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. 

No Comment!!

 A quick follow up on yesterday's post, which might prove enlightening to anyone who trusts their viewing statistics, on Blogger, anyway. Here is the current state of play at 12:30 today:

Three THOUSAND views this morning, and an unprecedented 142 reads of the latest post? Really? No, not really... Two comments, though, that's true.

LATE EXTRA:

At close of play (i.e. bedtime around 23:00) the final score is:

Crazy...

No Comment

One of the most long-term commenters on this blog asked me recently, in effect, "Hey, where'd everybody go?" Which is a good question. The number of comments on this and most other blogs has fallen off considerably in recent times, and it's worth pondering why. But if this is not a question that interests you, then move along: nothing to see here. Something more to your liking will be along soon, I'm sure.

So: it has never been the case that every post on this blog has stimulated a response from my honoured and respected readers, but once upon a time the ones that did could sometimes accumulate quite a long tail of lively commentary. This has been one of the more rewarding aspects of writing a blog, and I always try to make a worthwhile response to anyone who has taken the trouble to comment. We never did get into the extraordinary length and depth of the comments on, say, Language Hat (no relation) [Oh, do stop it, Mike – they know you don't do that blog! Ed.], but, on the other hand, neither was I plagued by the numerous inanely phatic comments that other blogs seemed to attract like flies.

Such comments as do appear here I "moderate" – sadly, this doesn't mean I can edit comments (wouldn't that be fun?), merely choose whether or not to make them public – but I rarely suppress them, even when things veer off topic or get testy; it's all part of the game. Sometimes, I even used to find myself writing a piece in order to provoke a response from one or other of the more frequent commenters. Or, in the case of my old and now late friend Tony (who commented as "Zouk Delors"), carefully stepping around certain issues that I knew would trigger his less, um, reconstructed attitudes and sensitivities.

So here are the stats Blogger provides for a seven day stretch (I started writing this on 21st November, but any recent seven days would do): 

Now, the comment figures are accurate, but the viewing figures are inflated by passing robots and in-and-out ricochets from people looking for something that they didn't find (most likely camera-gear chat). I'd say you could safely knock off at least 1000 or so as fakes and "false drops". So, from about 750 more-or-less meaningful views over those seven days – which is perfectly respectable by my standards – only eight comments were left, and those were from just two readers, doubled by my replies. Which indicates not so much a fall-off in readers, as is only to be expected in Ye Olde Blogge Worlde, as a dramatic decline in the urge to comment. Which is more interesting, no?

There can certainly be problems with leaving a comment on a Blogger blog, which doesn't help. Blogger is a free service from Google, which inevitably means you get what you get, whether you want it or not. For a start, in order to fend off the spammers and click-baiters I have to require commenters to hold an active Google account, which is obviously a barrier to many. Then, quite regularly new tweaks and "features" are introduced without warning which often disrupt the smooth functioning of a blog, most often from the creator's point of view, but which also affect readers. Lately, for example, I notice that the header text setting out my comment moderation policy has vanished. More troubling, though, is when I hear from fully-qualified would-be commenters who say that they tried but failed to leave a comment, and I imagine that for every one of those heroes of perseverance, there are several who think, sod it, who cares? I'm pretty sure I would, too.

In fact, the majority of comments I get these days are private communications from people on my email list, almost entirely actual friends who seem to need a direct prod in the mailbox to be persuaded to read my rantings. Again, this was something I had to set up myself when Google disabled the original "Follow by Email" widget, and didn't replace it with anything similar.

Having a number of regular commenters can itself create problems. As anyone who has given a seminar or workshop will know, a few voluble individuals can silence all the other members of group, unless the seminar leader takes steps to ensure full participation. Many people need time to develop their thoughts, which may be uncertain and provisional, and will often have to be asked a direct question before summoning the courage to speak. Similarly, when visiting any blog with a well-established commentariat, it is always hard to avoid the impression that you have stumbled into a private party, with its own unspoken etiquette and rules of engagement; better to say nothing and "lurk" for a while. In any situation where one-to-one interaction with the silent majority is impractical –  I even hear of so-called "seminars" in our universities now with 200+ participants! – it's next to impossible to devise strategies that might encourage the unknown unknowns to speak up. After all, you're hardly likely to tell your best commenters to shut up for a minute and let the lurkers get a word in, when there may well be no-one else out there with anything to say, anyway.

It's clear that it's the chattier venues like Twitter/X, Threads, and newcomer Bluesky where most people are going for their social media fix, and has been for some time. They may still read a few blogs like this one, but no longer feel the need to participate as commenters. I suppose we blogging hold-outs are rather like old-fashioned charity collectors, rattling a tin on the street, in a world where the charity-conscious mainly donate via standing order and online clicks. You want actual cash, you say? I'm sorry, but who carries loose change in their pockets these days?

