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.