Ambivalence

Amazon is a money-making volcano which hardly pays any taxes and puts smaller businesses to the sword at five-minute intervals. It is a useful symbol for lefties who want to berate capitalism. Its internal economy probably exceeds that of Poland. The name may well be on most people's lips at least weekly, possibly daily. Yet it remains oddly anonymous. I for one have never heard anyone say: I love Amazon.

Amazon got the way it is through logistical efficiency, a subject I was paid to understand. I can confirm: Amazon is efficient. Sure it makes mistakes but so does Poland. So does - whisper it not in Gath! - the USA.

But still you'd type Amazon as heartless.

Cast your mind back to childhood fables. The words "a magic wand" arose and you wanted one, didn't you? Hold that thought for a moment.

We are living in times which disprove John Donne's most famous line of poetry: all men are islands. We phone our closest, email them, text them, Skype them but they remain unapproachable. Sometimes we feel the urge to do more. Send them a gift, not lavish but well-chosen. Most of all we want to do it now, while the urge still burns. We need that magic wand, and Amazon supplies it. The pop-up says: Buy it. One click, it's done.

VR magically caused John Carey's A Simple History of Poetry to drop into my lap. Brother Sir Hugh did the same with Staying Alive - Real Poems for Unreal Times (even more generous given I'd savaged his first sonnet). Deborah Orr’s Motherwell arrived for VR from daughter Occasional Speeder. There've been others and we’re ashamed of our forgetfulness.

Hateful Amazon. But so efficient.

My anonymous guide

The height difference didn't diminish my affection

Damn! I’ve forgotten her name. I need to be sympathetic, let’s call her Han.

Han was guide to thirty European journalists visiting Japan in 1988, guests of  techno-giant Citizen Watch. Frequently it was grim work. With our bus immobilised in Tokyo traffic-jams, she told “little stories” – vignettes of Japanese life. Alas, French, German and Swiss journos proved just as oafish as their British counterparts and she was ignored.

I, however, had other fish to fry and needed Han’s help. I’d been commissioned – quite separately - to explain those Japanese hotels where guests sleep in tubes like torpedoes in a submarine. Han found me a contact. In a hyper-technical interview about just-in-time procedures at Citizen I needed the company’s best translator. Han got me the company president’s personal aide. Finally I’d been forced to represent the Brits at the Sayonara evening and had peppered my speech with sentiments in Japanese. Han phoneticised them for me.

Han was an attractive woman and knew Western culture; I liked her. Crossing a plaza we let a wedding entourage pass. Why, I asked , did everyone look so gloomy? Han averred it was probably the money. Years ago I'd read H. L. Mencken saying Japanese Shintoism was perhaps the silliest religion in the world. I was minded to follow this up but needed to know whether Han was religious; I didn’t want to offend her. “I am a free-thinker,” she said, and I liked that.

On the last day I struggled into central Tokyo and after several linguistic misunderstandings I bought the latest Graham Greene, Han’s favourite author. At the airport she tore away the beautiful wrapping and was overjoyed. I laughed, explaining she should have waited to unwrap it just in case the gift proved duff. She said, “I knew it wouldn’t be.”

Small aside re. Joe

Joe, formerly Plutarch,

tie askew, looking BS

straight in the eye

Four years ago my pal, Joe Hyam, died. He and I were both magazine editors in and around London and I'd known him since 1963; others will remember his blog, Now's the Time. His initial blogonym, Plutarch, was later dropped in favour of his real name.

But why Plutarch in the first place? I’m mildly ashamed I never asked. So, seeing a dilapidated paperback of Plutarch’s Lives on the charity books table at Tesco, I decided to check. Published nearly sixty years ago. the pages have lapsed into that familiar orangy-brown, some fragile as ash. I have many books in that state. It’s a way of re-visiting my youth.

Plutarch was born a Theban in AD mid-forties and lived until he was seventy-five. Studied philosophy in Athens, travelled, held various magistracies, and wrote only about “men of action”. This version (there are others) of  Lives covers movers and shakers in a crucial period in Greek history “from the legendary times of Theseus to the end of the Peloponnesian War.” All news to me. I was not classically educated, not educated at all, really.

