Scenius

I was reading an interview with Brian Eno in the Guardian about his new book, co-authored with Bette Adriaanse, What Art Does, and two things he said struck me as noteworthy. First:

Eno says. “I had met a 15-year-old who was talking about doing her A-levels. She said, ‘Well, I really want to do art because that’s what I like, but my teacher said I was too bright for that.’ I thought: that is really the death of a culture. When we decide that stuff we’ve been doing for the whole of human history is not as important as learning about FinTech or computer programming.”

Well, that was me. Not actually me, obviously, but me in 1970, at the point of choosing my A-level subjects. Three years previously I had been required to choose between Art and German, which was a no-brainer at the time: I love languages, and wanted to learn to speak German much more than I wanted to muck about in our really rather underpowered art classes. Besides, I was enjoying myself drawing, painting, and making lino prints at home, and was even starting to show work at little local exhibitions, so: kein Problem!

Now, I had been something of an art star at my primary school, where a strong emphasis had been put on the importance of "art and craft"; my paintings were entered for national and local competitions, in which I won first prize twice. But at secondary school art was regarded as mere busywork for the non-academic kids. Nobody cared that I could draw and paint, as I had been tagged as a potential Oxbridge candidate, and nothing mattered more to small-town state grammar schools than a few Oxbridge successes every year. But I've covered this ground before in the post Life Drawing, and will simply say that when in 1970 I initially proposed one of my intended three A-Levels as Art, I might as well have suggested Masturbation, given the reaction I got. So I chose Geography instead, and have never regretted it.

But what Eno says is interesting. I don't know about now, but back then art school was the destination of choice for fashion-conscious live-wire misfits who hadn't cared for school discipline or three hours of homework every night. The connection between Britain's art schools and the inventive vitality of our rock and pop scenes is well-established, from the Beatles and the Who to Roxy Music, Blur and beyond. Eno himself, of course, was famously tutored by my man Tom Phillips at Ipswich Art School. But, TBH, I think Eno is wrong to see a zero-sum competition between Art and Academia: these are two very different forms of intelligence, and rarely possessed in equal measure by any one individual. One very good reason why conceptual art has become such a boring dead end is that it demands the application of academic intelligence from people who, in the main, are simply not cut out for it. After all, conversely, no-one expects a professor of technology also to be a design genius (have you ever seen a lab prototype?) or, for that matter, a humanities scholar to turn out a brilliantly innovative work of literature. Of course, it is undeniable that, on a personal level, for anyone with conflicting talents and desires to have to choose a path though life at age 16 can be agonising, but it is also surely true that for those with a genuine artistic "calling" and talent to match the way forward is never less than clear.

The other quote that caught my attention was this:

So I have this idea of ‘scenius’,” he elaborates. “Genius is … the brilliance of an individual. Scenius is the fertility of a whole scene of people. So much of art history doesn’t acknowledge that at all. You know, it’s like: Picasso, Kandinsky, Rembrandt, these great individuals. But look at the world that they were in. There were a lot of other great individuals around them, and there were other people who don’t even get called artists, who facilitated. Curators, dealers, critics, people who ran salons, girlfriends, mistresses, wives, children.

Now that is surely very true, and a very neat coinage. Nothing stimulates creativity like being part of a "scene", where ambitious individuals compete for attention, steal ideas off each other, and are nurtured, accommodated, and facilitated by other members of that scene endowed with different but complementary sets of gifts and ambitions. Not just anybody can become a successful dealer, for example, in – ahem – either sense of the word. There have always been "lone wolf" artists, of course, but quite often it seems that their renown came late in life or even posthumously; I suppose Van Gogh is the type specimen. Most of the artists we have heard of, though, whether visual or musical, will have emerged from some supportive creative milieu. In fact, the same scene will often have produced several major and multiple minor figures, like one of those awe-inspiring "star nurseries" identified and so beautifully photographed by the Hubble telescope.

I have very few regrets in my life, but I do sometimes wonder what might have been if I had found myself in a scene like that, where whatever latent creative abilities I have might have found a congenial testbed. I never did, though: too lazy and unfocussed to be an academic, too uninterested in "current affairs" to become a journalist or politician, I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time at university. Much as I enjoyed myself there and treasure the lifelong friendships I made, it was not really "my scene", as we used to say. Far too many of us, I think, had our ambitions channelled and truncated by schools which had the sole aim of getting us into university... Got your A-levels, got your place? Job done... Bye! But if, at that crucial time, you have no clear game plan that extends beyond formal schooling into adult life, it's too easy to end up falling through the cracks of your own personality. Unless, that is – whether by accident or design – you are surrounded by a coterie of others who share the same aims and interests; friends, rivals, and even enemies who can hone, amplify, and boost your talent into escape velocity.

TBH I doubt I'd ever have made a success of the artistic life, anyway; so few do. In the end, I was lucky enough to land on my feet and find a satisfying role working in academic libraries; hardly a "scene", but a good-enough fit for me, with a good-enough salary and the prospect of a decent pension at the end of my working life. Result! Not everyone is that lucky, however, perhaps especially those minor characters who were once constituents of a scene but then disappeared without trace, at least as far as "art history" is concerned. I'd be surprised if Eno can recall many of them himself, or has any idea of what happened to them after fame and fortune came calling for the chosen few – the hangers on, the roadies, the dealers, the fixers, and all the various temporary friends that make up a scene like the one that produced Roxy Music back in the early 70s. How easily "scenius" will have turned into "hasbeenius" for them.

This reminds me of a book I read a few years ago, A Hero for High Times, by Ian Marchant, about a man called Bob Rowberry. Living in an immobilised bus in the woods near Presteigne in mid-Wales – one of our very own annual Easter haunts – Bob is a happy survivor of more "scenes" than you would have thought possible. He pops up everywhere in the story of the long counterculture, 1956-1994, with anecdotes too numerous and eyebrow-raising to summarise here. It's quite a story, though, and appears to be true. But characters like Bob are the exception: the improvised life can be cruel to those who choose it, as was brutally exposed by the Covid shutdown of the theatres and concert venues. There are no pensions, no incremental salaries, or even guarantees of regular work for those who take the chancer's leap of faith.

And then there are those who have simply drifted into the life of someone more driven, and destined for great things. We revere the songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, but who really knows or cares who Cary Raditz or Marianne Ihlen were, other than journalists looking for a fresh angle on an old story? There are worse fates, you'd think, for an artist's ex than to become famous in their own right as the discarded muse behind a wonderful painting or song. Unless, I suppose, that song is any one of hundreds of bitter and twisted break-up songs (OK, let's make do with seventy-five). Far from "dining out" on the story, you'd probably want to keep very quiet about that.

And BTW: farewell to David Lynch. I'll never forget watching Eraserhead in a tiny fleapit arts cinema in Bristol around 1978, and thinking, is this real or am I having some kind of icky flashback? Or watching Twin Peaks spellbound on my 8" portable TV, and then using its themes and characters as test entries when working on the digital conversion of the Southampton University Library catalogue ("The Owls Are Not What They Seem", and so on). Imaginary books which people actually began to request, despite the prominent note reading !!THIS IS A TEST RECORD!!; so much so that the Ref Desk people insisted I remove them (I think I did, I'd better check...). David Lynch is a sad loss: they don't / won't / can't make 'em like that any more. There is a man in a smiling bag...

