GSOH, SBS

I was surprised to read a "lifestyle" piece in the Guardian recently, in which the online dating woes of short men were highlighted:

When Tinder recently said that it was trialling a feature that allows some premium users to filter potential matches by height, it quickly proved controversial. “Oh God. They added a height filter,” lamented one Reddit thread, while an X user claimed: “It’s over for short men.”

It seems short men – I'm not sure how tall you have to be, these days, to count as "short" – are worried that women on dating sites will always favour tall men. They may be right; I really don't know who uses these dating apps, or why.

Now, I am a little over 5' 6" (168 cm), which is short enough to raise an eyebrow if you are a leading-man actor like Tom Cruise, but nowhere near short enough to be of any concern in real life. I have always been aware of my height, and would not have minded being taller – I have often joked that I am a tall man trapped in a short man's body – but it had never seemed to me an inherent disadvantage in life. Although it is true that with age I may actually be getting shorter, both absolutely and relatively.

Absolutely, because it seems that, at 71, I have lost some of my peak adult height. I'm afraid to say I did get quite, um, short with the nurse who revealed this fact to me recently. Check your calibration, madam! I am a full half an inch taller than that! Sadly, though, that seems not to be the case any more. I'm shrinking, dammit.

Relatively, because some of the young folk are getting really bloody tall these days, aren't they? I mean, I may always have been a little bit short for a man, but I never felt truly tiny until recently, for example when standing in a queue between strapping young students, so many of them measuring around or in many cases well over six foot. Is this class, Darwin, or diet, I wonder? One thing is for sure, though, it is not the result of self-belief or the power of prayer; to adapt an old saying, if wishes were inches then short men would play basketball. So perhaps it is a consequence of this inevitably unevenly-distributed generational growth spurt – the UK average height of males is still just 5' 9" and females a surprising 5' 3" – that height seems more of a cause of anxiety to young men now than it was in my younger days.

That "tall" and "short" are essentially relative terms was first made clear to me around 1980, when we visited California (the one on the West Coast of America, not the one on the East Coast of England), and then Spain's Basque Country. We were in Oakland staying with friends, and in the Bay Area I had a preview of what now seems to be becoming our national future, both height-wise and girth-wise. Extremely tall people towered over us everywhere, often combined with truly shocking obesity. It seemed that Americans might be expanding to fill the available space on their still largely empty continent. By contrast, holidaying among the compact Basques I regularly had the heady experience of being the tallest man in the bar. It was all a bit like Gulliver's Travels or perhaps Alice in Wonderland and, like those books, a Great Teaching. 

But to return to the concerns of that Guardian piece. My dating days were in the 1970s, and conducted entirely by "face time" at venues like local youth clubs, parties, and their equivalents at university. There was no other way: if you wanted to try your hand at romance, you had to leave the house, and put your trust in the serendipity of proximity. It never occurred to me then that my height might in any way be a handicap in the dating stakes. And, as it turned out, it wasn't: from age 15 until I finally met my match life-partner at university I "went out", as we used to say, with a series of attractive and life-enhancing young women, for periods of anything from a couple of months to an entire year. True, they did mainly happen to be shorter than me, but then most women were, and self-evidently still are; it simply wasn't an issue.

In fact, now I think back, nearly all of the other lads in my circle who were popular with the girls were also on the short side, including one so devilishly handsome that girls used to follow him home (so he said, anyway) and another notorious rake-in-training who had been hit with a paternity suit early on in his "dating" career and who was a good inch shorter than me. No, it was generally the taller, sporty, and hyper-masculine types who had a problem, not us. Possibly because they seemed to think that what girls liked was to be stared at wordlessly in a brooding, quasi-cannibalistic manner – pretty much the equivalent of a heavy-breathing phone call – or relentlessly teased and belittled like some annoying younger sister.

Which reminds me of one of the earliest posts in this blog – an answer to the question When were you happiest? – in which I describe how my then girlfriend (for a whole unforgettable year!) and two of her classmates made their way across town from the girls' grammar to the boys' grammar during their lunch break to surprise me on my 17th birthday with a cake and a kiss in full view of a sixth-form common room of envious boys. Hah! Few things could ever rival that. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over. What's "short" got to do with it?

Chasing girls...

Not sure I'm enjoying this as much as I'd expected...