Theseus (Founder of Athens) was certainly an action-man. Periphetes, aka Club Bearer, was an early casualty, encouraging Theseus to adopt the club himself. He may have clubbed “Phaea... a robber, a murderous and depraved woman... whom Theseus afterwards killed.”

But now it’s confession time. I’m still on Theseus with eight more lives to go. But I may have answered my own question. Joe liked Plutarch’s essentially in-yer-face attitude:

...geographers when they come to deal with those parts of the earth which they know nothing about, crowd them into the margins of their maps with... “beyond this lie sandy, waterless deserts full of wild beasts” or “trackless swamps...

Plutarch and Joe, neither a purveyor of traditional BS.

Regrets? I've had a few

This is all rather vague and, in retrospect, poignant.

Herman Bruce (formerly Helmut Bruch) joined my primary school - see pic - during the war. I remember him crying to the teacher: "X (another boy) said I was a German spy." I was slightly shocked but did nothing.

We became "school friends". Why? There was some connection between our fathers. Herman's was a confident, jolly taxi-driver with a very strong foreign accent. Before my father could acquire a car, he took the bus to work (Impossible to imagine!) and he must also have used taxis. Occasionally my father spoke to my mother about Herman's father but I cannot remember any content.

Herman, himself, had no accent though his English and his attitudes were somewhat formal. Since I liked to use big words he may have seen that as an attraction. As a scholastic dumbo I left primary school to become a fee-payer at the grammar school. Herman expected to get a scholarship to the grammar school (by then he was confident and super-articulate) and told my mother he was disappointed when he didn't. He did, however, find a place in Bradford's second-best school where my father had been educated.

Herman, I and a closer friend went on a hitch-hiking holiday to London staying at YHA hostels. One evening my friend and I submerged Herman’s spoon in his soup and watched his fruitless search and subsequent outrage. By now his superiority was beginning to irritate me and I dropped him. I think he went on to uni.

I've dropped quite a few acquaintances and never regretted the decision. But being able to piece together what I suspect is Herman's no-doubt horrific life story and remarkable emergence I feel I should have done better. This post is poor compensation.

Corny? Perhaps. Enlivening? Certainly!

Last year in Dusseldorf. This year the beer will remain undrunk

We've had to cancel our traditional visit to a German Christmas market. This year it would have been Aachen, followed by a short flip over the border for a couple of nights in Montreuil (France).

Many must wonder what we see in Christmas markets. The stalls sell stuff so why not visit a website and avoid getting cold? Gluhwein (mit Rhum) and potato pancakes are terrific but they may be simulated in the Robinson kitchen.

My reasons will sound grandiose, even sentimental. So be it. My bonds with Germany were born during a fortnight with a family living in the Ruhr valley in 1957. Since then they've grown.

Small moments. In Normandy there's an inconspicuous cemetery for German soldiers killed in the D-day aftermath. Yesterday the BBC's build-up to the November 11 centenary addressed German families: the perfect English of one elderly man broke down in tears. I'm reminded of the EU's primary aim - to discourage war between France and Germany. I sing magnificent songs by German/Germanic composers:

Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb' entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt

(You, noble Art, in how many grey hours,
When life's mad tumult wraps around me,
Have you kindled my heart to warm love,
Have you transported me into a better world.)

German Christmas markets attract three generations. The atmosphere is friendly, the spirit optimistic. It's all a bit corny; theoretically I should be above it. Instead I seek to chat in my vestigial German.

Yeah, I'm pissed off not to be there.

Into (on to?) air

MikeM tersely twits me after the Low Cuisine post. Equally tersely I twit him back and pass the night worrying if I've been OTT. That I might have lost a friend. I needn't have. Apart from many other talents MikeM has rubber-ball resilience (see his comment).

What's more he was justified: he'd been working on a roof. Now there's a funny thing.

In my extreme youth, during the Plantagenet era, I did rock climbing. Not well, but then we aren't all Olympians. From this you might conclude I'd conquered vertigo. On natural rock, perhaps, less so with buildings. For one thing the “slopes” on buildings tend to be vertical, for another, buildings are man-made. Who knows whether the chippie, the roofer or the brick-layer wasn’t careless just when it mattered?