In the end, it's pretty obvious why the newer "share, link, and follow" social media have succeeded at the expense of blogs. Let's set aside any condescending remarks about "TL;DR", appropriate as that seems to be for so many of us now. No, it's clear that fewer and fewer people are bothering to share their views with just one self-obsessed stranger in the quiet cul-de-sac of their blog – too much like sharing your opinions about Life, the Universe, and Everything down at the local pub – when there is the very real possibility of being read and followed (or at least me-too "liked") by dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of like-minded strangers; why, you might even attract the attention of Someone Famous, or that crucial mover and shaker who will advance your career to the next level. There's no getting round the fact that a blog is more like a funnel than a megaphone: same shape, but a radically different device.

So I keep thinking I've almost talked myself into signing up for Bluesky. But then I think: just 250 characters? Hmm... Unfortunately, I seem to need to write, and to write at length, more than I need even to be read or "liked". Or, indeed, famous: it goes without saying, obviously, that the massive, world-wide fame and notoriety that would inevitably and instantly follow if I were to join up would seriously disrupt my daily routine and lifestyle. I'm pretty stuck in my ways, now, and to back into the spotlight I seem to have evaded so well so far in my 70 years on the planet would be an intolerable inconvenience. Garn, clear orff, 'fore I sets the dogs on yer! 

Seriously, though, folks... Fewer comments than previously? Not a problem as far as I'm concerned. You are reading this, and that's good enough for me. But, please: don't feel you have to come up with some comment, just to prove me wrong... As John "Cockney" Keats said of poetry, if it comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, me old china, it had better not come at all...

Anticyclonic Gloom

Anyone who thinks photography is not, in the end, all about the light has probably never experienced the sort of glum "anticyclonic gloom" that has been squatting over southern England for what feels like months. A static high pressure system has created a thick grey layer of cloud and trapped all the atmospheric crap beneath it while at the same time sealing off the sunshine, rendering everything joylessly flat, like a vast neutral density filter, or the visual equivalent of an anechoic chamber. [1] Once upon a time, before the Clean Air Act of 1956, these would have been perfect smog conditions in any city worth the name, and Southampton's air is still not the cleanest or clearest at the best of times.

The shortening days have not helped, either. I had to drive over to an auction house near Salisbury recently – I'm finally disposing of some "edged weapons" that have been hidden from children in the back of a cupboard for decades – and was amazed at the reduction in visibility by mid-afternoon. Beyond about the width of one field on either side of the road everything faded into indistinct grey silhouettes: even the imposing remains of Old Sarum were practically invisible. Admittedly, there was some sort of photographic opportunity there, but this kind of weather seeps into your soul – I know, I should probably get myself re-souled – and I simply couldn't be arsed to stop the car. There are precious few safe stopping places out there in rural Wiltshire on a misty day and, besides, I didn't want to attract the attention of any passing police, in case they might wonder why I had a Japanese sword and a bayonet in the boot.

But you can't keep a good obsessive down, and I've been tinkering with this idea of an "angels" project, as foreshadowed in the post Every Angel Is Terrifying. As it's not been worth going out to hunt for fresh angelic manifestations I've been scouring the archive, selecting and converting suitable candidates into monochrome versions so as to impose a certain uniformity of style. I don't think the weather has influenced this "creative decision", but I suppose it might have. I will also concede that I may have got a little carried away with the monochrome filters. Whether this array of slightly antique looks will survive into the project's final form I'm not sure, but I'm enjoying it at the moment, and it feels appropriate.

BTW, talking of grey skies, has anybody out there signed up for Bluesky? I'm curious about it and might be just a little tempted, but I was never on Twitter so have no story to tell here, other than the sanctimonious "why are you wasting your life on social media?" one, which you will have heard many times before (and yet still you tweet!). Doubtless, though, if I were to join then the thing would immediately go out of fashion / be ruthlessly monetised / be bought by some billionaire twit and renamed Z or something. I should probably be public-spirited and stay well away.

1. A subject about which I happen to know something. See the post Thoughts From an Anechoic Chamber (a good read that one, I think).

Close Encounters

I keep reading about the decline in the study of the humanities at university level – English literature especially – usually attributed to the shift since the 1980s towards a narrow view of higher education as "credentialisation" for the workplace, plus the ever greater value placed on so-called STEM subjects (essentially anything that might require you to wear a lab coat and/or be able to handle maths). Certainly, it can be hard to explain the relevance of your grasp of Coleridge's theory of the imagination in a job interview, when your interviewers have never heard of Coleridge and are suspicious of imagination, never mind any theories whatever-you-said-his-name-was had about it.