But things have changed in recent decades, of course. The internet and social media have poisoned the well when it comes to dating. The very idea of someone sitting alone in a room and scrolling through lists of potential partners based on nothing more than an over-groomed, quite possibly drastically-edited photograph combined with a bit of formulaic self-description is deeply depressing, not to say alarming. Apparently those quaint, essentially space-saving acronyms that used to figure in the "lonely hearts" columns in the papers – things like GSOH ("good sense of humour" or sometimes "good salary, own house") – have now evolved into creepy semi-secret handshakes such as ENM ("ethical non-monogamy") and ONS ("one night stand"), not to mention various others indicating quite specialised sexual preferences. Seriously? On a first date?

Even when not actually a disguised invitation to meet a kinky psychopath – how could you possibly know? – it all seems a bit soulless and robotic, more reminiscent of a takeaway menu than Saturday night at the village-hall dance. Perhaps the fear that women will always choose the tall men over the short men with nothing going for them beyond GSOH is not so unrealistic. Hmm, think I'll have the perfectly-groomed six-footer with ENM and a side of fancy car this weekend, please! But then I imagine if "chest size" or "weight" were mandatory many women would be similarly alarmed, too.

But, wait... Surely young people as attractive and sophisticated as you and I once were (or at least thought we were) don't resort to dating apps, any more than we used to frequent those vulgar venues that used to be known as "cattle markets"? We're taking about those other people here, aren't we? The boring beige people, the normies, the Kevins and Karens, whatever you want to call them?

TBH I have no idea who uses these apps. Kinky psychopaths aside, I suppose quite a few will be opportunists seeking ONS hookups or a bit of ENM with some GGG type ("good, giving, and game"). But I imagine the more sincere customers are likely to be the lonely ones who emerged from their teens and early adult years without finding The One; the desperate ones who thought they had found The One, only to find themselves single again in mid-life; and the too-choosy ones who just never knew how to accept that This One would do very nicely as The One, thank you very much. Plus, of course, the very ordinary, not necessarily short men who have been convinced by porn and "manosphere" influencers that they should settle for nothing less than some compliant trophy WAG-alike, and who will eventually despair of "relationships" and sink into an angry sulk of incel misogyny. There are apps for them, too.

In retrospect, one of the nicest things about the 1970s for many of us was the elevation of scruffiness into a fashion statement, at least for that cohort interested in all things counter-cultural and probably headed for higher education in one form or another. It took the pressure off appearance, and put the emphasis on character, wit, and intelligence. At least, that's how it seemed in the sixth-form common room of Alleyne's School, Stevenage, in February 1971. Hah! For a while, the nerds became the Cool Kids.

But, as that prime nerd Darwin proposed, and as today's shorter young men clearly fear, it is female preferences, however capricious, that drive reproductive behaviour and hence evolution, with sometimes bizarre consequences. I mean, do you honestly think that male peacocks chose to drag that ridiculous tail around? And check out those poor evolutionary fashion victims, the male birds of paradise. Crazy stuff! Regression to the mean may be a useful concept in statistical analysis, but clearly doesn't much apply in the long game of evolution.

So when it comes to the possible effects of dating apps on the future of our species it is – as Chinese premier Zhou Enlai said of (the wrong) French Revolution in 1972 – too soon to tell. But you might wonder, given the way things seem to be going in these days of the Anthropocene, whether a GSOH and a compact size (call it SBS, maybe? "Short but sturdy"...) may yet be traits worth selecting for. Tall? Not so much, big boss man.

1972: natural selection at work in Stevenage

("None of the above, but thanks for your interest...")

I was saddened to learn that Martyn Cornell (2nd from the right behind the bath in the photo) died suddenly and unexpectedly earlier in June. Martyn was a journalist for most of his working life [1], but his lifelong interest in beer, its history, economics, and sociology, led him to a certain renown within that community, and his latter years were a continual round of invitations to international festivals and brewery events, giving papers at conferences, blogging (Zythophile), and publishing. He died just one week before the publication of his latest book, a definitive history of the porter and stout varieties of beer. Martyn loved a controversy, and liked nothing more than to carry out thorough research in primary sources in order to bust various myths and misunderstandings repeated thoughtlessly in lesser writing about beer and brewing. Actually, no, that's not true: he liked nothing better than drinking good beer and eating good food. Cheers, old friend! Hope the afterlife beers are to your liking...

1. Martyn has a solid claim to have come up with the headline FOOT HEADS ARMS BODY when a sub-editor at The Times. See the discussion at Quote Investigator.

