any more.

Lucky, lucky, lucky me!

* German-speaking readers will recognise Mulm as a word for "rotten, worm-eaten wood", probably equivalent to the "punk" beloved of Boy Scouts for starting fires.

April is the Wettest Month

It has been very wet.  Apparently, April -- not generally known as a dry month -- was the wettest April on record.  Parts of the country that started the month officially in drought are now officially in whatever the opposite of "drought" is.  Ah, well:  "English weather unpredictable but quite wet" is hardly a headline, though of course it has been precisely that for most of the last month.

I'd like to say I've been busily photographing nonetheless, striding weather-booted through the plashy fen in my waterproof gear, but that is not the case.  "Staying home to watch the rain" has been more like it, and never have the lyrics of "Time" on Dark Side of the Moon seemed more relevant.

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way...

The sun reappeared this week, though, so it's "get back to work, ye swabs!" for my rusting cameras.

Scans

I was lying on my back on a PVC-covered reclining couch, with no trousers and my shirt pulled up round my chest. "All done, you can clean yourself up with these paper towels", she said, briskly.  I slid off, and wiped away improbable quantities of a gel-like substance from my stomach, groin and legs.  It took about half a dozen towels before I was in a dry enough state to get my clothes back on.  It was, I thought of remarking, a bit like waking up after a particularly entertaining dream, aged sixteen, but she was busy putting away various appliances, and our relationship -- so recently so intimate -- was clearly coming to a rapid end.  It seemed inappropriate.

I've had two sets of scans recently.  One to check the circulation in my lower half, to see whether this might be the cause of the painful "shin splints" I've been enduring, and one to see whether some faulty circuitry in my head might be causing the deafness that drives my family nuts ("Sorry, what did you just say?").

The bottom half experience was harmless enough, if slightly reminiscent of the scenes in The Singing Detective when Nurse Mills rubs grease into Marlow's skin.  The nurse had to squeeze electrolytic gel all over my legs, groin and stomach in order to investigate the state of my tubes with what felt like a paperweight.  Apparently I'm very healthy, with a good pulse and no obstructions, which is good to know.

The MRI scan of my head, though, was a different matter altogether. I've had an MRI before, some years ago when they were investigating my tinnitus, so knew what to expect.  Back then, it was rather like being slid head-first into a narrow stainless steel oven; it is definitely not an experience for the claustrophobic.  Knowing this, they would put a panic button in your hand, and there was a periscope mirror inside so you could see a distorted image of outside ("outside" being nothing more comforting, though, than a bleak fluorescent-lit room full of baffling wires and pipes).  Nothing much has changed since.  The scanner is less oven-like, but you still get to clutch a panic button, and you're still slid in like a shell into a cannon, although now there's no periscope -- you just get to stare at a curve of beige moulded plastic a few inches from your nose.

It's the noise, though.  Despite the ear-protectors, nothing can prepare you for the unpleasantness of the noise.  It starts up suddenly, loud and industrial, like a malfunction in a nuclear power plant, and goes on and on and on and on.  The initial "short three minute scan" seems to last forever.  But the full twenty-minute job takes you into psychedelic territory -- you are stuck eternally inside a machine which makes progressively louder and stranger whoops and grinds.  It starts to shake and emit panic-inducing alarm sounds. You are a pigeon sucked inside a jet engine, or a spider inside a vacuum cleaner.  It is hellish, and only borderline tolerable.  I found myself obsessively wondering whether I had, in fact, forgotten about any piercings or shrapnel or dentistry or other metal foreign bodies that might suddenly erupt out of my head, sucked out by the intense magnetic field.

When, finally, it was finished and I was rolled out again, I said something like, "Blimey, that was unpleasant". The technician replied, "Well, we're not here for entertainment!", and I confess I contemplated violence.  But it can't be fun, putting people through that several times a day, so I simply retrieved my metallic impedimenta and got out of there.

If you detect personality changes over the next weeks, you'll know what has happened.  My mind has been rummaged through with a magnet, like a careless customs examination, and I'm still cramming bits back into place.

Closely-observed marbles...

A "through the viewfinder" image (Kodak Duoflex)

Pop Quiz

I've been trying to get some order into my "university facades" pictures, with a view to putting them into a sequence for a book.  This means coming up with a structural theme that is a bit better than just "Here's another bunch of my pictures, and I hope you like them".  Why I bother with this I'm beginning to wonder, though, given my sales rarely even enter double figures, but if you don't take yourself seriously, who else will?

One idea I had was to use a series of real or invented exam questions, something I've used occasionally in posts (you can tell how deeply I've been marked by the exam experience).  Then I thought, why not use the profound and often unanswerable questions posed in pop songs, as if they were exam questions?  This naturally led to a meditation on the assertion of reggae-lite master Johnny Nash that "There are more questions than answers".  Is that true?  I wondered.

On the face of it, it seems illogical.  Every question has an answer, even if it's unhelpful or negative, like "Not tonight, Josephine", or "42".  Though I suppose Nash probably intends "answer" in the sense of "solution" rather than "response".  Looked at that way, the logic might support Nash.  The number "3" is the answer to any number of questions:  "What is 5 minus 2?", "What is 9 divided by 3?", "How many steps are there to heaven?", "How often are you a lady?", etc.  But does that mean that the vast number of questions that have the answer "three" all have a single answer, or that there is an equally vast number of answers to those questions, all of which happen to be "three"?  And what about incorrect answers?  Or multiple correct and incorrect answers to ambiguous questions like "Do you know the way to San Jose?" (one of my all-time favourite songs, by the way).