Of course, I'm sure the same could be said for your understanding of stochastic optimization or Fourier transforms, although they do at least sound more impressive. No, what employers want to know is: Are you a team player? Where do you see yourself in five years? Or, in the trinity of job interviewing that I was taught: Can they do the job? Will they do the job? Will they fit in? (see the post Inflexible Attitude, Hates a Challenge for my finely-nuanced take on recruitment as seen from the interviewer's side of the table).

Now, I am biased here: despite my inclination towards visual art, I took English Language and Literature as my first degree, and then did a master's in Comparative Literature, and was on the brink of a doctorate and an academic career when I finally came to my senses. But that was the 1970s. I'm really not surprised youngsters today are losing interest in English as a three-year course of study, now that it has to be considered primarily as an investment: a substantial amount of real capital exchanged for an indeterminate amount of cultural capital. That, plus so few real academic job prospects in a declining field. It was bad enough in 1977; now...

I think there has been a problem with literary study at university for quite some time, however, which is that children who have discovered a love of reading at school do not find themselves doing mo' betta readin' at university, but learning to choose from an assortment of critical pins and probes to stick into the mummified remains of an activity which no longer really exists, if it ever did. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but it is surely simply a fiction that there is a meaningful fraction of the population who still read "the canon" of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Joyce, and the rest of the usual suspects, other than for exam or academic purposes? That includes most English graduates: it's easy to confuse a love of "literature" with the deep joy of being a smart seventeen-year-old exploring your bookishness for the first time, and it's hard to sustain that level of passion into adult life. Besides, reading is a time-consuming activity, and hard to combine with raising children, doing a job, watching films and TV series, and so on. It takes a certain determination to make the time, which you're only going to do if you continue to feel the need for it.

It's also hard to avoid the impression that many of today's literary academics do not themselves get much time for reading for pleasure. Nobody is going to pay you a professional salary for kicking back on the sofa every day with some poetry; papers need to be written, and those essays and dissertations won't mark themselves. No, for academic purposes literary works are there to be mined for evidence in an ongoing series of inquisitorial trials which have little to do with any reading and writing that was or is taking place in the real world – never more than a minority-interest branch of the entertainment industry, anyway – and have everything to do with various arcane theoretical tussles which verge on the theological. "Texts" exist not to be read and enjoyed and discussed, but to have their inky souls examined and those of their sinful creators interrogated, and usually found wanting. "I put it to you that there is not a single mention of the slave-trade or sugar-plantation profits anywhere in Pride and Prejudice, is there, Ms. Austen? No? I rest my case...".

Meanwhile, across the campus someone is working on some STEM miracle – let's say "a cure for cancer" or "green energy" as catch-all placeholders for whatever it might be – and yet is having to waste far too much valuable time and attention scrabbling for funding and lab space. Harassed administrative eyes fall on the humanities departments yet again: what is going on in there? And why is recruitment falling?

Why? Because eventually the word gets out, and kids stop applying to spend three expensive years wandering around lost and confused in what is a peculiarly hermetic and often angry cultural space. Unpopular and therefore underfunded departments go into decline and, in the classic formula, as the stakes get smaller the disciplinary infighting gets more vicious. On the plus side, however, this might mean that at least some of those kids might study something more practical – I always regretted not choosing geography, myself – and carry on reading simply for pleasure, while the dwindling number of academic literary theologians keep sawing away at the branch they are sitting on.

Is any of this really a problem? Some would argue that your "culture" is like your native language: you don't need to learn it, you are already fluent in it without the trouble of grammar lessons or vocabulary lists. Which is, as far as it goes, true. A mumbling idiot speaks a version of the same language, more or less, as that used by the most grandiloquent public speaker. The point of the comparison with language is that what people do or don't do is their culture; there is no higher or lower, it just is what it is. Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone! But, hold on there...This is not an argument you'd want to apply to diet or exercise, is it? And it is a view that too easily excuses passive consumption and cultural complacency, which are a problem, aren't they? If you don't think they are, you might as well stop reading now.

In a well-ordered society, the job of humanities education has surely always been to identify and activate the life-affirming cultural traces that lie latent within us, to help us to see that there is more to life beyond the imaginary bars of our comfy cage, and not merely to equip us for an unquestioning existence within it. But how far does or should higher education really play a part in this? Obviously, just as you don't need to attend drama school to stop speaking like a mumbling idiot – hey, I'm still working on it – you don't need a university degree to enhance your appreciation and understanding of the magnificent literary culture you've had the great good fortune to be born into. You'd think those three years ought to make quite a difference, but they don't seem to: in fact, English graduates are notorious for having had any love of reading trashed at university. 