Chips vs. Chips

Morcombelake bus stop

From time to time someone publishes a book that makes a zeitgeisty splash: it seems to help if its arguments can be reduced to a simple takeaway formula by reviewers, obviating the need for anyone else actually to read the book. In fact, ideally, this formula will at least appear to be encapsulated in its title: no need even to read any reviews! I'm thinking of books like Small Is Beautiful, The Shock of the New, The Black Swan, and so on. What, you've actually read them?

For a short while recently, it seemed that a book by French political scientist Olivier Roy, The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, might be the latest candidate to fit that description, but its moment has probably already passed. It's a translation of L'Aplatissement du monde: La crise de la culture et l'empire des normes, a title which actually conveys the apparent contents more accurately: roughly "The Flattening-Out of the World: the crisis of culture and the empire of norms". I assume there's some kind of sideways glance at one of Roland Barthes' more curious books going on there, too, the one on Japan, Empire of Signs. Now there's a book you'd never get from its title, much as you might presume you could.

The main bit of Roy's argument that stuck with me from the reviews was that our contemporary global pick-and-mix culture is destroying "cultures". That is, that the authenticity of long-established national and local cultures is being undermined by our constant consumerist flirtations with what, for example, used to be dismissed here – in an earlier, more robust version of British "authenticity" – as foreign muck. Today, that would be non-native food fads like kefir or kimchi, but formerly any new and deeply suspect items imported from dodgy overseas locations: quasi-pornographic ingredients like olive oil, garlic, and capsicum peppers [1]. Some stiff-necked types back then, I'm sure, will have blamed the loss of an empire on our new-found fondness for pasta and pizza.

There are reviews of Roy's book here and here, and no doubt elsewhere, too, should you want to make up your own mind about it. Whatever its merits, the "undermining local cultures" bit seems a very tired old argument to me, and despite the leftist credentials of the author the very essence of a certain brand of conservatism. But then I haven't read the book, and have no intention of doing so.

In France, however, to take a stand against a globalising food culture does make a kind of sense: the national culinary tradition is often claimed to be an essential part of what it means to be French. Unless, I suppose, you're of North African heritage and living in a run-down banlieue of Paris, or even some British expat in a refurbished farmhouse in the Dordogne, craving Marmite, proper tea, and a comforting plate of baked beans on toast. But apparently the youth of France are showing little interest in haute cuisine or spending the necessary hours in the kitchen preparing traditional staples of the French diet like boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin, and have fallen prey to le fast-food and McDo, like the youth everywhere else.

But if you are a Brit living in Britain, really? Let's have more of that foreign muck, please! Come on, guys, undermine our authentic national culture as much as you like! For anyone over sixty, memories of the British kitchen in the past are like a nightmare from which we finally began to awake somewhere in the 1980s. Does anyone truly long for the actual domestic boiled-beef-and-carrots "tradition" of fried breakfast, tinned peas, jam sandwiches, overcooked vegetables, and stodgy puddings with instant custard? For years now I have been keeping an eye on the supermarket aisles where the Fray Bentos tinned pies, bottles of Camp coffee, Bird's custard powder and other assorted relics of the pre-refrigerator British diet are racked, and have never yet seen anybody put one of those culinary curiosities into their basket. Maybe they're really there as a sort of "remember the 1950s?" museum-cum-warning: You've never had it so good. No, really! Mind you, when the Russian hackers finally cut off our electricity, those shelves will empty even faster than the ones carrying family packs of toilet roll.

Porthole view of Clevedon Pier

I don't know about you, but I do like a bit of chocolate, and my chocolate of choice is Lindt Excellence 70% (inexplicably, my partner prefers 90%): not because I'm some sort of snack snob, but simply because it's so much nicer than anything our "native" manufacturers like Cadbury's have ever come up with. There was a time, of course, when I, like all British kids, knew no better. A shilling (5p) bar of Cadbury's Whole Nut seemed pretty damned sophisticated to me. But at Easter 1965 we had a primary school trip to Switzerland (which was unusual, and I should write about that sometime), and I don't think there was one of us who didn't come home changed, and changed utterly, taste-wise, when it came to chocolate. Some kids had practically filled a suitcase with Suchard, Toblerone, and those mauve-wrapped Milka bars [2]; goodness knows what they had done with their clothes. In fact, for many years most British self-styled "chocolate" could not be marketed as such in Europe, because of its unacceptably high content of vegetable oils and milk. Frankly, at its worst, our chocolate was little more than flavoured wax – anyone remember those cheap Superba bars you used to be able to buy in Woolworth's? – compared to the ambrosial substance made by cocoa-dusted angels in Switzerland, Belgium, and other select euro-franchises of heaven.

But, thinking of the miraculous cocoa bean, you do have to wonder how quickly unfamiliar foodstuffs from overseas become incorporated as a staple of the local "traditional" culture. Never mind kimchi and kefir, what about rice and spices? Or potatoes? Tomatoes? Chillies? Peppers? Where would our national love of hot gloop be without cornflour? And what could be more traditionally British than a tin of Heinz baked beans, an American concoction marketed by an American company which incorporates not a single "native" British ingredient other than salt and a splash of vinegar.

And then there's the "tradition" of a curry or a Chinese meal after a night out. I'll never forget the night in 1971 that a friend finally persuaded me to try a crispy spring roll as a tasty alternative to a greasy pink sausage in batter as a post-pub takeaway treat. Or later that same year when our teacher took the sixth-form German group on a theatre visit to Cambridge, and treated us all to a proper "Indian" afterwards. It was my first ever experience of an Indian restaurant: I had a chicken biryani that I can still recall with pleasure over fifty years later. Of course, even the magnificent cuisine of India itself has happily incorporated "foreign" ingredients, not least some other members of that extraordinary New World vegetable diaspora, those tasty (if sometimes deadly) shape-shifters, the Solanaceae. Cooks everywhere know a good thing when they see it (or, better, taste it). Even, eventually, in Britain.

Deceptively broken chair, Southampton

In the end, all appeals to cultural purity and tradition have to be regarded with suspicion, whether from the left or the right, politically. I shared some thoughts on this in a post from 2010, The Italian Job, when a set of my photographs was being shown in a town known either as Innichen (to German speakers) or San Candido (to Italian speakers) situated in the Italian Dolomites; a territory which, before its post-WW1 annexation by Italy, was once a part of Austro-Hungary known as the "South Tyrol", and is still divided, culturally and linguistically, more than a century later. The big step from national pride to intolerance and violence against incomers and cultural "others" was all too easily taken in the hot mess created by the decline of empires and disruptive wars, a mess that has never gone away and is being dangerously over-heated again today by mass migrations away from climate change, kleptocracies, and intolerant authoritarian regimes. "Too much too soon" is never the safest way to mix things up, especially when it comes to people, and even "little and often" can become explosive after a while.