It's a tricky one.  But then I always preferred Nash's more perspicacious song, "I Can See Clearly Now".

But in investigating this business of pop questions I came across a minor genre of humour, which might be called "serious answers to silly questions in songs".  Once you've got the idea, you'll be able to keep yourself entertained for hours, so here's a few to get you started.

"Why don't we do it in the road?"  : Hard to know where to start.  A lot depends on what "it" is.  If "it" is a three-point turn, then "in the road" seems an obvious place to do it.  But if "it" is, as I suspect, "to have sex", then some serious objections arise.  One appreciates the spirit of the question ("Why are we so hung up on having sex in comfortable, private places, when we could be freely doing it in public on challenging surfaces like this here gravelled, oil-stained tarmac?") but sometimes practicality does have to win out over rhetoric.  However, Sir Paul, if I can go on top and wear knee pads I'll certainly give it my consideration, for a suitable fee.

"Anybody here seen my old friend Martin?" : No, sorry.  Try next door.

"Have I the right to hold you?" : I had to run this one past my legal adviser.  Apparently and surprisingly, no, you don't have that right, under any legislation, national or international, including the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  So back off, creep, and keep your hands to yourself.

"Why does it always rain on me?" : Well, a cheap answer to this one would be because you're living in Scotland, fool, but I sense something a little more existential behind your question.  I take it you don't literally believe this, but harbour some deep sense of cosmic injustice, for which "rain" is a metaphor?  Were you brought up in a religious context?  I'm thinking of Matthew 5:45, "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust".  Or maybe Feste's song in Twelfth Night ("For the rain it raineth every day")?  Or -- now here's a random thought, just humour me -- did you by any chance lie when you were seventeen?

"Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?" : What??

WWSD

The other day someone said to me that a certain mutual acquaintance should be feeling ashamed of himself.  I said that I doubted this was the case, as shame was so last century.  It was one of those throwaway remarks, but it did make me wonder: whatever happened to shame?

Shame is a curious experience.  I'm not even sure what sort of experience it is.  Is it an emotion, an idea, a physiological reaction, or some kind of mix of all of those, a sort of moral blushing?  It's a more acute experience than embarrassment,  but less acute than remorse.  In the end, to be ashamed seems to take two forms: it is both to acknowledge guilt before the tribunal of one's own better self, and it is also a perception -- often sudden -- that one has fallen short in the eyes of others.

I am glad to say that I have led a relatively shame-free life.  Partly through luck, partly through good judgement, and partly because I choose to stand humbly before the highest authority I know, and at moments of difficulty, uncertainty, and doubt, ask myself: "What would Shakespeare do?"  I have found the Court of Shakespeare a pretty humane and forgiving place, except in matters of spelling, punctuation, and infelicitous expression.  Will had plenty to be ashamed of himself, after all, that double-dealing, plot-stealing, brothel-owning, theatrical, whoreson rogue. Not to mention those dreadful puns!

But, obviously -- in common with all but the truly, worthily dull -- I have experienced moments of shame which have become prize specimens in the cabinet of torments I can resort to when a little self-reproof seems in order.  No, I'm not going to tell you about them; these are private moments, events generally long-forgotten by the other participants, or recalled by them in a quite different light. We are a forgiving species, and rarely remember the mortification of others, no matter how acutely we recall our own.  Besides, my time in the Left-Luggage Dept. of MI6 must forever remain a closed book.

And yet shame has been, in the past, a very public matter.  "Name and shame" used to be more than a handy rhyme, it was part of a system of regulatory behaviour that stood alongside -- and often substituted for -- the law.  Codes of honour used to be pervasive: words like "dishonour" and "disgrace" described psychic conditions that are now nearly extinct, but once had the capacity to render your life not worth living.

Do you remember the opening sequence of the TV series Branded, where the buttons are ceremonially ripped off Chuck Connors' uniform jacket, and his sword broken?  Or, in real life, the seppuku of Yukio Mishima following a failed coup d'etat in 1970?  Or what about the government minister who resigned his post in 1911 because his daughter had danced with a man whose brother's firm was involved in a tender to supply the Civil Service with paperclips?  Actually, I made that last one up, but you get my point.   It was pretty grim, living under such high expectations, and seems absurd and grotesque to us easy-going, live-and-let-live moderns.

No, thankfully, we have shaken off the shackles of shame, but have failed to put anything usefully restraining in their place.  In retrospect, this might be a problem.  Obviously, a government minister who, let's say, leaves his wife of 26 years to share his life with a bisexual woman, formerly in a civil partnership (who admits to selling stories about the sex life of his main political rival to the tabloid press), would -- once upon a time -- have been required to "consider his position".  Now?  Not so much.  Do we care?  Not really.

But consider the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady,  who, it emerges, was involved in "investigating" (i.e. covering up) and thereby enabling and prolonging the truly shameful activities of notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth in the mid-70s. Brady says he is now "ashamed" of his role, but sees no reason to resign.  In the classic defence of the shameless, he was only following (presumably holy) orders.

Would it have helped the Cardinal, or even Father Smyth, to have asked, "What would Shakespeare do"?  I have no idea, to be honest, but I recall these words:

Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
   All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
   To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Sonnet 129

Now there speaks a man who knows something about shame.