However, at some point aspiring readers do need to be helped to progress beyond the ABC basics in order to meet the more ambitiously "literary" works halfway. So let's pretend there is such a thing as a poetic license. To earn it, you will need to work on your attention span, to be open to uncomfortable and edgy imaginings, be at ease with obliquity, ambiguity, allusion, and playful obscurity and, to fully qualify at the highest level, have developed the skill known as "close reading". But our universities, it seems, have lost interest in this particular form of credential.

Close reading, like drawing, is a skill that is best built on a foundation of talent – yes, there is such a thing as a talent for reading – and this is best done not at university, anyway, but at school. You will know this, if you have been been lucky enough to grapple with a few well-chosen set texts – a little "difficult", perhaps, but not daunting – and pored over them with a group of like-minded peers, guided (and, if necessary, provoked and goaded) by a good teacher. Not everyone is so fortunate – I was – but there is really no better time or place to awaken a hunger for "the best which has been thought and said", in Matthew Arnold's formula. After that, though, you're on your own.

There's no doubt that in time even the keenest appetites can wane. I find I don't read anything like as much now as I used to; "literary" fiction, in particular, tends to sit unopened and to sink ever lower in my tottering stacks of unread books. As novelist John Banville remarked in an interview:

When I was young I remember arguing with George Steiner about an essay in which he said old men don’t read fiction. Well, I’m an old man and I don’t read much fiction; whatever fiction gives you, I don’t seem to need it any more.
John Banville, interviewed in the Guardian, 12/11/2022

Very true, that. Still, it is now obvious to me that the time I spent at school learning to close-read worthwhile texts – poetry in particular – has had lasting value in my life. The time I spent as a postgraduate grappling with various theoretical-theological speculations? Not so much... Take those speculations of Coleridge on the nature of the imagination I mentioned above, that had once seemed so significant to this sometime would-be scholar. They have now utterly faded from my memory, but his poem "Frost at Midnight" has not. It may not be "the best", but whatever it is that a good poem does, it does for me.

There's an important distinction to be made there. Personally, I rarely crave "the best" in most things: we drive a Skoda Citigo, live in a suburban three-bed semi, I wear the same cheap but practical clothes until they wear out (and sometimes beyond), and generally acknowledge the truth that "the best is the enemy of the good". To argue over what does and does not count as "the best" in any creative field is pointless – fashions change and tastes differ, and quietly eloquent voices are all too easily drowned out by the loudest shouters and their most insistent advocates – which is why all competitions and prizes, from the Nobel on down, are essentially ridiculous. They are looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

Which reminds me of one of the tales of Mullah Nasruddin I read many years ago, which goes something like this:

A man saw Mullah Nasruddin on the street searching for something under a lamp post.
"What have you lost, Nasruddin?" he asked.
"I have lost my keys," said Nasruddin.
So they both got down on their knees and searched for them.
After looking for ages they were still unable to find them, so the other man asked:
"Are you sure this is where you dropped them?"
"No, no – I dropped them back there in my house", said Nasruddin.
"Then why on earth are you looking for them out here?"
"It's too dark inside my house, but there is plenty of light out here under the lamp post".

Or maybe they're looking for the wrong thing in the right place? Obliquity, ambiguity, allusion, and playful obscurity... If that's a problem for you I'm going to have to ask to see your poetic license, sir. Please step away from the lamp post.

America Decides

Swamp thing

Honestly, what a right old how's your father, eh? What is wrong with you people? Rhetorical questions, obviously; you do you, America...

Swamped

Go Van Gogh

Yes, I know that the American pronunciation of Van Gogh as "Van Go" is annoying to all right-thinking people, but it makes a nice header for the post. Besides, "our" version as "Van Goff" is only marginally closer to the actual Dutch, probably for reasons of decorum. I mean, seriously? Can you imagine a seminar in which all three versions are in competition, or worse, a roomful of English-speaking pedants all using the correct, throat-clearing version? Hilarious. There's a Monty Python sketch right there.

Anyway, on Thursday I went to see the Van Gogh blockbuster currently at the National Gallery, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. Quite why the National chose that curious "poets and lovers" tag for this show is a bit of curatorial hand-waving not really worth exploring. Basically, they have assembled a lot of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings from the astonishingly creative two-year period spent in Arles, spread generously over six large rooms. Sixty-one, in fact, borrowed from galleries and private collections worldwide, of which by my count just five came from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, which apparently holds 200 paintings and about 500 drawings. It seems there is rather more Van Gogh out there than I, at least, had imagined.