So is the world being "flattened out", culturally, as Olivier Roy and many others have suggested? Up to a point, unquestionably, yes. Setting aside McDonalds, Microsoft, and the like, the fact that our very own English language – surely not one of the easiest to master – has escaped into the wild and become international property is a symptom of this. Every day I am humbled by the confident idiomatic command of my mother tongue by politicians, journalists, scientists, writers, and public figures of every type and nationality when I hear them being interviewed on the radio. Are there British politicians today who could hold their own under interrogation on, say, Spanish or German radio? I doubt it. But do these fluent speakers of our pushy lingua franca still treasure their own language? Of course they do. Do they resent the cuckoo-like domination of English in pretty much all international discourse? Even in a Europe from which we flounced away a few years ago? Apparently not, not even in France – well, not much, anyway – a country with a long-standing language-anxiety issue that amounts to a tradition in itself. Although it is undeniable that we have our enormous and muscular American cousin standing behind us at all times, who speaks a snappier version of our language in a much louder voice, and always carries a Big Stick tucked under his arm.

It is also true that anyone's mother tongue is less and less likely to be one of the hundreds of endangered languages (list here). It is said that one of these languages will die out every 40 days, a "little and often" shift towards the more widely-spoken languages that is a bottom-up kind of flattening out. Linguists tend to regard that as a tragedy, and celebrate the fact that there are still 840 living languages on Papua New Guinea. But I doubt many PNG administrators feel the same way and, inevitably, English is the language of government and the legal and education systems there, with Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, the most widely spoken language.

Incidentally and not entirely irrelevantly, here's a real TV treat for David Attenborough fans from 1957. If you followed the link, that is very much the black-and-white world I was born into in 1954 – intrepid man in khaki shorts encounters strange "natives" in faraway places – and there is little doubt that the world has lost much of its enticing variety and strangeness since then. I mean, you can't find a proper cannibal or head-hunter anywhere, these days, can you? But – what's that? – do I hear mutterings out there (in academic English, naturally) about "orientalism" and "white privilege"? Sure, there's that, but come on... A world without even an imaginary heart of darkness would be a very flat place indeed.

The big question, of course, is does any of this matter? Is a vision of a few broadly similar world cultures speaking a handful of languages, all eating a pick and mix world-diet bought from the same few supermarket chains, and all watching the same streamed TV programmes every night a dream of a better world or a dystopian nightmare? Are those who oppose this apparently irreversible direction of travel – sometimes "by any means necessary" – the good guys or the bad guys?

These are Big Questions to which I have no answers, you won't be surprised to hear. So here's another big one for you: do you think, in time, we Brits might be compelled by linguistic force majeure to refer to "crisps" as "chips", and eat "fries" instead of "chips"? I sincerely hope not, and if we did I'd be annoyed and have a bit of moan about Young People Today, but I'd probably not be inclined to go to the barricades over it, or encourage a potato farmers' tractor blockade of Whitehall. That's much more of a French response to such provocations but, as we like to say here: vive la différence!

Although, apparently, like cul-de-sac, sacré bleu, and even c'est la vie!, no-one ever does actually say vive la différence! in yer actual France. In much the same way as there are very few actual cowboys in America, and no-one in Britain has ever referred to an umbrella as a "bumbershoot". It seems bits of different cultures are prone to leak into each other in a uniquely distorted and sometimes unrecognisable fashion, in what is more like an ongoing game of international Chinese whispers than any dismal flattening out into a grey, entropic cultural pancake / tortilla / chapati / focaccia / matzo / etc. (you get the idea).

So who knows what weird series of mash-ups will eventually result? Although I'd suggest that the English language itself, this amazing linguistic car-crash – bent out of shape so many times but never written-off, now much simplified and incorporating cannibalised bits of various other contenders and, incredibly, leading the race (for now, anyway) – may give us a hint of what is yet to come. Yes, folks, here comes the Franken-future!

And well spotted, you're quite right: these four photographs have no apparent relationship whatsoever with the rambling content of this post. They just sort of leaked in.

Bristol flat kitchen

1. The only place you would find olive oil when I was a kid in small-town Britain was in a chemist's shop, sold in small corked medicine bottles, its sole known use being to soften ear wax prior to syringing. I imagine there were secret places in Soho where garlic and – crikey! – root ginger could be bought, furtively, probably as sex aids.

2. Not to be confused with Nestlé's aberration (always pronounced "nessles" here BTW, unless you're looking for trouble), the Milky Bar, an emetic confection of "white chocolate", much advertised on TV when I was young, featuring some wimpy bespectacled boy in a cowboy outfit: The Milky Bar Kid. Bizarre.

Pretty Misty

Hardown Hill

As has become our custom, we split our end of year / start of year break into two halves: some time at Christmas with our adult children in Dorset, then New Year in our Bristol flat, meeting up with my partner's family and some old friends from our time living in the city.

Dorset was incredibly foggy, as was much of Britain. On our first day there – in our customary rental in Morcombelake, perched on the shoulder of Hardown Hill – you could see there was a dense ridge of mist out near the coast. By the next day it had rolled inland to cover everything for the next four days, reducing visibility to a minimum. As you can imagine, this was not ideal from a walking or photographic p-o-v.

But in addition to a "proper" camera and my iPhone I'd taken along the crazy Canon Zoom monocular, and got some interesting shots with it. I like the way its intimate close-in zooming couples with barely-acceptable image quality to produce some very "pictorial" images. Here are a few from Dorset:

And here are a few more from the vantage point of the Bristol flat, where the mist finally cleared after a stormy New Year's Eve, and sunshine and a little frost livened things up:

A Tolerable New Year

January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity, noted as the guardian of revolving doors, with special responsibility for the safe return of goods to their shop of origin after the gift-giving season.  Traditionally, offerings to Janus took the form of credit notes, rather than cash. January is thus a time for refunds, swaps, reviews, fresh starts, and subscription renewals.

It's also a time for simultaneously looking back, and looking forward. Pro tip: Don't try this at home. In fact, here is some even better advice, which I wholeheartedly endorse, despite generally failing to follow it myself: never go back, never dwell on the past.

But, as you take the sharp January bend into a new year, it's impossible not to glance back and find yourself confronted, however briefly, with the trail of wreckage you have left behind, not just in the previous year, but in all the preceding years. Although it's true that, with the turn of each successive year, the view of the past does seem to improve as it fades further away, like the vista back down a mountain road of hairpin bends. This, despite the fact that what most of us see down there is the strewn debris of a lifetime of broken resolutions, missed opportunities, abandoned projects, wasted potential, and poor choices. Reason enough to refasten one's gaze on the road straight ahead once more. This time, it will all be different!

But the chances are it won't be very different at all, and inevitably around this time of year I catch myself in a pensive, retrospective mood, mulling over the past, and that zig-zaggy trail of wreckage. In particular, I often end up contemplating my Lost List of onetime friends and wondering, "whatever happened to So-and-So?" It is one of life's nagging known unknowns not to know with any certainty whether someone you once thought of as a close friend, or even as a possible partner in life, is still alive and thriving out there in the world somewhere. Or, um, not.