A Preliminary Sketch of My Mother

Today would have been my mother's 102nd birthday. Thankfully, it wasn't; she died, already irretrievably lost in the dark, haunted cellars of dementia, back in 2007. To be honest, it was a massive relief all round; not what you're supposed to say, but... I've been meaning to write about her for some time, but our relationship was ... complicated. The fact is that she was complicated; I've never quite known where to start. So perhaps if I start somewhere completely different, I might by indirection find direction out, as that idiot Polonius put it. Here we go:

Back in the 1980s there was excitement about the potential of so-called "expert systems"; that is, interactive computer programmes that were essentially a flow-chart of the decisions an expert would make in response to a carefully constructed set of questions. Typically, these would be broken down into "yes-no" questions that led through a decision-tree to a single final answer, such as a medical diagnosis or the selection of an engine part. As always, the underlying motive was to save money by employing fewer actual experts. I tried writing a couple myself, primarily as exercises in developing my programming skills, and quickly realised their limitations (this was in the days of MS-DOS and text-only displays). The fact is that genuine expert knowledge, especially when backed up by experience and judgement, is incredibly hard to render into simplistic decisions without constructing something impossibly convoluted. "Yes, but...", "Hmm, maybe", or "How much can you afford?" are not easy to bend into clear logical choices.

One of the most successful of these early "natural language" programs was, in fact, a complete fraud. Based on ELIZA, developed at MIT in the 1960s, someone constructed a counselling system that simply mirrored the user's input back to them in the form of open, non-directional questions of the sort used by counsellors and psychiatrists, having scanned the input for a range of significant keywords in order to incorporate them into the question, typically: "So, tell me more about your [mother]?" Apparently, people found the opportunity to talk exclusively about themselves and their worries to an entirely passive listener quite therapeutic. Which is hardly surprising, I suppose, this being the MO of most therapy. Plus, of course, it didn't charge £50 per hour.

Today, everyone is getting justifiably anxious about that more sophisticated descendant of the expert system, so-called "artificial intelligence", or – more accurately but less sensationally – "large language models", which in the end are simply software packages built onto immense source databases that are very good indeed at, for example, sticking words and phrases together to offer a simulacrum of language and thus the illusion of an "intelligence" behind the verbal collage. I read that some people are even using AI for fortune-telling. Which probably tells you more about fortune-telling than about AI.

But, since you ask (that was you, wasn't it?), I'm now going to tell you more about my mother. You don't have to listen, of course, I'm really just talking to myself. If someone else's family history is not your thing, feel free to leave the room.

A little preliminary family history is necessary.

My maternal grandfather Thomas was born illegitimate in Liverpool in 1893, abandoned by his mother as a newborn, and grew up along with his older brother James in an establishment for pauper children and the "unparented", the so-called Fazakerley Cottage Homes. It sounds cosy, but must have been pretty grim. The boys were trained to be either gardeners or musicians; Tom got the former, and Jim got the latter, joining a cavalry regiment as a trumpeter. World War One came along; Tom was conscripted as a private into the Royal Engineers, and Jim's regiment, the 7th Dragoons, shipped out from their base in India to France, along with their horses. Both survived (not sure about the horses).

It was always a mystery to me how Liverpudlian Tom had ended up in rural North Hertfordshire to marry a local girl, Ivy, in 1918, until I discovered that the Royal Engineers had maintained a depot in the market town of Hitchin during the war. Doubtless he had either passed through or been stationed there. The couple settled locally, initially lodging above a "beer house", The Seven Stars in the village of Charlton, sharing a few rooms with a number of other members of Ivy's family: her mother, step-father, and four other children. Tom found work in the cement works at Arlesey.

My grandmother Ivy's family was complicated, as rural families seem often to be. Her mother Eliza and father Herbert had met as servants at the local "big house", Hitchin Priory. But, as was the invariable custom in those days, marriage meant they could no longer work as servants, so Herbert became a labourer in a Hitchin brewery. Eliza, a devout Baptist, washed bodies in the local chapel. Unfortunately, after just a few years of marriage and two children, Herbert was killed in a dray accident in 1903, when Ivy was six. Eliza re-married, and Ivy and brother Herbert grew up alongside four step-siblings and a half-sister in a succession of villages along the Hertfordshire-Bedfordshire border.

My mother Edith was born in Charlton in 1923, the second of two daughters, into this typically confusing rural labouring-class crowd of relatives. I doubt anyone ever took the trouble to explain the intricacies of the several intersecting family trees: everyone was just an "aunt", "uncle", or "cousin". It took me, equipped with all the resources of the Web, quite some time to disentangle.

