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)

Just Like That

In a recent piece in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee commended Keir Starmer (now Labour Prime Minister of the UK, in case you haven't been keeping up) for saying in an interview, "I'm not working class any more". Which is pretty much a case of stating the bleedin' obvious. I mean, even Angela Rayner (now Deputy Prime Minister, in case etc.) isn't working class any more, and she was a 16-year-old single mother who left school with no qualifications, and worked as a carer before rising up through the ranks of the trade unions, which ticks about as many "working class" boxes as will fit on the official class-assignation form (what, you haven't done yours yet?). Although, of course, like many thousands of others in the professional and political spheres, they will both always be "people of working-class origin", an identity which will always declare itself to those who care about such things. You only have to read the obituaries of John Prescott (a former Deputy Prime Minister, in case etc.) to realise how deep this national obsession with class still goes.

Class is real, of course, but is also what the academically-minded like to call "a social construct", one of the collective imaginings – rarely if ever consensual – that make a society tick. At night, when I wake up in urgent need of a trip to the bathroom, I find I have reverted to a pre-class, positively Cro-Magnon state: me need pee, where me at, where me go do it? Hmm, better now! I assume even King Charles III himself undergoes this same regression, although I could be wrong; perhaps royals are so cross-bred by now that they're too far down their evolutionary one-way street, like those ridiculous toy bulldogs that find it a challenge to breathe just trotting down the street, never mind chasing and bringing down a caribou. But for the rest of us, to live in society is to inherit a tottering pile of such "constructs", heaped unsteadily on top of this base-level grunt human who has urgent needs at 3 in the morning.

I'd suggest that one of the more (only?) useful lessons of all the gender and identity kerfuffle of recent years is that certain boundaries are not just crossable but permeable, and that includes those between social classes. There has been "social mobility" for a long time, of course; people of talent and ambition, whether political, intellectual, artistic, or entrepreneurial, have always found routes to a higher station in life. That's Lord Prescott to you, matey! But I think, beyond this, many of us are now becoming more class fluid. That is, we can inhabit different social classes in different situations and at different times, even different times of day, and sometimes simultaneously. Which is a neat trick, and might even be a sign that we're moving forward, albeit slowly, to a less class-conscious society.

Permanently changing your accent, say, is not really what I would call class fluidity, although the ability to switch from one register to another, however subtly, is closer. At university, social mobility has always been the unspoken subsidiary subject on offer, mainly for state-school students looking to move up the social scale. Although I do remember hearing rumours that de-elocution lessons had been taken by some public-school revolutionaries-in-training (there must be a musical in there somewhere: My Fair Vanguard, perhaps?). But mobility is not the same thing as fluidity. As with gender fluidity (or so I imagine), you have to be able to walk different walks as well as talk different talks: social class is a whole-body experience, built up over the years as a sort of muscle memory.

Take Starmer and Rayner. Sir Keir is never again going to be able to banter with the guys in his father's machine shop, if he ever could: he has passed through too many one-way doors on his journey to the top of the legal and political classes. He is a classic Hoggartian "scholarship boy", stranded on a lonely planet, 2000 light-years from home. By contrast, Rayner is clearly comfortable in her original skin, but could never "pass" in academic circles, say: like John Prescott, her authority will always rest on her origin story, and her force of character. Despite what they have achieved in life, these two are not really examples of class fluidity.

Of course, there have always been the shape-shifters, and natural-born con-artists. They have a full repertoire of tells and shibboleths enabling them to pass in at least a couple of very different social strata, usually more. The most fluid of all – so fluid they are positively gaseous – are instinctive social cold readers, mirror-like chameleons able instantly to adapt themselves to pretty much any situation. Even when several social tribes are present, they will quickly assess how the power and energy in the room are flowing, and position themselves accordingly. However, it's hard to escape the impression that such folk are not pioneers of social change, but merely opportunists with designs on your wallet, or worse.

Certain socially-superior people have often been celebrated for having "the common touch", generally defined as the ability to get on well with "ordinary people" and to attract their support. I suppose Boris Johnson could be said to have it: "He's posh, but not at all stuck up! What a character, eh? I'll be voting for him..." Usually, of course, it's nothing but a cynical facade: as in a quote variously attributed, "the key to success is sincerity – fake that, and you've got it made". The "common touch" ought by now to be an obsolete expression, a relic of a bygone era of far more rigid social boundaries. But, as Kipling put it in his much-loved and much-derided poem "If—":

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much...

Well, congratulations, you'll probably be Lord So-and-So of Wherever before you know it.