No matter how fortunate you have been in your friends, or how assiduously you have tried to keep in touch with each other, some will simply have vanished from your life, and may even already have left the scene permanently. Everyone, but especially those of us who were young in pre-Internet days, eventually has a Lost List. All it took back then was a few changes of address, some mild "musical differences", or just one significant solo turn off the metaphorical road you once travelled together, and they had disappeared. Curiously, it seems to take a special effort of imagination to realise that you have vanished from their lives, too. I think many of us nourish a narcissistic fantasy of walking back into a certain place – it might be a pub, or a cafe, or a convivial room – where all those past acquaintances sit waiting in a state of suspended animation for your return, like Norm Peterson walking into Cheers. Yay! So what have you been up to for the past fifty years, man?

It is the B-side of this fantasy that, just as our lost friends remain Forever Young in our memory, so too do we in theirs. Which is weird. Especially when you think quite how much you have changed, both in appearance (argh) and in your beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. I don't know about you, but I was an idiot when I was 20. I cringe with embarrassment when I think of some of the things I thought, said, and did, back then. That there are people out there who may still think of me as that posturing young buffoon, utterly unaware of the wise, caring, sober-sided-father-of-two and now white-haired citizen I have become since – at least in my own estimation – is both amusing and appalling. No wonder so few of them have stayed in touch.

Mind you, they were mostly idiots, too. They are probably equally embarrassed, and rightly so. I'm thinking of the ones I knew in that youthful dreamtime that lies between your late teens and early twenties, when everyone still has their full unspent allocation of unrealised potential and the world is still – for the lucky, talented few, at any rate – an enticing board-game of unmade choices. Everyone is still a contender; the dice are still in the cup, uncast. So, while we're waiting for the game to begin, why don't we all have some fun? Well, why not? Hey, why don't we try out for size some things we may regret or try to forget for the rest of our lives? Great idea!

It doesn't take long, though, once the dice have rolled, for the snakes and ladders of real life to begin. Paths immediately diverge. Tagged as an incorrigible hedonist, rarely rising before noon, and ironically something of a stranger to the library, I quickly became unnecessary company to my more serious-minded and career-orientated acquaintances, not least those I had met at a college noted as a launchpad for eminent public lives. I didn't mind: it made it easier to identify the like-minded souls. As someone once said, the dancers will inherit the party. And what a party it was!

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –

Not so when I have danced for an hour:

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and

sit in corners alone, and glower.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

At the risk of coming across as some kind of sociopath, it has always been a source of great pleasure to me that, although a few old playmates did become public figures, none ever became truly famous. Which was fortunate for them, too, I hasten to add, fame being famously a curse: apart from the all-encompassing inconvenience, it seems that household names rarely inhabit happy households. Plus, to be absolutely honest, I have always been particularly grateful that none of my old friends ever sought success in a creative pursuit that I might actually have envied; as a novelist or poet, say, or even as a blogging photographer, come to that. That would have been tricky, and I might have needed to resort to blackmail, or at the very least leave a lot of one star reviews on Amazon.

For most of us – certainly, for most of those still figuring on my address list – there will have been the pleasures, satisfactions, and occasional frustrations of a normal, useful life; in my case, nearly forty years of selfless service to the bibliographic needs of the staff and students of two universities: you're welcome! Also, for those like me who decided early on to fold the hand they were dealt and sit out the wider game – hey, someone has to order the takeaways and make the coffee – there are the philosophical consolations of the slacker's manifesto:

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.
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald translation

After all, looked at in the right way– maybe try squinting a bit? – it's not so much wreckage you can see scattered across the road back there as leftovers, packaging, and jettisoned ballast: traces of a life that, remarkably, turned out to be yours. Again, sorry, there are no January refunds or returns, and there's really no point in indulging in buyer's remorse: what you see is what you got.

So, properly considered, there is really no need at all to resolve that this time it will all be different. Another round of the better bits of the same-old same-old will do just fine, I reckon; ideally, of course, with as few as possible of the worse bits and no unpleasant surprises at all. That, surely, is what we mean when we wish each other a "Happy New Year", isn't it? Or, as an old friend from 50 years ago put it (one who, I'm glad to say, has stayed in touch): "Have a tolerable 2025 (let's not aim too high)".

I'll drink to that... So: Here's to a tolerable New Year! May 2025 turn out to be not too bad, really, all things considered! And, crikey, there's already quite a lot to take into consideration, isn't there?

 Your blogger attempts "May You Never..." , ca. 1973 [1]

[1] Actually, "Home Ranch", by Thomas Eakins, 1892, reversed laterally to get the guitar the right (wrong) way round (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Regifted 2

As mentioned previously, I'm going to polish up a few old posts, wrap them nicely, and hope you don't mind getting them again. Even if you have seen this one before, at least I can be pretty sure it wasn't you that gave it to me in the first place. So here's the next one:

For a Dancer

Brother and sister

Now that sex 'n' gender have been put firmly, if controversially, on the agenda by the young – in much the same seniors-unsettling way radical politics and recreational drugs were put on the agenda in my younger days – it's not surprising that any thoughtful person might end up wondering: what if I had been born with a different biological sex? What differences would that have made?

It's a thought experiment that was carried out as long ago as 1928 by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, in which she traces the projected life story of a sister to William Shakespeare: "She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school". Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well. Indeed, Woolf was quite a pioneer with respect to gender fluidity: in her novel Orlando the protagonist lives several lives over several centuries, and changes sex along the way. So these ideas have been around for a long while, if not forever – see, for example, the Greek myth of Tiresias – but have only really become prominent in the popular imagination in recent times. Well, as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, 

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

Or, in the strangely eloquent LOLcat Bible version:

Has happen? Gunna be agin. Nuthing new undur teh sunz. Kitteh can not sez "OMFGZ sumthing new!" is jus REPOST!

Now, any single life is made up of an impossibly complex series of circumstances and choices, that only ever look inevitable and linear in retrospect. In the statistician's view we all get levelled out into typical examples of this or that category but, regarded as individuals, we're pretty much all crazy outliers in one respect or another. True, to be born a boy in England in 1954 is to have certain broad characteristics in common with a cohort of hundreds of thousands of others, including, of course, all those born as girls in England in 1954. For a start, as I like to say in my autobiographical profile, none of us could ever have known the Land Before Rock'n'Roll, which distinguishes us from premier cru boomers, those born during or immediately after WW2.

But the standard differentiating factors start to pile in immediately after birth, of which sex is just one. These are obvious things like geographical location, social class, race, family stability, siblings, health, psychology, intelligence, schooling, height, appearance, and so on. There are, I am certain, many other men alive today who were born as white males in 1954 in English New Towns to aspirational working class families with one elder sibling, of robust health and good intelligence, and with the good fortune to attend excellent state schools; some of them will even have been short in stature, left-handed, and so on. But not one of them, at least as far as I am aware, has ended up as a clone of me. A thousand other circumstances and choices, some quite possibly unique, have made us into entirely different people. Like Tigger, the wonderful thing is that each of us is the only one!