For whatever reasons, Mum was always fairly reticent about her early life. I have a collection of fragments that she let drop over the years, but no clear narrative. For example, I know she had a kitten that was killed by a neighbour's greyhounds. She hinted at occasional explosive, possibly violent outbursts between her parents. She mentioned several times occasional visits from a mysterious and posh "Granny Hay", which I'm pretty sure must either have been some kind of follow-up from her father's time in the Cottage Homes, or from a family in Altrincham that had fostered him for a few years before his military service in WW1. [1]

She would walk to school several miles into Hitchin and back every day. She was no scholar, but seems to have won some kind of prize there that may have resulted in a trip abroad, possibly to Belgium. I have a battered souvenir book – handed out to all local schoolchildren by Hitchin Urban District Council upon the accession to the throne of George VI in 1937 – with a label inscribed with her name. She left school that same year, aged fourteen, to find work. The rent paid from her first pay-packet, a few silver sixpences, was kept in a decorative metal eggcup on a sideboard by my grandparents; I used to take them out to admire on Sunday visits, and they were eventually left to me.

Edith was an attractive auburn-haired girl, and worked as a telephonist in the Hitchin engineering firm, Geo. W. King, where my father Douglas, a Letchworth boy, was also employed. Doug, who like his father played drums, had joined a local dance band that played a circuit of the North Herts village halls and pubs and one night found himself in Pirton, Edie's village, where a tentative relationship began. She can only have been fifteen or sixteen years old.

Not long after, however, Douglas was called up for military service as part of the cohort of men who were twenty-one in 1939 – the so-called Militia – and was overseas for most of the six years of war, from Dunkirk to Burma via the Western Desert, but the two of them kept up an increasingly affectionate correspondence. It seems that at one point during his time in the desert Doug became depressed about his chances of survival, and wrote to tell Edie to forget about him; luckily for me, she didn't.

In 1943 she joined up herself, serving in the ATS. She rose to the rank of sergeant in the 155th "mixed" (i.e. men and women) Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment (Battery 531), operating 5.25" anti-aircraft guns on the English east coast. Later in the war she was posted overseas herself: to Antwerp, as part of the defence of the city and port against constant bombardment by V1 and V2 rockets. This must have been an extraordinary experience for a 22-year old woman from a quiet rural backwater, but then I suppose the same might be said for anyone who saw active service abroad in that war. It is a matter of regret to me that I could never persuade her to write a memoir of these early years similar to the one I eventually managed to extract from my father. Her reticence in this regard was typical, however: she was always quite "tightly wrapped", as they say, and a lot of Dad's energy over the subsequent decades went into protecting her from the world's rough edges.

So Douglas eventually returned home to England from Burma on VE Day – 8th May 1945 – and they were married, both still in uniform, later that same month. For some years they lived with Edith's parents in the village of Pirton, where my sister was born in 1946, then in the 1950s they moved to Stevenage New Town which is where I finally come into the picture; a full eight years after my sister, although whether by accident or design I don't know and never thought to ask. 

At which point, obviously, my complicated relationship with my complicated mother finally begins.

But, look, it seems our session time is over, so the rest will have to wait until next time. Will you take cash, card, or a cheque?

[To be continued, probably...]

1. The Haigh family (pronounced "hay" by some, apparently) were involved in the supervision of the West Derby Union, who ran Liverpool's workhouses, cottage homes, etc.

Near Dark

I generally don't trust invitations to back Kickstarter-type campaigns. You know the sort of thing, I'm sure: "we need to raise £50,000 to start production of our innovative tin opener", backed with various levels of reward if the target sum is raised and if it doesn't turn out to be either a scam or a fantasy that fizzles on first contact with reality. However, I am backing this one – a book of photographs by Chris Dorley Brown, and encourage you to do the same.

Why? Well, first, these are truly excellent photographs that deserve publication, and second, Dewi Lewis is a well-established and trustworthy publisher of photobooks: this is definitely neither a scam nor a pipe dream. Yes, it's a shame that work of this quality can't find a publisher without begging for support, but that's the reality.

Those of you who, like me, are fans of the Hoxton Mini Press will probably recognise Chris Dorley Brown's name from their list, both as a photographer of London's East End and as a compiler of vintage photographs (I have his book The Corners, as well as a couple of the collections). However, if you've been following that press's progress, you'll have noticed their move away from being a specialist in photography (one of their earliest, On the Night Bus by Nick Turpin, is one of my favourite photobooks) to a publisher of "opinionated" guides and themed photographic compilations. In the end, you have to publish books that sell – they, too, had to resort to Kickstarter during the Covid shutdowns (see my post Hoxton Mini Press of 2020) – and the sad fact is that most photobooks do not sell as well as they might. In fact, it is the dirty secret of photobook publishing that many, if not most of the deluge of unexciting books that appear now are vanity projects paid for by the "artists" themselves.