You might well wonder why there has never been a complementary expression: something like "the posh touch". Yes, the posh and the wealthy may tend to be entitled wankers, entirely lacking the common touch, but certain "ordinary people" know how to get on well with them, nonetheless, and earn their trust: we might say they have the posh touch. But AFAIK even among artisans whose livelihood depends on cultivating those with enough money to buy their services – top-end builders, garden designers, or artists, for example – there is no expression that separates the muddy-booted curmudgeon who vapes in your designer kitchen from the winning personality tolerated in the wealthiest of households. "Yah, she has a little man from Just Toffs who does her interiors; he really does have the posh touch..." Although it's true that successful artists can get away with behaving like entitled wankers, too; it's all part of their charm, I suppose.

But the future does not lie with any of these people: they are all still playing the game according to the old rules of upstairs and downstairs, condescension and ingratiation. It surely goes without saying that the best and most hopeful form of fluidity would be a thoroughgoing dissolution of all barriers and manifestations of social class. Sadly, though, humans – even at grunt level – seem to have an instinct for creating hierarchies, and no-one has yet found a workable way to prevent these power games from making life perfect for a few at the expense of everyone else.

Although a small-scale sample of this necessary but elusive change can perhaps be experienced even now in the mutual respect that flows when intelligence, empathy, and humility are applied to any social interaction, underpinned by a presumption of equality, whether it be with the girl behind the till in a supermarket or a government minister. This is neither the common touch nor the posh touch, but a superpower as yet lacking a name: "emotional intelligence" or EQ are similar, but not quite the same, and "common decency" shares the lineage and vintage of "the common touch". Adopted and amplified, could it save us all from a Wellsian dystopia divided into a mass of grunt-level Morlocks and an elite of super-evolved Eloi? What are the chances?

There is an obvious problem, though; a paradox, really. I think of a quotation from E.M. Forster I've used before:

I believe in aristocracy, though – if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.
Two Cheers for Democracy

I used it in a previous post, also called Two Cheers for Democracy – written in 2021 and quite prescient, politically; by my standards, anyway – in which I contrasted Forster's mild-mannered manifesto for a freemasonry of Good Chaps – essentially a redrafting of Kipling's "If" minus the chest-beating – with the unleashed fury of the tinfoil-hatted mob. The paradox is that, given our human instinct to distinguish "us" from "them", even such self-styled super-sophisticates are potential oppressors, destined eventually to become Wells's Eloi, even if only out of self-preservation.

Now, some of us might feel we have already moved beyond such crude yardsticks of humanity as class, race, gender, and so on (in my case not so much, actually, but you, definitely...). We might even prize intelligence, moderation, and toleration sufficiently highly over stupidity, arrogance, and bullying that, given the power, we would magically banish these obvious evils from the earth: gone, just like that! Oh, brave new world, that hath not such creatures in it!

But, more practically, given the power we might choose to establish societies where the arrogant, the stupid, and the intolerant would be identified, and – assuming it could be demonstrated that these traits were eradicable "social constructs" and not genetically-transmitted glitches in the human code – assigned to re-education. Perhaps some isolation camps would be a regrettable necessity, just to, ah, concentrate the more problematic cases in certain places. Ultimately, though, any irremediable bad seeds would have to be be detained indefinitely and refused permission to breed, and a programme of compulsory st... Um, no. Just hold on there, Eugene... You can see how easily this entirely well-meaning project could escalate and get completely out of hand.

The road to Hell, as they say, is a one-way super-highway paved with ten-point programmes and lit with visionary manifestoes. But what we're really looking for is the road out of Hell, which is much less obvious, and may be rather steep and stony, or so I've heard. Meanwhile, we could make a modest start by seeing the check-out girl for who she is and not what she is – never mind the government minister for now – and let's see how that goes. After all, you never know, she might be the next, better Angela Rayner.

Stuff Sticking Around

After rather too many years of neglect, we're having the house repaired and redecorated in stages. New fence: tick. New gutters, soffits, and fascias: tick. Now it's the turn of some of the internal cracks, stains, peeling paper, and general wear and tear of decades of family life. An extremely thorough and competent Polish decorator is currently tackling the job, which has meant a certain degree of disruption for the past two weeks, and possibly more: it's dusty, noisy, and distracting.