So, to imagine the consequences of changing just one of those factors is as absurd as it is fun to think about. I mean, what if I had grown as tall as my policeman uncle? It could have happened, but didn't. What if I had shown considerably less interest in homework, and left school at 15? Quite a likely outcome. What if, rather than a loving sister eight years older, I had had a bullying brother who enjoyed tormenting our family's annoying little show-off? A deforming experience, I'm sure. Or what if my innate contrarian tendencies had developed into criminality? Or what about any of the above in combination? You can imagine any number of outcomes, none of which need necessarily have come to fruition in real life, due to some other balancing or distorting factor. Rather than Big Mick, the gangland mastermind, at one extreme, I might just as easily have become Old Wotsisname, the forgettable and dim delivery driver, at the other. Life is not so much a lottery, as a particularly complicated multi-dimensional board-game, played with several chiliagonal dice and several sets of truly life-changing chance cards.

But I suppose sex 'n' gender is the fashionable variable to play around with, so why not? I can imagine writing an entire alternative-reality "Shakespeare's Sister" autobiographical account of my life as a woman. Goodness knows, I was a heartbreaker when I was young... For now, though, I'm just going to consider a few factors that I think would have been in play in the early years.

I think my parents' "policing" of gender would have been conventional, but not oppressive. In the 1950s, ideas of what was appropriate for girls and women were beginning to change, but not yet radically. My parents were liberal in their views but relatively uneducated: both had left school by age 14 and spent their formative years either at work or under military discipline. My mother had, in fact, been a sergeant in the ATS during the war in charge of an anti-aircraft battery, and was out at work from the time I started at school. She was clearly uncomfortable in the role of "housewife", which was never a problem for my easy-going father. From memory and from the photographic evidence, my sister was allowed to be "tomboyish", often wore trousers, and had her hair cut quite short. Indeed, I can remember my parents scoffing at the doll-like get-ups forced on a cousin, and her parents' fussing about getting dirt on her clothes. So, there would have been no major complaints about gender stereotyping, although my toys and games would surely have been different: no guns, no Dinky cars, no "army games" in the woods. Instead, I expect skipping ropes, chalking on pavements, giggling in corner confabs, and ceremonially burying dead birds [1] would have figured large.

Actually, though, I think my main recreation would have been reading. Whatever gene it was that made me into a "reading boy" would surely have been amplified to eleven as a girl. Those were the golden years of the public library service, and I would have been a familiar face at the issue desk, clutching this week's fresh batch of loans, quickly working my way up from Enid Blyton to Jane Austen. "She's always got her head in a book!" Nobody would have had to worry about what to get me for birthdays or Christmas: no dolls or dresses, just book tokens, please! And what do you want to be when you grow up, Michele? A writer, Miss!

After the co-educational, comprehensive days of primary school, the transition to secondary school would have marked a first, definitive fork in the road. A while ago, I was pleasantly surprised to be contacted by someone who had been in my primary school class, and whom I literally hadn't seen or heard from since 1965. Jean, it transpired, is now an academic, fully equipped with a PhD, publications, and everything, and works at a Russell Group university. I wondered which of our town's three grammar schools she had been to – two single-sex, one mixed – and what mutual friends we might have had. But I was amazed to discover that she had in fact gone to a "secondary modern" school.

In our county of Hertfordshire in 1965 state secondary schools were still divided into grammars for the "academic" minority, in those days about 25%, and secondary moderns for the rest. However, your destination was no longer determined by the notorious Eleven Plus exam, but by headteacher's recommendation alone. So you might well suspect some gender bias was at work here, and this would also go some way towards explaining why, despite living in a relatively small town with limited social opportunities, I (that is, the male me) never once met any of the brighter girls from my primary class in our teenage years [2]. However, let's assume that a girl with a high-swottage readiness for three hours of homework a night would have been a grammar-school no-brainer, so to speak. Therefore there was an important choice to be made: the all-girls grammar school, or the mixed-sex grammar school? A tough one, but – on the grounds that at age ten I probably despised boys and that my older sister had already been to the girls' grammar – I think I would have chosen to go to the girls-only school and regretted it for the next seven years.

Doubtless, the long leash that I was allowed in my teenage years as a boy would have been shortened considerably. There would have been bitter quarrels over clothes – "You're not leaving this house looking like that!" – what time to be home, unsuitable boyfriends, makeup, and so on and on and on. Although how far a lively social life would have been a priority for an academically-able "nice" girl in the late 1960s / early 1970s is an interesting question. Those long hours of homework aside, fear of pregnancy would have been a real party pooper. The routine prescription of contraceptives to teenage girls was still some years off, and an unplanned pregnancy was an emphatic full-stop to any girl's freedom and ambitions; as it happened, by then I had some very close-to-home precedents to learn from. It had never occurred to me until speaking to my old classmate Jean that another reason we boys met so few of the very brightest girls socially may have been that we represented the single most serious threat to their future plans. Certainly, many of those girls seem to have decided to postpone the distraction of romantic involvements until university. So, in those crucial mid-teen years, I think I would have given the actual, male me a very wide berth indeed, and cultivated a small, all-female coterie of BFFs, mocking the other girls for their pathetic obsessions with boys and clothes. [3]

I would have hated my hair. This seems to be standard issue: I have yet to meet the teenage girl who did not hate her own hair. But mine... Reddish-mousy, thick, dry, with an unruly wave, like a hatful of straw. Argh. I imagine when I was a kid my mother would have tugged it into a plait every morning that resembled something left over from a harvest festival. It will have driven her mad when I let it hang loose, long, tangled and knotted, as a teen. Probably even more so than the regular rows over the growing length of my actual scruffy male hair: she was a firm believer in the moral virtue of a proper "do" for a decent woman. I can remember hurtful words like "rats' tails" and "bird's nest" getting thrown about in heated arguments with my older sister. As for the rest of my body, we'll just pass over that dangerous and volatile territory in silence, except to remark that, hey, my face is up here, matey. 

Music is an interesting one. Things may be different now, in these culturally homogenised, pick 'n' mix days, but boys and girls used to live their young lives to different soundtracks in the 1960s and 70s or, where there was common ground, enjoyed the same sounds in different ways. You only have to watch footage of the audience at a Beatles concert to realise how "gendered" the reaction to music can be. I mean, crikey! WTF? So which one would have been my Beatle at age twelve? Paul? That bimbo? John? He looks mean to me. Ringo? You must be joking... Quiet, intense, skilful George, though: I choose you to haunt my tweenie dreams.

Later – going on the evidence of the record boxes of the young women I knew back then – I'd be listening to Joni Mitchell and Carole King, of course (Tapestry was clearly handed out in class at girls' schools), but probably also other soulful singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen or James Taylor. Glam-era David Bowie and Roxy Music might have figured (Bryan Ferry seems to have had a powerful effect on girls you would have expected to know better), but very little "rock" as such, and no "prog" at all, unless it was the ubiquitous Pink Floyd. I would have loved folk, though, and become a Liege & Lief evangelist: I probably fancied myself as a Sandy Denny lookalike, taught myself to play guitar, and wrote some embarrassingly earnest songs about doomed love and handsome rogues, which would never be heard outside of my intensely private bedroom.