A Taste of Porridge

Taste in aesthetic matters is a personal thing, obviously, although the consensus around "good taste" is as rigorously policed by its self-appointed arbiters as that of its zanier cousin, fashion. "Tastelessness" is not quite the opposite of "good taste", however.  For something to be judged in poor taste it has to breach certain widely-held taboos about the suitability of subject matter, and its appropriate handling.  Sometimes, but by no means always, "tastelessness" is a marker of the new.  Satirical comedy is the obvious example, but John Keats, in his time, was another.

Of course, mention the word "taboo" and artists will start to swarm like, um, flies round a cow's head in a vitrine, scenting an opportunity for "transgression" (transgression has been the new black for some time, according to the taste police, hadn't you heard?).  But the taboos of taste are pretty flexible, really; genuine taboos, by definition, rarely get broken.  Images of what might be questionable in most contexts are usually rendered acceptable by the sanctifying cloak of art so that, for example, in the 19th century the likes of William Etty and Lawrence Alma-Tadema could make high-minded, high-end soft-porn into a respectable (and profitable) business.  Someone like Robert Mapplethorpe is their direct heir; his work is absurdly overrated by museums and collectors, in my view.

So I suppose one shouldn't still be surprised to discover super-expensive "good taste" and highly dubious camp imagery co-habiting, especially in the domain of self-declared fine art photography.  I recently checked out the website of an upscale photography publisher, for example.  Now, this is a very superior operation indeed.  They publish strictly limited-run books of mainly world-renowned photographers, with production values that are stellar.  Their productions are as good as it gets, the genuine white-glove, collectors-only experience, with no expense spared, no corners cut.  So much so, it is very difficult not to feel that perhaps one doesn't really belong on such a website.  There are no prices on display, for example, and there's nothing so vulgar as a shopping cart.  To be honest, I expect all the copies are sold in advance to subscribers, and the website is little more than a prospectus.

Now, I accept that taste is a personal thing, and that I am a cash-strapped nobody whose opinion on the matter nobody has sought, but I found the work being showcased so luxuriously to be, in the main, rather dull, and some of it, dare I say, a little tacky, though without achieving the glory of full-on tastelessness. It seemed remarkably staid in its aesthetic choices -- mainly monochrome, of course, with an emphasis on tonality and composition, and highly-crafted using alternative processes like platinum -- but that, presumably, is what collectors demand. But I also found the similarities of much of the tackier subject matter tedious, it was as if all the artists had been issued with the same kit of random parts and the same instructions. "Art photography junkyard challenge", perhaps.

Let's see: there are naked bodies in oddly contrived poses, nostalgic junk, dead flowers, candles, mysterious symbols, fruit, bits of taxidermy, and quite often "all of the above" in constructed surreal juxtapositions.  These are either carefully lit in "still life" mode or washed out with pinhole languor, generally with a brooding overlay of angsty sexuality.  Like Alma-Tadema, the work often invokes the support of classic texts, though I am curious to know which of Shakespeare's sonnets is illuminated by Flor Garduno's image of a naked woman holding a severed swordfish head over her own like an idiotic hat*.  Preposterous is too kind a word.  If the names Joel Peter Witkin, Jerry Uelsmann, or Eikoh Hosoe mean anything to you, you know what to expect -- the gang's all here, and it's dressing-up box time, complete with dwarves and suggestive fruit. It's simply not my cup of tea, but I imagine it must sell.

Why do I find this disappointing?  I suppose because I like the motivations behind an enterprise like this, and therefore want to like its products.  Although, at heart, I endorse photography's democratic nature (and am dubious about the value of editioning photographs and photo-books), I am nonetheless a sucker for the honest pursuit of craft values and premium quality.  Sure, I could never afford anything on sale here, but I love the look and feel of a well-made print, have strong views on the relative merits of papers, and adore the heft of a well-bound book; I would be happy just to press my nose against the show-room window for a bit.

But it is the disappointing truth that wealthy collectors drive the upscale market, and collectors seem to converge on the same work, portentous stuff plastered all over with every possible signifier of "art", but signifying nothing.  But I suppose there's no point in setting up a business without knowing your market.  In just the same way, the producers of cheap, lo-fi fanzine-style products all push an equally predictable "urban" imagery (apparently rescued from an all-nite film-processor's reject bin) and whatever "look" has been in vogue lately.

Whether excessively precious or eminently disposable, "taste" seems to be the driver.  And, as I read somewhere recently, there is a useful distinction to be made between the history of taste and the history of art.  The former is the realm of minor artists, typical of their time, briefly popular but quickly forgotten, the modish filler that serves as the matrix for the outstanding, untypical work of the true iconoclasts and groundbreakers.  But it's an undeniable fact that there's always money to be made from peddling "taste".  It's what people with money to spare want to buy.

It all reminds me of the poem "Popularity", by Robert Browning, which concludes with this verse:

Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats.
Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup.
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats--
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
   What porridge had John Keats?

In other words, originators starve, imitators thrive.  It surely takes a brave artist -- and an even braver gallery or publisher -- to choose the starvation route.  But then, you get the impression that true originators, poor devils, simply can't help themselves.

(OK, OK, but that's MISTER Nobbs to you....)

*  Let me guess:
Shall I compare thee to a Manta Ray?
Thou art more fishy and corniferous.