So, Kickstarter is a necessary evil, if work like Near Dark is to, um, see the light of day. If photobooks are your thing and you can afford it, why not give it your backing?

Desert Island Disco

Most countries have some sort of "honours" system, a way of rewarding prominent citizens for being prominent. Britain has a long-established hierarchy of official gongs, from the humble MBE, through various grades of knighthood, all the way up to peerages. But, as we know, at the top end this system is mainly operated by political patronage and down-payments laundered as charitable donations, and is hopelessly corrupt. It also reveals the bottomless "me too" neediness of those who you would have thought had already summited their personal Everest. I mean, as of today, Sir Roger Daltrey? Sir David Beckham? Really, guys?

But we in the UK do also have an alternative, more honourable institution, which is no less sought-after. It is a radio programme called Desert Island Discs, first broadcast in 1942. The programme's simple but brilliant formula is that someone has to pretend they have been shipwrecked onto a desert island, and can rescue just eight records from the sea.

Yes, records. Look, never mind why they're saving their records rather than, say, food. It's just a conceit, yes? Plus Desert Island Soggy Survival Snacks would not make good radio. And, yes, obviously, the programme was conceived in the days before vinyl, let alone cassette tapes, CDs, or streaming; so by "disc" they mean "single coherent recorded work", whether it be an Abba single or a Beethoven late quartet. You just have to go along with it, OK?

Anyway, every week some notable is chosen to nominate their eight discs recordings, as well as a book (other than Shakespeare or the Bible, which due to their natural buoyancy have washed up ashore already) and a luxury (no, I have no idea what sort of insight the choice of a "luxury" is meant to provide in these days of plenty, but there it is, and no doubt there it will stay). The essential idea is that the eight records are a way of talking us through the stages of the guest's life, in conversation with the host, currently Kirsty Young Lauren Laverne [thanks, Dave!]. Mind you, if this venerable programme has taught us anything in recent years, it is that few contemporary lives, however distinguished, are very eventful, and that eminence in, say, astrophysics or athletics does not guarantee good taste in music; far from it, in fact.

Now, there comes a "Ballad of Lucy Jordan" moment in nearly everyone's life, when you accept – finally, reluctantly – that you will never, ever be invited to select your eight discs and flirt outrageously with Lauren. Oh, well. That honour – not to mention the knighthood for services to bloviation – has definitely passed me by. But, hey, that doesn't mean we can't put the show on right here!

Now, I must admit I had not anticipated quite how difficult this exercise is for anyone who actually likes their music. I mean, just eight records? EIGHT?? That means entire performers and genres, whole phases of my life in music, will all have slipped beneath those tropical waves! You could drown several times over in the time it would take you to flip through all those discs, hundreds of them, sloshing around in the tide.

So, in the end, as per the formula, I divided up my life-so-far into phases that were both biographical and musical; as you might expect, these did seem to coincide quite neatly. Also, after much agonising, I decided to confine myself to a "pop" selection, 1954-2000. After all, no-one really wants to hear the Goldberg Variations or a Bach cello suite yet again on Desert Island Discs, do they? We could always do Part Two – The Serious Stuff – another time.

I did have a first stab at this back in 2016, and took the liberty then of nominating some runners up, but it strikes me now that was cheating, and my choices are so dad-rock predictable, anyway, that keeping strictly to the "eight discs" plan would be a mercy. Besides, this is not supposed to be an exercise in musical one-upmanship.

OK, cue the Eric Coates theme tune and seagulls... "My castaway this morning is..."

Here we go:

We like cowboy music!

1. 1954-61
Lonnie Donegan - Rock Island Line
What can I say? Lonnie was the kingpin (hey, that's from another song, from a later life-phase), and I was a five-year-old pioneer of the skiffle air-guitar; what I loved above all else was what I thought of as Cowboy Music. In any establishment we visited that had a jukebox – they used to be everywhere, especially in seaside towns [1] – I could be quite the annoying little show-off. Still can, I know... It was Lonnie who showed me the Way.