I was accompanied by two old friends of school-days vintage who, conveniently for me, have married each other, which makes staying in touch so much easier. We met in Trafalgar Square at 1:30 pm for a 2:30 booking, forewarned by a blogger who should know that the queues were horrendous: up to an hour at popular times. But in the event there was no queue at all, and we were waved through a whole hour early.

Security has been tightened since Just Stop Oil activists bafflingly decided to attract attention to their (worthy) cause by throwing soup over one of the paintings. Liquids are now banned inside the gallery, bags are searched, and everyone must pass through an airport-style metal-detector gate, although thankfully without removing shoes, belts, and loose change, which might make you suspect it isn't actually plugged in. Also, I'd forgotten to empty a half-full bottle of water inside my shoulder-bag, and it was only on the train home that I realised this had been missed – or possibly allowed through? – by the bag searcher. Well, at least it wasn't soup or superglue.

All blockbuster exhibitions are exhausting, I find, particularly when they feature an overwhelming quantity of work by just one blockbuster artist, some of whose blockbuster pictures are so familiar – from posters, coasters, postcards, tea towels, key fobs, fridge magnets, and whatever other gift-shop tat can carry a reproduction of an image – that they have ceased being works of art and become a blockbuster brand, even recognisable by people who don't care about "art" at all. To be honest, I'd rather come across a few deservedly famous paintings when walking through a gallery, like bumping into old friends on the street, than navigate whole roomfuls of major and minor masterpieces which, however thoughtfully curated, is always more like attending a reunion or a wedding, where the meeting-with-people quotient of a "high-functioning introvert" like me gets stretched a little thin. "Hello, 'Trunk of a Tree', I believe you know 'View of Arles', we were at Montmajour together in 1888? Oh, do excuse me, but I've just spotted 'The Yellow House' talking to 'The Bedroom', and I must have a word..."

There's also the problem that the rooms become so crowded that actually getting to see the paintings is a contest of sharp elbows and strength of will, especially once the afternoon sessions pile in. At times, it can feel less like an exhibition and more like the mid-session interval of some large assembly, where people are passing the time before reconvening by admiring some pictures that happen to be on the wall. So, rather than join the slow clockwise shuffle from picture to picture, I always make a swift pass through all the rooms, noting where the points of interest are, and then circling back, looking for opportunities to get in front of a genuine piece of Awesome. I will then stand there, and actually look at the gorgeous thing: up and down, side to side, for as long as it takes, searching for some of the secrets of its awesomeness, and ignoring the seething annoyance of the phone-snappers you can feel on the back of your neck. How dare you get in the way of my photograph? How inconsiderate, to be standing there, just looking! Honestly, I do wonder whether it is time all photography was banned in popular exhibitions, the way it used to be? I wouldn't object, and I don't see why anyone else should, either.

Blockbuster exhaustion is a pleasant sort of exhaustion, though – one of my companions was positively giddy with a mild case of Stendhal Syndrome – mostly felt as an ache in the feet and the small of the back, plus a certain light-headedness; you simply know when you've been arted out, and it's time to find a cup of tea. Later, I was surprised to discover that my phone app had recorded 8,334 steps that day, roughly 3.3 miles: that's a lot of gallery floor covered and stairs climbed, given that the walk from Waterloo station to Trafalgar Square and back is barely two miles. I'm beginning to wonder whether gallery visiting ought to be be recommended as a pleasant exercise regime. [1]

As for Vincent van Gogh (oops, sorry! Here, use my napkin), what is there to say, without lapsing into gushy "Starry, Starry Night" mode? A troubled man who probably only ever sold a single painting in his lifetime is posthumously recognised as a visionary genius and catapulted into the TOP TEN ARTISTS EVER! super-league? Improbable, romantic, sad, infuriating, but true. Highest recent auction price: USD 117,180,000 (that's well over 90.5 million pounds sterling) for "Verger avec cyprès", a pleasant-enough painting of impeccable provenance, sold at Christie's in 2022. [2] Life simply isn't fair, is it?

1. I'm reminded of my experience of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, swarmed by seemingly endless throngs of confused-looking elderly Chinese. See the post Hermitageous.

2. How far any painting is truly worth 90.5 million pounds is an interesting question. Had the purchaser taken it out onto the street and set fire to it (rather than putting it into a Swiss vault or hanging it over their fireplace), how impoverished would the culture really be? What if, instead, they had donated their £90.5 million to an art school or public gallery, or endowed some new "genius award" for artists with difficult to pronounce names? Discuss...