Bad With Names

Today is Shakespeare's (presumed) birthday.  You had probably already noticed: he's inescapable at the moment, what with the BBC's Shakespeare Unlocked season, and the World Shakespeare Festival, and goodness knows what else.  Sometimes, you'd be forgiven for wondering whether it is ever not Shakespeare's birthday.  But brace yourself for 2016, the 500th anniversary of his death.

One of the marks of an intelligent, aware person is an understanding that the world is never as simple as the version served up to satisfy the limited curiosity and attention span of children, and the cultural bystanders and don't-knows who make up 90% or more of the population.  But, even with that awareness, most of us are too lazy to act on it.  We stick with the official canons and "grand narratives", and tend as a consequence to suffer from a constant low-level guilt that we haven't put more effort into broadening our horizons.

But life is short and the Arts are overwhelmingly long.  Shakespeare and Dickens, Bach and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Turner; a person can spend a lifetime just getting to know the Premier League of the Arts, never mind looking into the life and works of the also-rans and might-have-beens. But it is troubling, isn't it?  Knowing how infrequently the prizes in life go to the deserving, you do have to wonder whether the Illustrious Dead, too, have somehow networked or sharp-elbowed their way to the top table.

For example, have you ever heard of Christoph Graupner?  No, neither had I.  Once, it seems, he was regarded as one of the most prominent composers in the competing courts of the German-speaking world.  In 1723 he applied for and was offered the post as Kantor in Leipzig, but his employer, the Landgrave Ernst Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt, made him a counter-offer -- more money and job security -- and so he turned Leipzig down, clearing the way for one Johann Sebastian Bach to get the job.  Graupner wrote over 2000 works, virtually none of which has been performed in the last 250 years, mainly due to a dispute over his legacy that kept his work unpublished.  Radio 3 played one of his choral works last week, and to my untutored ears it was indistinguishable from Bach.  But what purpose would it serve to redress the injustice or to rewrite the history of music now?  There's quite enough actual Bach to be getting on with, not to mention Telemann and a dozen other underrated but moderately well-known composers jostling for attention.  Only scholars care about context.

But the embarrassing thing is that I seem constantly to be coming across new figures of substance -- unknown to me -- in domains I thought I knew.  Somehow, you assume that after 40 years or so, you will have a pretty good sense of who's who and what's what, at least in those areas that matter to you.  I'm sure there are many prominent physicists and Formula One drivers whose names have passed me by, but I would have thought that I'd have the novelists, the poets, the photographers, the painters, the musicians and the "cultural moments" pretty well covered by now.  Not so.

This week I was surprised by Jack Spicer and the Berkeley Renaissance in poetry, a movement of the 1950s that is a direct precursor of  The Beats.  How did I miss that?  Spicer is a good poet with interesting ideas about the role language itself plays in writing (his collected poems are titled "My Vocabulary Did This To Me").  Maybe I'm just bad with names.

There's simply too much good stuff out there, but luckily there's no law says you have to keep up with it.  And the great thing about Shakespeare is that -- so far, at least -- he sits reliably, indisputably and unassailably at the top of that vast tottering human pyramid of artistic endeavour.  It doesn't do us too much harm to ignore everyone else, and it seems highly unlikely that we've overlooked some other great poet-playwright genius, unjustly buried and struggling under that heap.

Or does it?  Or have we?  I wonder...  But don't you worry about it, birthday boy. I think you're probably still safe up there.

If thou survive my well-contented day
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more resurvey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bett'ring of the time,
And though they be outstripped by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
"Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought
To march in ranks of better equipage;
   But since he died, and poets better prove,
   Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love."
Sonnet 32

The Waste Land

Of course, the second app I bought -- damn the expense!  -- was the Faber / Touch Press version of Eliot's The Waste Land.  The whole package -- poem, manuscripts, readings, interviews with the likes of Seamus Heaney -- is outstanding, but listen:  I don't know how many times I have read this poem, but I confess I don't think I ever really understood it until I watched Fiona Shaw perform it.  I had always thought of it as deliberately made of broken bits -- you know, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" -- but she brings a remarkable unifying sensibility to the whole thing.

In an earlier post I discussed her fine performance of John Donne's poems on a TV programme by Simon Schama, but this is something else.  Eliot's original title was apparently going to be "He Do the Police in Different Voices", and the price of the app is worth it for her amazing act of interpretive ventriloquism (impressionism?) alone.

Your shadow at evening rising to meet you...

A Humument (Unsolicited Testimonial!)

I have several times made reference to the bookwork A Humument, by artist Tom Phillips. As a new, 5th edition of this mighty work of creative book defacement is shortly to appear, I thought it would be worth mentioning it again, if only to persuade you to buy a copy (for the first time, it's only being issued in paperback). Artists have to eat, too, even famous ones (and you only have to see a photo of Tom to see that he's a man who likes his food).

The project is so unique, and so long-lasting (begun in 1966 and still going); so involuted, self-referential and hermetic, yet so open-ended, inclusive and oracular; so witty, so funny, so filthy-mindedly sublime; so simply good to look at ... It's hard to know where to begin. At the beginning, I suppose. In TP's own words:

Like most projects that ended up lasting half a lifetime, this work started out as idle play at the fringe of my work and preoccupations. I had read an interview with William Burroughs (Paris Review 1965) and, as a result, had played with the “cut-up” technique, making my own variant (the column-edge poem) from current copies of the New Statesman. It seemed a good idea to push these devices into more ambitious service.