But mostly there would have been 45rpm singles: a good solid helping of soul and Motown and even disco and the sort of one-hit wonders that brighten and define a summer. Girls are far less nerdish about music than boys – unafraid to like what they like just because it's "uncool" – and above all girls love to dance. Which is what pop is for, isn't it? Not analysing and taxonomising as if it were Holy Writ. I would have loved to dance for sure, in the improvised, solo styles of the time. Yes, you've seen me, swirling like a dervish in a strobe-light in a darkened hall, tranced-out and untouchable, and wondered: is she strange, stoned, or just completely nuts?

Then there is the fraught business of getting to university. Men are often dismissive of the eager-to-please "swottiness" of clever women, always turning in 10,000-word essays when one side of A4 would have done the job and, incredibly, actually having followed the advice to "read around" a subject. But that attitude – that to try too hard to win is somehow cheating – is essentially an aristocratic ploy to ensure the entitled stay entitled: gentlemen versus "players". Or, in this case, gentlemen versus "bluestockings". But look: in 1970 there were, for example, only five women's colleges at Oxford, versus over 30 for men: only 16% of Oxford undergraduates were female. The picture was even worse at Cambridge. So, to gain admission to Oxbridge at the time I sat my A-levels and subsequent entrance exam, a girl would have had to compete not against a large field of lazy, entitled men, but a small subsection of her own most brilliant peers. Set this alongside the fact that in 1970 only 33% of 621,000 students in higher education overall were women [4], and the chances of success were comparatively slim. No wonder the brightest girls had to try so hard; no wonder so many were discouraged from even bothering, especially those from families like mine with no history of higher education. So at this crucial point, my life could have taken various, very different directions. A lot would have depended on the support and encouragement at school and at home, and on the value set in both on women in higher education. [5]

But, let's assume that, against the odds, I made it to university. It would be too big an assumption, I think, to imagine that I would have made it to Oxford or Cambridge with any ease. The most likely outcome, in reality – assuming I had not been firmly discouraged by my teachers from applying in the first place – would have been disappointment, and a held-over place at some respectable alternative venue for literary studies like Nottingham or Sussex, plus a lifelong suspicion of "Oxbridge types" [6]. But a girl can dream, can't she? Whatever the outcome, and as was certainly the case with my male incarnation, I'm sure I would have undergone some major changes when I arrived at university, but for very different reasons.

I would have left my home town as a confused and conflicted young woman: a hippyish earth-mother-in-training draped around a serious scholar like an unflattering Laura Ashley dress, and trailing a patchouli-scented back-story of half-understood encounters and epiphanies. But then I would quickly have discovered radical politics and then feminism, jettisoned the flowing fabrics and joss sticks, and realised with Damascene force that the problem was not me, or my hair, or even my sharp tongue, but men. Men! Obviously the oafish ones who tear your favourite blouse, or bruise your body in terrifying displays of sexual urgency. And obviously the arrogant ones who belittle, ignore, or talk over you in seminars and meetings. Not to mention the tongue-tied and awkward ones who stare at you with a unsettling mix of desire and contempt. But especially the ones who put themselves forward as leading lights of left-radical factions, but expect "the chicks" to do the shopping, the cooking, the housework, the leaflet-distribution, and all the tedious administrative tasks, and yet still to be there for them when they have their regular dark nights of the soul. Oh, and for clumsy, unsatisfying sex, prescription contraception having turned up just in time to make "no" a really petty-bourgeois downer, Mish, yeah?

So the auspicious night when copies of the SCUM Manifesto and The Dialectic of Sex were pressed into my hands by a new, better-informed friend was the point at which another crucial divergence in this alternative life as a woman began. But that is another story, and I fear that, as with the tale of Shakespeare's sister, it may not necessarily end well.

1. Why did girls do that? Do they still? I doubt it.

2. Unusually, my primary school was streamed by ability, so you would have expected a fair few of those "A" stream girls to have gone on to grammar school. I have no idea how many did.

3. These things are relative, of course, and not always as "gendered" as we might think. The famous Isle of Wight Festival took place in August 1970, when I was 16, but there was no question of me being allowed to attend by my parents. However, I was astounded (and not a little jealous) to discover recently that a female friend from those days had gone – with a boyfriend! – with the full blessing of her parents. However, they were out-of-town liberals – her father a Communist academic – and an entirely different species to most New Town parents.

4. Figures from Social Trends No. 40. This includes full-time, part-time, under- and postgraduates. Compare with 2,383,970 overall in 2018/19  of which 1,025,107 were male and 1,358,860 female (57%)! So some things have changed in the last 50 years...

5. My partner tells me that at her London girls' grammar, there was a typing pool in the sixth form, to prepare girls for secretarial careers... Not exactly a vote of confidence.

6. As it happens, the same remarkable young woman in note (3) did go up to Oxford at the same time as me. In fact, her father drove me, her, and her future husband – my good friend Dave – all the way there in his van.

Regifted

It is the time of year (for some reason, I get annoyed every time I read the words 'tis the season... Grr, I've done it to myself, now) when the possibility of regifting serviceable old presents received in previous years is on everybody's mind. Or, um, so I'm told. It's not quite potlatch, but similar; let's keep those acceptable but pointless gifts in circulation. So, to take the pressure off as we head into what, perversely, I persist in calling Christmas and New Year, I'm going to polish up a few old posts, wrap them nicely, and hope you don't mind getting them again. Even if you have seen them before, at least I can be sure it wasn't you that gave them to me in the first place. So here's the first, which, as it happens, has already been regifted once, so why not twice, or even more? After all, Christmas is all about the invention of fake traditions that eventually become real ones, isn't it?

Some Assembly Required (a.k.a. Sniffing Glue at Christmas)

There's a film (I can't remember which) where someone says that Christmas, for them, always smells of oranges. For me, if Christmas smells of anything (I have virtually no sense of smell) it smells of Airfix glue. I always imagine there used to be thousands of small boys, high as kites on solvents, bent over plastic model kits on Boxing Day. That thought set me off down a very pleasant seasonal chain of associations, and I spent a couple of idle hours googling in the World Wide Curiosity Shop – surprisingly successfully – for items from my own remote personal past. It's shocking, really, how much easier it is to retrieve trivia like toys from oblivion than it it is to find, say, the actual friends you used to play with.

Anyway, think of this as an Idiotic Hat Christmas Special, reeking of butanone.

I'm pretty sure my very first "plastic assembly kit" was a Frog brand WW2 propeller-driven American fighter aircraft, probably the Republic Thunderbolt, which someone must have bought me for Christmas around 1960. Going on six years old, I was clearly too young to build it unaided. It was the sort of unthinking present for a minor relative that is snatched off a peg in Woolworth's at the last minute (well, we've all been there). Nevertheless, it happened to spark a lasting enthusiasm.