2.  1961-67
Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep Mountain High
Crikey! Oo-wee, baby! And check that video! Wow! What riches! What years! I more or less stuck in a pin, but this track is the business, isn't it? (But, phew, please let's sit down now, Lauren, I think I'm getting too old for this dancing lark). Pretty much anything from these years takes me back instantly to Saturday teatimes in front of our black and white TV: Six-Five Special, Ready Steady Go, Juke Box Jury... As kids, we had no real idea of how new all this was, and couldn't wait for it to be our turn. Of course, for us junior TV spectators of the pop scene these were still the monochrome years: it took until 1967 for the advent of colour into our drab post-war British lives, the late kick-off of what you might call Sixties 2.0.

Just another teenage dirtbag...

3 & 4. 1968-73
Fairport Convention - A Sailor's Life
Those prime teen years... Finally, it was our turn. Again, I could have stuck in a pin... The Stones were at their peak, as was Rod Stewart (no, really: check out Every Picture Tells a Story), then there were Jethro Tull, Free, Pink Floyd, David Bowie... Any number of must-have choices (mostly British, I have to say) from that head-swirling, arm-waving, foot-stomping blitz of innovation and lovely noise: the apotheosis of guitars, drums, and sixth-form poetry. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive... But Fairport: I was a huge fan of these pioneers of electric folk, and this track was the first spine-tingling indication of where things might be heading. Best listened to on a mono Dansette-style player in a darkened bedroom, deep in a torrid imaginary affair with Joni Mitchell.

Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Whoah! I couldn't not include this. Those opening bars still give me the chills, every time. Inside, in the secret place where we are all superheroes, this is who I am. If I don't see you no more in this world, I'll see you in the next one, and don't be late... A friend had this track as a 7" single as well as "Honky Tonk Women", and I'd make him lift the needle and play the similarly riff- and drum-heavy introductory bars of whichever was on the turntable repeatedly. Yes, I can be annoying in private, too.

The Essay Crisis Kid

5.  1973-77
Steely Dan - Bodhisattva
University... If I'd known then what I know now, I'd probably have done more work. Instead, I had a lot of fun, which I felt I'd earned by getting to university (first in the family, etc.). Late nights in various smoke-filled rooms, getting to know new friends from strange new worlds, with a constant sound-track of strange new music on someone's stereo. Add an early-hours carton of cold milk and a bar or two of chocolate from the college vending machine, and that, my friends, is heaven. It is my sure and certain hope that the hereafter is organised on a collegiate basis.

The local NALGO executive's Education Secretary assembles the banner

6 & 7. 1977-84
Ijahman Levi - Are We A Warrior? 
Emphatically not! Do we 'ave to 'ave a war? First proper job, sweet long summer nights in St. Paul's, Bristol, finally done with exams and looming essay crises. But bloody Thatcher managed to get me out on the streets, angrily holding up one end of a trade union banner. Oh, and then there was the 1980 Riot... Nothing to do with us, but there we were in the middle of it, burning police cars and all. Babylon!

Police - Walking on the Moon

I reluctantly spent a further year studying in London, 1980-81, and this never fails to remind me of walking home at 2 a.m. from a friend's squat off the Caledonian Road, through Islington and Hackney and along the Balls Pond Road, back to a squat in Dalston. London was eerily quiet at night in those days, and the pavements were oddly cushioned, too, which made walking a challenge. The actual police were always disappointed to find nothing more interesting than lecture notes in my bag, however.

What's going on back there, mister?

8.  1984-2000

Paul Simon - The Cool, Cool River
Like any impoverished person of taste and discrimination, I lost interest in rock and pop in the 1980s and 90s and stopped buying records. Artists I had loved in previous decades were still turning out "product", but I wasn't paying any attention. However, in 1984 I had left Bristol to take up a job in Southampton, and one day I discovered that the Central Public library loaned out cassette tapes, of which it had a substantial and up-to-date collection (those were the days...). Like catching up with old friends, I decided to see what those guys had been up to since we last met. One of the many tapes I borrowed was Paul Simon's album Rhythm of the Saints. It instantly became a favourite, and this track is the stand-out for me. It always moistens my eye when the rhythm and acoustic ambiance change: "I believe in the future we shall suffer no more. Maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours, I feel sure..."  It says there is hope, and that the future will belong to the humblest, now living in resilient poverty at the margins of the First World greed-fest: "Who says, hard times? I'm used to them!" A good note to end on, Lauren!

Which ONE record would I take, you ask, Lauren? Too hard... Do you know, I think I'd rather have none of them than just one of them? As the man said, "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter". Oh, all right, then, probably Steely Dan.