I made a rule; that the first (coherent) book I could find for threepence (i.e. one and a quarter pence) would serve.
Austin’s the furniture repository stood (until it closed in 1995) on Peckham Rye where Blake saw his first angels and along which Van Gogh had probably walked on his way to Lewisham. At this propitious place, on a routine Saturday morning shopping expedition, I found, for exactly threepence, a copy of A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, published in 1892 as a popular reprint of a successful three-decker. It was already in its seventh thousand at the time of the copy I acquired and cost originally three and sixpence. I had never heard of W.H. Mallock and it was fortunate for me that his stock had depreciated at the rate of a halfpenny a year to reach the requisite level. I have since amassed an almost complete collection of his works and have found out much about him. He does not seem a very agreeable person: withdrawn and humourless (as photographs of him seem to confirm) he emerges from his works as a snob and a racist (there are some extremely distasteful anti-semitic passages in A Human Document itself).

However for what were to become my purposes, his book is a feast. I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings. Its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover.

(from the Introduction, on the official Humument website)

I'll say. Over the years, Tom has settled on a signature style of overpainting the pages of A Human Document, which isolates and links words (and parts of words) by following those wiggly typographic secret passages known to compositors as "rivers". This technique is both instantly recognizable and incredibly expressive; pages worked this way can become simultaneously yearningly sad, laugh-out-loud funny, and deeply filthy. In fact, those are the keynote tones of A Humument.

I have very recently got my hands on an iPad 2, and immediately downloaded the Humument app.  Well, of course!  It is simply amazingly, breathtakingly beautiful to look at, with that remarkable Apple screen resolution and those vibrant colours bringing out the true essence of the work, like pretty pebbles still wet from the sea.  Much as I love the books (I own as many editions in as many versions as I can find or afford) I have to say I think the app is actually better than the printed versions.  There is also a tongue-in-cheek "oracle" function which may, for all I know, give the I-Ching a run for its money.  And it only costs £4.99 -- ludicrous!

Bill Toge, the Humument's shapeless

 lump of a protagonist

N.B. If anyone has a little bit more money than £4.99 to invest, Tom Phillips sells signed, limited run Humument prints at very reasonable prices at his 57talfourd.com online gallery, and you can also get them at even more reasonable prices at the Shandy Hall online shop of the Laurence Sterne Trust, which is well worth your support (you have read Tristram Shandy, haven't you?).

Frank Exchange

There was an interesting edition of BBC Radio 4's Front Row recently, when Mark Lawson pulled together interviews with young Jewish writers who have been grappling in their recent work with the Anne Frank Stoff (as we literary theorists say), sometimes in a way that is deliberately provocative to the pieties of older generations (careful now).

I normally find listening to Lawson trying to negotiate delicate topics rather like listening to a car crash (why does he get so creepily insistent about sexual matters?), but he handled this one well.  The authors included Ellen Feldman, Shalom Auslander and Nathan Englander.  Auslander's novel Hope: a tragedy deals with the conceit of a man who discovers the aged Anne Frank hiding out in his attic, and poses questions that non-Jews of a liberal persuasion would never dare ask.  Such as putting these words into the mouth of Anne Frank: "I think never forgetting the Holocaust is not the same thing as never shutting up about it". Yikes.

It struck me as amusing, therefore, to find these posters for current productions at the Nuffield Theatre juxtaposed:

What Anne Frank thinks about...

Thinking about Anne Frank...

It amused me, anyway.  The posters are for the three productions, "At Swim Two Boys", "Souvenir d'Anne Frank", and "Lalita's Big Fat Asian Wedding".

Alien Sweetcorn

The "mobile phone" -- as in, a portable telephonic device you can use anywhere, except on the train between Winchester and Southampton -- has been with us now for some years.  There is no denying that in its current evolutionary state as "the smartphone" it has become a wondrous thing.  To carry a phone, a camera, and the entire internet in your pocket in the same sleek gadget is a truly future-tastic Dan Dare moment.  However, these devices have had an impact on behaviour which is not entirely benign.

From its earliest days, the annoyance of having to listen to one half of a mobile phone conversation was the stuff of "observational" comedy.  "I'm on the train!" became a watchword for inane, inconsiderate behaviour.  Do you remember the story about the guy talking loudly and obnoxiously on a mobile phone in a train carriage, which -- when he was asked to use it to get help in a sudden medical emergency -- turned out to be a non-functional toy?  Back then, a decade or more ago, that story was all about "us" versus "them" i.e. a non-mobile-phone using majority vs. a minority of selfish, infantile show-offs.  But now, when according to Ofcom's figures for 2010 over 90% of the adult population of the UK owns a mobile phone, it has become quaintly historic.

But the issues of how, when and where to use a mobile have not gone away, however, they have simply become more complicated.

Walking around town and the university campus, I am struck by how hard it is to distinguish "phone-driven" behaviours from mental disorder or distress.  I see people talking animatedly to themselves, waving their arms and gesticulating in various corners.  I see people frowning down at their palm and muttering, as they page through mails walking along.  I see people laughing, shouting and sometimes crying at no obvious stimulus, as they do something as innocuous as fill a bag with potatoes in a supermarket.  The genuine lunatics must feel aggrieved at having their act stolen like this.

A lot of overseas students are particularly fond of hands-free earphone-and-microphone sets, which only adds to the confusion.  A bearded man of Middle-Eastern appearance with a loud angry voice comes striding towards you, both hands waving energetically, eyes fixed in the middle distance -- you have seconds to decide whether or not to take evasive action. A Chinese girl is smiling broadly at you through the shop window and nodding vigorously -- no, don't wave at her, fool, she's only on the phone!