My partner has departed for the Bristol flat, sensibly, and I am left lurking in the couple of rooms we have reserved for another time. That is, the ones too full of stuff – books, mainly – that it would be too difficult to move out of harm's way before the other rooms are finished, and which are currently stacked with all the stuff moved out of the other rooms; furniture, "archives" of various sorts, and yet more books. It will be great when it's done. But having to skulk in one over-crowded room most of the day and negotiate ladders and other decorating paraphernalia at night – not to mention the coating of plaster dust settling over everything – is a nuisance, to put it mildly. In my next lifetime, I intend to become a keen exponent of DIY; this time round, though, not.

When I took down the curtains in the room formerly occupied by our son, some ancient window stickers of birds were revealed on the south-facing side of a bay window. They must have been there for twenty-five years at least, slowly losing their colour and breaking down in the sunlight, then gradually flaking away from the gummed plastic substrate onto the windowsill behind the curtain, forming drifts of tiny translucent beige fragments. Caution: entropy at work. No wonder microplastics have become the problem they now are: similar self-destruction has crumbled away some of the ancient plastic bags containing more stuff stashed under beds and in cupboards. However, what is now left of the stickers has actually become rather attractive, in a wabi-sabi kind of way, and worth recording.

On the same bay window there is also a seagull sticker which has fared rather better. Like the bird it represents, it seems to be an indestructible survivor. Sunlight? You'll have to try harder than that! Although I believe our infusion of everything with microplastics – not least the oceans – is not doing the real thing any good at all. Not to mention the assorted chemical additives we have thrown in for good measure. We – as in us human beings – are just an all-round bloody nuisance, aren't we?

N.B. For a photographic exploration of plastic pollution in the ocean, you should check out the work of Mandy Barker, in particular the beautiful book Altered Oceans. Highly recommended.

OECD

Not North Hertfordshire

Recently, the word "headland" came up on the blog Language Hat (no relation, as I always feel obliged to point out, despite the fact that this is perfectly obvious). As an American, blogger Steve Dodson had not come across this word before in its specific British usage as the unploughed area at either end of a field, where the tractor (or horse team in the past) turns round, as it makes each freshly-ploughed "land" on the field.

I don't suppose many Brits have come across that sense of the word, either, but I grew up in a New Town plonked like an island of concrete onto the claggy arable fields of North Hertfordshire where a good many of my ancestors had laboured away their brief and muddy lives. On Sunday visits to my grandparents' village I used to play in a field just over the road, where I was told to stay on the "hedluns", and not venture out into the deep ploughed furrows, waist-high to a small child and treacherous, even after harrowing and the crop had grown. Did you ever put a whiskery head of barley up the sleeve of your jumper, by the way, and wait for it to reappear at your collar? Crazy but slow fun: we used to make our own entertainment in those days.

I was also reminded of one winter's day at school when our class had an outing to a nearby field – a literal field trip, you might say – where local magistrate, school governor and farmer Mr. Powell-Davis inducted us into the theory and practice of growing stuff in mud, standing on a cold and windy headland, dressed in flat cap, tweeds and wellies, and gesturing with his stick like some socially-awkward general briefing his troops, while we shivered in our school blazers and leaky lace-ups. I have no idea why this visit had been arranged: it wasn't as if this was ever likely to be something that lay in our futures.

Although, for some, it did. Several of my less academically-inclined friends left school at the first opportunity and started their working lives as agricultural labourers, and they enjoyed teasing us townie swots with their newly-acquired skills and jargon. It was not a life I envied. One Christmas I earned a few pounds stretching the necks of turkeys and plucking them as they hung by their feet from a noose in a cold barn; it was a horrible job, and after a couple of days I packed it in. Working as a temporary Christmas postman was much more my style, and better paid.

One of these friends – I can't remember who – eventually had a "tied cottage"; that is, a building on the farmer's land that could be occupied by a labourer for the duration of his employment, but no longer. It was the first of a series of similar rural hideaways where our little gang of about a dozen friends and associates could gather safely out of the public eye, united by our primary hobby, which was getting as stoned as possible, listening to records as loud as possible, and talking gibberish for hours. We were young, it was fun, and there wasn't much else to do in North Herts.

I remember one occasion in particular. Several of us were home from university and we were getting down to the usual activities one evening in one of these cottages. A friend called Nick was living there, and had arranged on the wall various agricultural implements he must have found lying around. One of these was like a short spade handle, but tipped with a metal cone rather than a blade. I wondered out loud what it was; Nick said it was a dibber, anticipating incomprehension. But when I said, "Oh, of course!", he countered, scornfully, "OK, then, clever Dick, what's a dibber, then?" But, to his unfeigned amazement, I did actually know. [1] As would any clever Dick, of course, who had enjoyed a teenage obsession with rural folkways – I was a keen reader of the books of George Ewart Evans – as well as the lifestyle and art of various indigenous peoples (surely not just me?).