Book:  Oh, God. This is worse than the music. Let's say the complete print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, plus supplements. That's about as close to inexhaustible as you can get. Plus those over-sized, slab-like tomes would make a decent foundation for a hut.

Luxury:  Must I? I'm not really a "luxury" sort of person. Under the circumstances, wouldn't a bar of soap be a luxury? But, all right, let's say an enormous box of pencils in assorted grades, a sharpener, eraser, and some unlined A5 hardback notebooks.

Cue theme music... Da da da-da dah...

Phew. I think that went rather well, although I realise now we didn't even mention the Beatles once! But, no, thank you, Lauren: it's been an honour.

For another time, perhaps: The tinnitus years...

(the high price of loud music...)

1. Apparently the jukebox at the far end of Clevedon Pier in Somerset was the only one for miles, and became the centre of a nascent "scene" in the 1950s.

Read It Again!

I'm busy doing stuff at the moment, none of which is particularly blog-worthy, but is all quite time-consuming and energy-sapping. So, just to keep things ticking over, I may continue to re-post some of my older efforts (with the customary edit and polish), which most current readers will probably either never have read at the time or forgotten all about by now.

As with columnists, reviewers, or any other provider of literate amusement, even your best efforts quickly go the way of yesterday's papers. Very quickly, actually: I realise now that I read something in the TLS earlier this week that made me hoot with laughter, but cannot remember exactly what it was, and can't be bothered to find out; that issue is already in the recycling bin. I used to keep a notebook to transcribe such things and my own occasional aperçus but lost the habit, probably around the time I realised I was never going to become a "serious" writer.

But most weeks I'm surprised to see that some old post that I, too, had forgotten all about is briefly having a moment in the blog stats for some reason and, although I say it myself, I am often agreeably surprised by its quality. This one, for example, which was originally published in 2013; a year which seems quite recent, subjectively, but ... isn't. Where does it go?

Just So

Many years ago, as a thoughtless young man I upset my mother by telling her – intended but not taken ironically – that I had had a deprived childhood because I had not been read, or been given to read, children's classics like Alice in Wonderland.  This was perfectly true, though, and hardly surprising, as both my parents had left school at 14 in the 1930s, and were never big readers. They had no idea that there was a children's canon that, as I discovered when I got to university, formed the bed-time bedrock of middle-class literacy. Wind in the Willows? Never heard of it. Treasure Island?  Arrh, Jim lad! All about pirates, and parrots with wooden legs, isn't it?  Never actually read it, though. Swallows and Amazons? That was on TV, wasn't it? Seemed a bit girly. And so on. You name it, I hadn't read it.

As a consequence, I find myself belatedly picking up these best-beloved books to read. The latest in this line of never-too-late classics has been Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Like Treasure Island, these stories are already over-familiar to everyone who has never actually read them. So much so, I could barely bring myself to read "How the Elephant Got His Trunk" (or, as I now know to call it, "The Elephant's Child"). What would be the point? Yeah, yeah, the crocodile bites his nose and pulls it. Very droll.

Well, you might as well ask, "Why bother to see Hamlet yet again?" What I discovered is that these are genuinely, startlingly original pieces of writing. They are spellbinding, begging to be read at bedtime, again and again, ideally by a talented reader capable of bringing to life and inhabiting the different voices and registers that Kipling weaves so inventively, and so intimately. Where else will you find something as delightful as "he smiled one smile that ran all round his face two times"? As vivid as "Off ran Dingo – Yellow-Dog Dingo – always hungry, grinning like a coal-scuttle"? Or as memorable as "One, two, three! And where's your breakfast?"

True, there are moments when cloying cuteness threatens to break out. Victorian and Edwardian gents were 'sclusively sentimental about characterful little girls: see Edward Lear, see Lewis Carroll, among others. But when you learn that Kipling was still mourning the death of his own eldest daughter, Josephine, the sentiment seems less toe-curling. Little Taffy in "How the First Letter Was Written" is clearly the great-grandmother of many feisty little heroines who neglect and reject their household duties in favour of more inciting adventures.

Also true, there are some dodgy undertones that bubble up ("'Oh, plain black's best for a nigger,' said the Ethiopian"). But I think Kipling both honours and teases the language, traditions and manners of India and Africa, just as he does those of the common British soldier in Barrack-Room Ballads. Nobody loves slightly bent English as much as Kipling.