There seems to be a new version of "privacy" under construction -- Privacy 2.0, perhaps*.  Call me an uptight boomer but, personally, if I wanted to discuss my financial situation or my recent operation, or to have a row with a builder, I would probably wait until the room was empty, close the door, and try to keep my voice down.  I would certainly not do it loudly and uninhibitedly in the street, on the bus, or in Tesco.  Nowadays, it seems, no-one is expected to pay attention if a person's life appears to be falling apart before your very eyes.  What business is it of yours? Why should you care if someone is in tears amid the alien sweetcorn, or of exceeding wrath in Poundland?  Get a life, stickybeak!

One of my colleagues complained to me the other day that she had been phoned, on an "urgent" work matter, while away on holiday at Easter.  I sympathised, but thought, More fool you, for letting senior management have your mobile number.  To me, my mobile is a private matter, shared with about five other people.  I only turn it on when I need to use it.  But this progressive, consensual and mutual erosion of privacy via electronic devices seems to be a generational thing.  My kids will receive and reply to texts from their friends under the restaurant table, even while engaging me in conversation at, ahem, an extremely expensive celebratory meal at Monsieur Blanc's establishment in Oxford.  It's the next step up in the evolution of multitasking, I suppose, from the way they did their homework while watching the TV, something I always found incomprehensible.

The barriers that I and my generation erect between activities, that serve to compartmentalise our  lives into "work", "leisure", "friends", "family", "public" and "private", are clearly dissolving.  This is how I know old age is approaching: too many fundamentally new things are starting to be beyond my ken.  Twitter?  Facebook?  There is no obvious place in my 20th century life for these 21st century things.  Try as I might to stay au courant, my similes and metaphors are losing purchase on the world.  Face it, those of us over 50 are hard-wired with a little icon in our brains of a proper bakelite handset with a dial, the one that lights up when anyone says "telephone".

Do you still raise your voice and ask "Can you hear me OK?" when using a mobile?  Do you worry endlessly about the battery running out?  Does the idea of tossing £50-worth of hi-tech gadget in the bin outrage you?  Do you wonder what on earth all these people find to talk about, constantly, just because they can?  Are you mystified why youngsters under 30 prefer to text rather than speak to a friend on their phone? Don't worry, you're just getting old, baby, and so am I.

* Actually, given Privacy 1.0 was "everyone sleeping in a cave", we're probably onto the beta version of Privacy 4700.1.76.54.2 by now, but you take my point.

Humble Retraction 19/4/2012:  A certain young man has strenuously denied using his phone on a recent occasion, and I humbly retract my unfounded allegation.  However, I'm pretty sure there was some brisk keyboard action going on in the seat next to him, so the rhetorical truth of my illustration still stands...  For the record, I should probably also point out that the meal was not "extremely" expensive, as the Brasserie Blanc is actually quite reasonable, given the standard of the food, though my advice is not to choose the liver.

A Walk in the Woods

Up behind "our" barn conversion in mid-Wales is an immaculately kept wood.  I think it may belong to Fernando, the Colombian builder who did the conversion.  Certainly, I have met him motoring along the track through the wood on his quad bike, on his way to the field that I know he owns, with a load of fence posts and cement.  Curiously, the owner of the conversion is Argentinian -- there seems to be quite a community of Latin American expatriates settled in the area.

In the bit of snow we had last week these woods became even more attractive, just right for an hour or two's easy hillside ramble with a camera.  You don't find many woods in Wales where there is grass underfoot, and the brushwood has been gathered into neat piles, ready for the wood-burning stove.

¡Qué bonito!

Adult Content

This week, Number One Son turned twenty-one.  Although I was in the first generation to benefit from the lowering of the age of majority in the UK to eighteen in 1970, attaining the age of twenty-one still seems somehow more "right" to me as the marker of passage into adulthood.  Although, let's be honest, few of us can claim to be even borderline adults until we've passed forty.

I'm pleased to say he's rather taller than me, now...

We've had what, in my observation, is an unusual experience with our kids:  we actually like them.  This has been a truly life-enhancing bonus.  Most parents love their children, of course, but "love" is an oddly ill-defined set of emotions that, it seems, need not include "like". Those parents always worry me who claim, for example, to "love their kids to bits".  An oddly revealing metaphor, especially when uttered between clenched teeth and with hands round the throat of some obnoxious brat.

Ah well, time to start moving on the next phase for both of us, I suppose:

And then the blogger justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances.

Of course, both he and his sister have yet finally to pass through the white water rapids of that modern rite of passage, the exam system.  This has played havoc with my dreams of late.  Long-forgotten anxieties about essays unwritten and subjects unstudied have been waking me at 4 a.m., and the flood of relief on realising that I have actually already sat all the exams I will ever sit is indescribable.  Phew.

So, if it's wise saws you're after, this reminds me of a little piece of hard-won wisdom I like to pass on to new fathers. I tell them that the worst bit will be school.  You will revisit all the bad experiences you had at school -- The horror!  The horror! -- but this time you won't be able to do anything about it, except worry on behalf of someone you care about more than you ever realised it was possible to care.  Compared to that, I have to say, dreaming about exams is child's play.