My father, being a practical man with a love of engineering, was only too ready to help. He was still young enough to feel the attraction of toys, and he liked the novelty and precision of combining the tiny plastic pieces into "assemblies", in a way which mimicked real-world engineering. I adored my father at that age, and we spent many happy hours hunched over the dining room table together, sticking Part A to Part B. I think those times, with him patiently explaining the differences between jet and prop-driven aircraft, or the significance of the wooden construction of the De Havilland Mosquito, were probably the closest moments we ever spent together. There was also the added thrill of learning that the tiny 1:72 representation in his hands was the self-same Stuka dive-bomber or Messerschmitt ME-109 that had attacked him repeatedly and in deadly earnest on the beach at Dunkirk or driving through the Western Desert 20 years previously. I have no idea how he really felt about this, but he didn't seem to take it personally. [1]

Above all, there was the shared satisfaction of getting it right. My Dad was a bit of stickler for doing things properly, and model-making was an ideal opportunity to induct me into the ways of bloke-ish perfectionism. To blow gently on a propeller and see it spin freely, or to get the undercarriage to set at just the right springy angle, or even simply to attach a cockpit canopy of clear plastic without smearing it with gluey fingerprints was, I came to see, a source of deep and lasting satisfaction. After a couple of years, I was ready to go solo. But we kept up our Christmas ritual for many more years. One of my most-anticipated presents would always be a special model kit, which we would make together over the long holiday afternoons. I can still remember most of them: the Red Knight of Vienna, a Bald Eagle with spread wings atop a mountain peak, a Kodiak Bear's head, a Mammoth Skeleton (crikey, that one was fiddly!), the Revell HMS Beagle, a pair of duelling pistols and, our final outing together in 1968, the Revell 1:32 "Werner Voss" Fokker DR1 Triplane. After that, girls and records were all I wanted at Christmas.

It's only in retrospect that I realise the intensity of my engagement with this hobby; not so much with the objects themselves, but with the processes and peripherals. I came to admire the analytical flair and representational clarity of a good sheet of instructions, for example, and still do: no words needed. [2] Is there anything more insightful, more brilliant in its just-right simplicity, than a carefully-drawn "exploded" view? If nothing else, it was all a good preparation for IKEA self-assembly furniture in adult life, I suppose. But I think you learn a lot about analysing a problem from such things: how a large problem can be broken down into its constituent parts, and how these parts relate to each other, and in what order various processes must be completed. This is not trivial stuff.

There is also poetry and art in model-making. There is the rich vocabulary of engineering in miniature: fuselage, nacelle, chassis, strut, cockpit, canopy, sprue, sprocket, propeller and aileron. Wonderful, evocative, precisely-meaningful words. Done properly, you also learn, literally and metaphorically, what is "fitting" and what is not. You learn the functional poetry of form, you acquire the ability to interpret and honour the intentions behind a design, and – in time – you learn the pleasure of going beyond those intentions to create something new, even if it is merely to paint your Spitfire pink. You also come to appreciate the artistry of the original model maker, as well as the finer points of manufacture. The best modellers pay close attention to matters of texture, surface, volume, and moulding, and the better manufacturers manage to convey all this in pieces of mass-produced injection-moulded plastic.

My favourite thing was often the little sheet of transfers (decals) that came with most kits, to enable insignia and other markings to be added to the model. These were often masterpieces of design and, before they were cut up, items of pop art in their own right; variations in branding (nationality, arm of service, etc.) might have to be accommodated on the same sheet, resulting in complex, interlaced layouts with exciting bold patterns of echoes and symmetries. But for sheer, open-mouthed, pre-teen, gawping pleasure, there is little to beat the magnificence of proper model "box art", depicting the aircraft or vehicle in question imagined in context – guns blazing, soaring through clouds, or crashing through mountainous waves, with every strut and rivet correctly in place. As seems to be the case with movie posters, an evocative painting can seem so much more enticing than a bland photograph of the box contents. All model-making requires a significant investment of imagination to make the thing come alive, and box art is the nudge that most of us need. I understand that artists like Roy Cross, Jo Kotula, Jack Leynwood, Brian Knight, and many others are much admired and collected. Google their names and you'll see why.

Then, of course, there's that glue. Or rather, "polystyrene cement", for as any fule kno plastic kits are welded together by melting the plastic in a solvent, rather than "stuck". Hence that never-forgotten sensation of sliding a lug into an aperture that had seemed too snug before applying the lubricating solvent [That's enough of that! Santa's elves are getting the giggles. Ed.]. Hence also those disfiguring fingerprints gluey young fingers can leave etched into a smooth wing or subtly rippled ship's sail. So I suppose at least some of the absorbed contentment of those long-ago Christmas holiday afternoons may have been due to being "glue happy". Some, but by no means all. In more recent years I rediscovered that very same sensation of shared concentration, when helping my own young son with his own favourite Christmas treat: an enormous Lego set, preferably Star Wars related, with a fiendishly baroque complexity of construction. Lego, of course, being famously glue-free, if somewhat lacking in verisimilitude.

In the end, happiness is happiness, however achieved, but a "flow state" of absorbed concentration is one of its truest and most rewarding forms. I hope that you, too, will manage to find some spells of true contentment yourself, by whatever means necessary or available, over these end-of-year holiday days and will continue to do so throughout the coming New Year. I think we've all earned it. But now, excuse me, I've got a table to assemble.

1. Buying Japanese goods was a different matter. Most Burma veterans seemed to feel similarly. Dad would have loved to have driven an Audi, if he could have afforded it, but you couldn't have given him a Honda, free.

2. Just as well: in my "girls and records" years, I had a good friend who was still building models, and he was keen on the classy Japanese imports that were coming onto the market in the late 1960s. We would have hysterics trying to understand the Japlish instructions concerning "supu-rocket wheels" (sprocket wheels) and the like. They were great kits, but it was a good thing I wasn't asking my father to buy any of them for Christmas.

Don't Forget the Matches

On Wednesday I noticed the water pressure in our cold tap – normally not far short of a fire hose – was dropping. We've been having new gas pipes laid on our side of the street, with lots of digging in a road surface and pavement already dug up many times, most recently to lay new water pipes; the obvious conclusion was that someone had managed to damage the water main. Although it's true that the use of a massive "suction excavator" – a real roaring beast of a machine – has radically reduced the amount of actual spade work and consequent risk of damage to buried infrastructure.

However, I thought I'd better go online to see if there was a wider problem, and there it was: "We’re really sorry that customers in parts of Southampton, Eastleigh, Romsey and the New Forest are experiencing either low pressure or a loss of water supply. This is being caused by a technical issue at our Testwood Water Supply Works". "We" being Southern Water, our local privatised monopoly, rather better at providing liquidity to its shareholders than to its customers; many thousands of whom were already without any water at all, and not for the first time. So I quickly filled every flask and bottle in the house and waited for the inevitable. By early evening the taps were dry.