With hindsight, this could be condemned as colonial "orientalism" or simple condescension, but his attitude could never be described as malevolent. Kipling is an imperialist, no doubt, but very far from racist. That unfortunate swastika on the rock in the illustration to "The Crab That Played With the Sea" is a Hindu symbol for "auspiciousness", which is why it also appeared on the bindings of Kipling's collected works. Kipling himself ordered the symbol to be removed as "defiled beyond redemption" after the Nazis had usurped it in the 1930s.

The tone of the Just So Stories is one of controlled but intense playfulness. It's a story-telling voice, rather than a story-writing voice. It is the relaxed, unbuttoned, domestic voice of upper-middle-class imperial Britain in 1902, as heard in a nursery within a large house, buffered from boring routine by servants, nannies, and cooks, and secure behind the impenetrable firewall of the greatest army and navy the world had yet seen.

Those were Good Times for the fortunate few able to enjoy that long Edwardian summer, soon to be disrupted forever by the industrialised slaughter of a world war. Indeed, Kipling lost his own son to the so-called Great War, having had to pull strings to get him into it, writing afterwards, "If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied" (Epitaphs of the War). Now there's a "just so" story.

Then there are Kipling's own illustrations. They are bold, Beardsley-esque, and – let's be honest – really not very good. Often described as "woodcuts", I'm pretty sure they are actually ink drawings imitative of the woodcut style. "The Cat That Walked By Himself" is an exception, and rightly popular, although few people seem to realise it was drawn by Kipling himself. Most of these illustrations, though, are crowded, mannered, uncertain of line, and have neither the delicate clarity of a Beardsley, nor the compensating vigour of bold shapes and composition (see Edward Wadsworth, for example). Above all, it's hard to make out what they're meant to be – never a good thing in an illustration –  and it's no wonder Kipling felt the need to write a commentary on each. Some of these commentaries are so whimsically strange you have to wonder what Kipling used to put in his pipe.

But I am much taken with these stories, Best Beloved, and if I am ever blessed with grandchildren I shall scare them something hijjus at bedtime with my gritted-teeth rendering of the crocodile in "The Elephant's Child".

Royal Mail Just So centenary stamps

Illustrations by Izhar Cohen

Incidentally, if you're even slightly Kipling-curious, you might enjoy my illustrations to "Puck's Song" from Puck of Pook's Hill, another later-years discovery. The book can be seen as a flip-book on Issuu (recommended, especially in  full-screen view), and should you happen to want to buy a copy (it's expensive, but the PDF is cheap) then go here to my Blurb Bookstore.

SRSLY?

Received in my email today from the National Portrait Gallery:

Tracey Emin homeware range (tea towels and plates).  Exclusive to the National Portrait Gallery. 

This 100% organic cotton tea towel features a portrait from Tracey Emin's Untitled, 2023 series. Featuring a design from her preparatory acrylic on paper drawings for the unique commission The Doors, 2023, printed in deep blue to emulate the original brush strokes with Emin’s signature printed at the bottom. 

The artist shares her thoughts on the project: ‘Women in history are greatly underrepresented. I didn’t want to depict specific or identifiable figures. I felt like the doors of the National Portrait Gallery should represent every woman, every age and every culture throughout time.'

Well, I think it's safe to say that she has certainly succeeded in not depicting any specific or identifiable figures, although I can see that they might be women, once this is pointed out. I suppose I could be persuaded that she is quoting (ironically? angrily?) the mask-like faces that Picasso used for the young prostitutes in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But, so what? And it's hard to imagine many regular gallery-goers who would be happy to pay £14 for one of these sketchy tea towels.

In many ways I admire Tracey Emin – she has been a bold and provocative presence on the bland contemporary art scene – but her elevation as a modern exemplar of excellence in drawing of all things (she was elected Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy in 2011) is baffling to me. Her work is instantly recognisable, yes; but convincing as graphical artistry? No. But then what do I know? Perhaps the idea is to decry "mere" graphical skill as facile and elitist, and to show that Art is something anyone can and should be doing. An excellent point, but doesn't it seem odd, then, to bestow accolades and loadsamoney on anyone holding that view? After all, football may be the people's sport, but you wouldn't get far as a professional if you deliberately avoided scoring or saving goals as mere show-offish skills, contrary to the true, deep, democratic spirit of the game. Not yet, anyway...

But plates and tea towels? Really? Although, in the end perhaps that's the true destiny of all art, however well or poorly executed. Tea towels, key rings, coasters, fridge magnets... You know you've arrived when you've been merched.