The Parable of the Tribunal

In the comments to a previous post, I proposed that to have some talent, in itself, is not enough to achieve anything worthwhile.  You also need

• Application. That famous "99% perspiration", or the "10,000 hours".
• A generous measure of selfishness.  Life, particularly family life, with a creative genius is a quick route to despair, divorce, and denunciation.
• Something to say.  Most rare of all. The Real Thing.  Accept no substitutes.

I might also add

• A  trust fund.  Or, failing that, a taste for the (very) simple life.

Frankly, if you are in possession of all of the above, any actual "talent" is an unnecessary luxury.  And, lacking them, the possession of any amount of "talent" is little more than an embarrassment, like having a car but no ability to drive.

This is particularly the case for those of us brought up in the non-conformist Protestant tradition (my family is Baptist; I am not).  We have a difficult relationship with a deity that likes to get quite personal about things like laziness and failure.  That notorious "parable of the talents" (Matthew 25:14 and Luke 19:12) is a central teaching for what we might call "shopkeeper's Christianity", and has been responsible for a lot of unhappiness.

Interestingly, those infuriatingly smug "wise virgins", who have loaded up their spare jerrycans of lamp-oil at the pump, also pop up in the very same chapter of Matthew.  There's an unpleasantly petit-bourgeois flavour -- Thatcherite, even -- to these parables that is hard to reconcile with The Man's more profound teachings that challenge precisely this "because I deserve it" world-view.  I have to say, Jesus as reported in the Gospels does seem to blow confusingly hot and cold on the subjects of the deserving and undeserving poor, the proper uses of wealth, and how far the Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a Building Society account prudently tied to the FTSE 100 Index.  Maybe he just liked to play with his disciples' minds.

With which thought, I did read said parable again -- it is Easter, after all -- and now present it to you from a different perspective.  Let the hate-mail commence!


LORD HARDMAN v. SIMON THE SERVANT

This Industrial Tribunal has convened to consider the case of Simon the Servant brought against Lord Hardman for constructive dismissal.

Let me remind the Tribunal, that constructive dismissal occurs when an employer's behaviour has become so intolerable, or the original terms and conditions of employment have been varied so substantially, that the employee has no choice other than to resign. Since resignation in such a case is not truly voluntary it is, in effect, a termination of employment. For example, in a case where an employer has acted like an utter shit, in order to get the employee to resign rather than dismissing the employee outright, then that capitalist bloodsucker is trying to effect a constructive dismissal.  Are we on the same page, now?

OK, facts:

Lord Hardman decides to go travelling for a couple of months.  Nice work if you can get it.  He divides up some serious capital, eight talents, between his three employees.  However, this is not done equally or equitably.  OK, eight talents won't divide by three, but to divide them in the proportion five, two, and one says something about his view of their relative merits, does it not?  Also, it is a matter of record (Matthew 25:15) that Lord Hardman at no point explicitly instructed Simon the Servant what to do with the money entrusted to him, though we can accept the implicit instruction not to lose it or spend it on handmaidens.  What may or may not have been said in private to the other, more favoured employees is not recorded.

The plaintiff decided to play safe, and stashed the cash in a "hole in the ground" account, paying little or no interest.  One talent doesn't go far, and the minimum investment requirement for high-return cash investment products is a statutory two talents.  His fellow employees, by contrast, decided to gamble with their employer's wealth.  They claim the money was put into high risk structured investment vehicles, that they got lucky, and doubled their stake.  In a couple of months, in the current financial climate?  We should all be so lucky.  However, it is not the business of this Tribunal to make allegations of corruption, money laundering, manna dealing or other improper use of funds against any third parties.

On his return, Lord Hardman went through a little capo di tutti capi routine, that resulted in the promotion of the other two employees, and the ritual humiliation of the plaintiff ("Where's my freakin' vigorish, you wicked and slothful moop?"), with open threats of weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Lord Hardman is known to be a "hard man" who, in the words of the plaintiff's deposition, "reaps where he hath not sown, and gathers where he hath not strawed".  We think this means that Hardman is a nasty piece of work, using business practices that border on the criminal.  A man to be feared, in other words.

It is claimed that the whole thing was a set-up to persuade Simon the Servant to resign (and thus avoid payment of the statutory redundancy lepton).  One talent out of eight? It was an insult, and a provocation.  Understandably, Simon left Lord Hardman's employ immediately, but was encouraged by the Amalgamated Union of  Slaves, Indentured Servants and Handmaidens to file this claim of constructive dismissal.

Decision:

The Tribunal upholds the claim of Simon the Servant against Lord Hardman, and awards him the exemplary sum of ten talents, to be recovered from Hardman Enterprises Ltd.

Implications:

We assert that the Republic of Heaven shall be like unto this Tribunal, whereby no wickedness which has been  perpetrated against any of these, my brethren, will pass without redress and compensation, though we are divided as to the wisdom of casting any rat-faced exploitative wrong-doer into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.  We also emphatically strike down and reverse the judgement that "unto every one that hath it shall be given, but from him that hath not it shall be taken away even that which he hath" as both implausible and unpronounthable.

Here endeth the lesson.


Addendum 10/4/2012:

I am appalled to be informed that there are people out there who do not know the parable referred to, or who do not have access to a Bible (have they never heard of the internet?).  For the benefit of those foolish virgins, here is the relevant part of Matthew's Gospel:

 14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.
 15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.
 16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.
 17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.
 18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.
 19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.
 20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.
 21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
 22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.
 23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
 24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:
 25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.
 26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:
 27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.
 28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.
 29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
 30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Four Mornings in Wales

We've been in Mid-Wales this week.  The one dependable thing about the weather in Wales at this time of year is that it will change.