Now, I don't suppose anyone else who was there would remember that exchange of dibberish (sorry). Frankly, I'd be amazed if anyone had remembered anything about that evening at all, even the very next day. But I do, mainly because I received two insights – revelations, really – that were both saddening and sobering.

As an urban flat-dweller, I had long hoped one day to live somewhere like that, an anonymous little house up an unlit private lane and remote from any neighbours, in a spot that was truly dark at night beneath a full starry sky and open to all weathers. I still do, but probably never will now. But what struck me that evening was that, if I ever did, for me it would always have to be a quiet and very private retreat, and never the setting for raucous gatherings like these. Second, and not unconnected, it dawned on me that, as an over-educated clever Dick with academic career ambitions, I was only ever tenuously and temporarily part of this aimlessly hedonistic mob. I was feeling that bitter-sweet blend of regret and impatient anticipation that marks the passage from one phase of your life to the next: the sense of an ending. [2]

Over-Educated Clever Dick, 1973

I have written before about the ways we are sent onto different paths by education. In the post I'll Never Forget Old Wotsisname, for example, I wrote this about a former best friend from primary school:

But that friendship came to an abrupt end when the secondary school selection process sent us on separate paths. My friend went through the door marked "secondary modern", and I went through the one marked "grammar" (or "snob school", as it was more generally known). When that door shut behind me I looked back, and all but a couple of my closest playmates had gone; the door might as well have had "EDEN – NO RETURN" written on it in letters of fire. It was the first instalment on the price of seizing certain opportunities (or having them thrust upon you), and in particular of choosing to walk the steep and poorly-signposted path of "social mobility".

In those years of the mid-70s when I was away at university I would only return home as briefly as possible in the vacations. My father had been made redundant, and my mother had suffered a disabling heart attack, forcing her to give up work; the atmosphere in our little two-bedroom council flat was oppressive, and I would escape as often and as soon as I could. But they would worry if I didn't come home at night, and more worry was not a burden they needed. Which meant that when out at one of those fun-fuelled rural gatherings I had to rely on at least one car-owner being "together" enough, as we used to say, to drive me home in the early hours. Which was obviously unfair and unpopular, and that sense of an impending ending became ever more acute. It was painfully clear that I couldn't both be at home and be my emerging adult self at the same time, and that, anyway, my future was taking shape in another, more exciting place, among a new and different set of friends; I needed to be back there, getting on with it, not marking time in a scene that had, for me, finally run its course. [3]

As I also wrote in that old post, nobody ever warns you that to choose social mobility is also to choose a form of exile; many thousands of us have experienced, and presumably do still and will always experience the truth of that. I never did return to live in that flat, and by the time my parents finally moved away to Norfolk, to live out their final years in a static caravan in my sister's back garden, my few closest friends had also moved on. I no longer had any reason to go back to my home town, and I never did.

Except once. Driving up from Southampton to my mother's funeral in 2007, I thought I'd make a detour to take a final nostalgic look at "our" flats and get some decent photographs, and maybe even take the lift up, if it was working, and knock on the door of number 47 to see who was living there now. It was the first time I had ever actually driven a car through the streets of the town where I was born and grew up, which was an odd feeling, like one of those lucid dreams where you are aware you are dreaming and yet have a certain degree of agency over events. Then, turning a very familiar corner in this very unfamiliar way, I discovered to my utter amazement that the entire block had been demolished, and building work was already under way on the site.

It was hard to take in. My bedroom, the theatre of so many vivid teenage dreams, fears, aspirations, and fantasies, had simply become an empty, dusty space, fifty feet up in the air. Gone! But I had no better response than to laugh... It was one of those ridiculously overcooked movie moments in life when you simply have to ask yourself: who writes this stuff?

Gone...

1. Feigned amazement was very much the style in vogue, as in "Oh, wow! That's amazing!" Not sure by whom or how this started, but it took me years to shake off...

2. As Corey Mohler of Existential Comics puts it: Your childhood is over when you first get the feeling that you've wasted a weekend because all you did was mess around and have fun.

3. The amusing thing is that to my new university friends, many of them privately educated, my tales of sybaritic scenes among the lower orders were as fascinating to them as their hilarious and hair-raising accounts of the goings-on in our most prominent public schools were to me. The truth was, though, things could get pretty sordid. I'll never be able to unsee the time that ... But no, Watson: that is a story for which the world is not yet prepared.