Twenty-four hours later, the water started to dribble back, and by late evening had regained something of its fire-hose vigour. But then we're fortunate to live very near a major hospital, and are therefore in a priority area. Others were less lucky: it seems the last customers were restored only by mid-day on Friday. Annoying, inconvenient, and unsanitary, but hardly comparable to the consequences of a rocket strike in Ukraine or Gaza. In that phrase so characteristic of previous generations of Brits: mustn't grumble! Except we do, and should. What else can you do, faced with challenges you cannot sort out for yourself?

Another, more contemporary phrase comes to mind: First World problems. Just one day without clean running water on demand is a sobering experience for the typical UK citizen, and a disturbing taste of an alternative reality, and a possible future. I recall a line from some philosopher (Heidegger?) I read a very long time ago that went something like, "the limits of western civilisation are visible at the horizon of machines that are out of order". Well, no shit, Socrates. When that suction excavator breaks down and you have to reach for the spades, it can really spoil your day.

But there are genuine First World problems. Arthur C. Clarke is famous for his remark that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and we are surrounded by – embedded in – such wizardry: you're probably reading this on a device you couldn't begin to explain, never mind repair or adapt. But there comes a point when certain kinds of technological magic – all stacked one on top of the other – have become so routine, and so essential to everyday life in an "advanced" society, that any disruption to just one is a potential major breakdown in social order and cohesion. As I remarked to a neighbour while we were having an enjoyable little grumble about the state of the water and the gas, just wait until the Russians or Chinese decide to switch off our electricity. That will be fun, won't it?

I don't want to come across as some sort of survivalist, but we're not at all ready for the sort of disruption that quickly shades into disaster. The Covid lockdown became an ugly spectacle almost overnight: supermarket shelves stripped bare, "just in time" supply lines cut off, weeping nurses unable to buy food because selfish ████s had loaded every available ready meal and tin into their SUVs, before heading off to drain the nearest petrol station dry. We have become sleepwalkers under the spell of "late capitalist" consumerist magic, unaware in our comfortably numb condition that the hands that are, we are reassured, keeping us safe, fed, and watered are instead mostly busy constantly dipping into our pockets. We really should wake up.

So there's my little Winter Solstice Sermon... May the darkness pass, and the days begin to lengthen, as they inevitably will, in a set piece of advanced planetary technology indistinguishable from magic. But also, why not get some tins and dried goods in your cupboard, a wind-up radio, a camping stove, a good torch, and a box of candles? Oh, and don't forget the matches.

Further on down the road...

Sheep Are OK!

On Thursday evening we attended a full-length performance of Handel's oratorio Messiah by the English Concert directed by Harry Bicket at the Turner Sims concert hall, here in Southampton. That's over two hours of music and chorale, divided by a twenty minute interval, which is a lot of magnificence to absorb in one sitting. Like, say, a well-edited performance of Hamlet, I can now see why cut-down versions of Messiah are popular, ones that stick to the "good bits" that everybody knows, glued together with acceptable lengths of chorale and orchestral magic.

I'm neither a musician nor a true baroque aficionado, and had never experienced Messiah before in full or live, so I was a fairly naïve member of the audience, unaware of where in the sequence those more famous solo spots and choruses would come. So to get the full-on brain-rattling blast of "For unto us a child is born" (WONDERFUL!! COUNSELLOR!!) so early on in Part 1 was a hair-raising thrill, swiftly followed by one of the loveliest instrumental passages, the lilting "shepherd bagpipers" Pastorale that leads up to what is always my favourite bit of the Nativity story, those "certain poor shepherds" minding their own business (washing their socks by night, as we used to sing at school), only to be megablasted by an urgent angelic newsflash. WTF? Oi, you with the wings! Don't scare the sheep like that!

Now, I am unashamedly English, and one of our distinctive national characteristics is to insulate ourselves from the dangers of sublimity by our instinct for parody and piss-take; we just can't help it. If there is the slightest scope for a subversive giggle, we'll find it. Does "watch their flocks" sound like "wash their socks"? You bet! Does "Comfort ye" invite "cup of tea"? Need I ask? So my personal takeaway prophylactic smirk from what was an overwhelmingly sublime experience turned up in the chorus based on these words from Isaiah 53:6: All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way. In that splendidly dismembering approach to the ornamentation of source texts typical of the baroque oratorio, the words "all we like sheep" have been separated off and get repeated multiple times to a jolly little tune, practically a jingle, which comes across as a cheerful endorsement: "We like sheep!" Check it out. Well, sheep are OK, but... Heh.

This blogger is mostly OK with sheep

I have to say, that characteristic bah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-roque musical tic, trope (or whatever technical term describes getting a gallon of music out of a teaspoon of text) can get – to my ears, anyway – quite annoying ultimately, unless you just let it flow over you, like a musical cascade of paralinguistic sounds. But if you do sneak a look at the actual libretto you cannot help but be struck by the fact that a mere dozen or so words from the Bible have been pumped up by melismatic inflation and ostinatoid ornamentation (I'm floundering here, terminologically, do step in) so as to take up ten whole minutes of your evening. Now, I'm sure attention spans have shortened since 1741, but even those well-upholstered Georgian butts must have been shuffling by the time that the very final part of the final chorus – a generous two hours after the first notes of the overture – manages to squeeze the best part of four minutes out of the single word "amen". Wonderful, Herr Handel, simply wonderful, but some of us have a sedan chair to catch.

A curious thing happened at the end of Part 2. As soon as the opening notes of the Hallelujah chorus sounded, a handful of the audience stood up. I thought perhaps something unusual had happened on stage – I was reminded of the time a member of the audience collapsed during a concert in Winchester Cathedral (see An Incident in Winchester) – but no: about half a dozen people out of a capacity audience of 300 were standing, and stayed standing motionless throughout the chorus, like Antony Gormley body casts. It was a bit uncanny: was it some sort of protest? Or an outbreak of anti-baroque impatience, perhaps – "For pity's sake just spit it out!" But eventually I suspected it might be the remnant of a Thing, like standing in the cinema when the National Dirge used to be played at the end of a film (bonkers, I know, but it always was, even in our local fleapit). A quick google when we got home confirmed my suspicion. The (probably apocryphal) origin story claims that King George II was present at a performance, and was so taken with this passage that he stood up, with the result that everyone else had to stand up, too. But if that's not actually true, then I have absolutely no idea what the hallelujah is going on with that. Maybe someone out there knows?

Anyway, it was all superbly done. There is nothing quite like live orchestral music, and a choir of just ten male voices and eight female voices supplemented (unusually?) by two male altos is overwhelming when it really lets loose: WONDERFUL!! COUNSELLOR!! Phew... Two of the four soloists were truly outstanding, I won't say which, although I will say that if you get a chance to hear Chiara Skerath sing you won't be wasting your time.

But the essential English-style comic deflation of the burgeoning sublimity was provided by the two baroque trumpet players. They sidled in when needed, but most of the time were either absent, or sat off to one side, constantly shaking and blowing spit out of their instruments, shifting in their chairs, and moving their music stand around; a tall thin one and a short stout one, just like Morecambe and Wise. Except that, when called upon, they mostly seemed to play all the right notes in the right order.

It doesn't take many to make a magnificent wall of sound...

(Morecambe & Wise have gone for a swift half)