On Monday, around 7:00 am, I awoke to a theatrical sunrise spectacular, that had me leaning out of the bedroom window with a camera. It was the sort of surreal combination of sun, thick mist, and clear skies that makes you question whether you are truly awake.  It burned off to reveal a day of blazing sunshine.

On Wednesday, around 6:30 am, I awoke to the whistling and banging of high winds, and opened the window onto horizontally-driven snow that continued all day.  We had to drive to Hereford that day, but luckily the wind seemed to blow the snow straight through the valleys and up onto the hills.

On Thursday morning, around 7:00 am, the blizzards had gone, leaving a light covering of snow on the fields, and a bright white cap on the hilltops.  The sun stayed behind a covering of cloud all day, but the snow had practically all melted away by the evening, except on the highest hills.

On Friday, around 6:30, there had been a heavy frost, and a smoking mist hung over the valley.  As on Monday, it had burned off by mid-morning, and we drove home in sunshine that grew increasing hot as we descended in altitude and latitude towards southern England.

Yes, that is the same oak-tree in each picture.  It stands in the field below the hillside barn conversion we have started to use in recent years.  It's a pleasant view to wake up to each morning, and it's one of the few places I know where you can wake up in a spacious timber-framed, oak-floored room, and get a regular photo-opp even before going downstairs to make a first cup of tea.

Material World

I recently watched the two parts of Living in the Material World, Martin Scorsese's portrait of George Harrison, on the BBC iPlayer.  Not out of any great interest -- apart from a couple of years in my early teens, the Beatles' music has never had much resonance for me, and I can't say I've knowingly heard a George Harrison album ever in my life.  I used to find the Rolling Stones much more interesting (that is, until their only subject became their own descent into sleaze).  But I can't resist any programme that incorporates vintage footage and interviews with aging musical celebrities.

I was particularly struck by a sequence where Lennon and Harrison are guests on one of those hyper-serious chat shows that have since vanished from the airwaves.  I presume the theme was something like, what should we make of the spray-on "Eastern spirituality" that has infected some strands of pop of late? (maybe the programme was billed as "From Satire to Sitar"?)  The two Beatles seem to have been summoned to appear before an invited audience of the intellectual and bien-pensant establishment, in order to explain themselves.  Although, this is only an "audience" in the sense of the seating arrangement -- these people are certainly not there to listen to anyone.  In fact, they behave like hospital consultants invited to discuss an interesting pathology, as displayed by the baffled pair on stage.

John Mortimer (one of those annoying upper class rebels, the archetypal "champagne socialist") and the guy seated near him (whom I feel I ought to have recognised, but didn't) are shown giving free vent to their theories on "Mr. Harrison" and his wacky Eastern ideas, all expressed in the most preposterously patrician tones imaginable.  It's outrageous.  Nobody speaks like that any more.  You almost expect one of them to get up and poke John or George with a stick.

The main effect of their torrent of fruity verbiage, of course, is to establish a barrier: on this side we are serious, educated, well-informed, articulate people, with considered opinions, worthy of attention.  On that side of the barrier you are, intellectually, objects, never subjects. You people over there may, in medical terminology, "present" interesting and even sympathetic behaviours, but you can never be expected to understand or express them yourselves.  That's our job.

How very 1960s.  Particularly British, too, I thought, was the fact that John and George -- a couple of streetwise scallies who had lucked out, big time, but ended up defining the zeitgeist -- were actually putting up with this treatment without verbally decking anybody.  It appeared they knew their place, although it's clear from their faces that they weren't happy about it.  It seemed a long way from the scene in the train carriage in  A Hard Day's Night ("I fought the War for your sort!" "I bet you're sorry you won, now").  But then, I don't suppose they wrote that.

The irony is that Lennon and Harrison were pioneers of a New Aristocracy, and really didn't need to take any crap from those pompous schoolboy bores any more.  Mortimer and Co. simply hadn't yet heard the news. But, if the evidence of this film is to be believed, global fame had already turned into a global prison for them, within which even prodigious wealth had become prodigious boredom.  It seems no matter how you played it, mean-and-moody or eager-to-please, you ended up having to live in a stratospheric gated VIP lounge way above the wordy bleatings of the media, but -- more sadly -- also way, way above the world of the fans who put you there, but whose dangerous devotion was a constant threat to your safety.

No wonder Harrison eventually turned away, and took to either hanging out with congenial members of those other aristocracies in showbiz, motor racing, and the film world, or gardening and obsessively re-landscaping his estate at Friar Park.  Not that it brought him safety, any more than it did John Lennon.  A lunatic with a knife was able to penetrate into this sanctuary, and Harrison was probably only saved by the bravery of his gutsy wife.

George Harrison was clearly a man obsessed by death, or more precisely, by the "spiritual" preparations for leaving one's life with equanimity.  Yet, in the film, Tom Petty reveals that Harrison's surprising message to him on the death of fellow "Travelling Wilbury" Roy Orbison was, "Aren't you glad it wasn't you?"  Elsewhere, I read that Petty's message to Harrison after his stabbing was, "Aren't you glad you married a Mexican woman?"

Frankly,  my takeaway message from the film was,  "Aren't you glad you're not a massively successful and wealthy rock star?"  Something we all need reminding of from time to time.  As Keith Richards is often quoted as saying:  I do all this stuff so you don't have to.  Thanks, Keith.