Our previous house sported an X-shape TV antenna. Defunct and loosely attached to the chimney. During the night it tapped, oh how it tapped.

I had a two-piece extendable ladder but needed to hire a roof ladder. Easy-peasy. One slides this device up the angled roof until two large hooks engage with the roof ridge. All that remains is to step across from the conventional ladder to the roof ladder.

Uh-huh! Those hooks were springy! As my weight transferred, the roof ladder stretched - according to a downwards and outwards vector. How many tentative goes before I put my faith in a pantheon of physicists and stepped up? A lot.

Removing the antenna was quickly done and I sat on the roof ridge, surveying my neighbours from a superior position, blissfully content. Contentment is best when it’s hard-won and I considered my earlier unease. Almost a sensuous memory.

Now I think of MikeM. Long past stretchy moments and entitled to be terse. Cheers, mate!

I've been lucky

Lucy on the left, VR on the right, pilot in the centre, me
behind the camera. Just prior to a flight over Brittany, aeons ago  

Lucy's closing down Box Elder. Perhaps for good (bad's more apt), perhaps not. Given I've recently tended to overdo my comments there I've just left one that's uncharacteristically short. It was either that or Swann's Way, majoring on the hawthorn blossoms.

To sum up. Several years ago our mutual friend, Joe Hyam, died and Lucy chose to attend the funeral. She lives in Brittany, the pointy bit of France that sticks out west; the obsequies were in Tunbridge Wells, about thirty miles south of London. Er, that's London, UK.

France's high-speed trains helped and VR and I were able to pick her up for the last leg. What followed was a long day for all of us and as we reached the hotel near midnight Lucy burst into tears of tiredness and emotion. In my gruff, unaccustomed-as-I-am, Northern way I gave her a hug and I must confess it felt like a privilege to be able to do so.

Lucy's admirable. Too understated, no doubt? Then I'm an unfeeling cold fish, a typical Brit.  Lucy encouraged me to blog, commented on my stuff, pointed out the few good things in my fledgling verses, sympathised when I needed it in well-constructed prose that reached into my tripes, could be wicked but was usually understanding, helped reinforce my Francophilia, shared the pleasures of the English language with me. And other big things. A friend.

Funnily enough I don't begrudge her closing down Box Elder. She's earned it. And others' comments, already rolling in, show I'm not alone. I don't think I'm even sad, how could I be with such a credit balance? I do think I've been lucky.

Future loss

Dass ich so traurig  bin. Heine.
(That I am so sad.)

Sadness, ah, there's a thing

Look, I won't be deserting J. Brahms, L. van Beethoven, R. Schumann, J. S. Bach, R. Wagner,  G. F. Handel, P. Hindemith, R. Strauss. K. Weill (tunesmiths), C. Ludwig, B. Fassbänder, U. Lemper, P. Schreier, DF-D, F. Wunderlich, W. Kempff, W. Backhaus, A-S Mutter, W. Furtwangler, H. von Karajan, E. Jochum, (musicians), M. Schumacher, S. Vettel, E. Degner, H-H Frantzen (vroom-vroomers), T. Martin, J. Voigt (pedallers), H. Schmidt, A. Merkel (presidents), D Bonhoeffer (modern martyr), W. Heisenberg (physicist), G. Grosch (cartoonist), Der Spiegel (muckraker), A. Durer, P. Klee, H. Holbein (daubers),  B. Brecht, F. Schiller, W. G. Sebald, H-H Kirst, T. Mann, G. Grass (scribblers). Or the Pollmeier family, Hattingen-Ruhr, with whom I stayed in 1953...

... but the political connection which I cherished will be lost.

Just back from Cologne where I grabbed lapels and asked if watching Great Britain shrink into Little England would be a sad experience? Yes, definitely, said the Dortmunder I met in a bar (see pic). Yes, said the lady at the tourist office. Yes, said the waiter at the Chocolate Museum. Yes, said the lady on the next seat at Fruhstuck (Who happened to be an Amsterdam academic but you get the idea.)

I went to bed that evening warmed by drink and Rhine-borne affection.

As James did to Louis

When did you last betray a friend? Five years ago? Ten? Never? Chances are it was within the last twenty-four hours.

Here's how. You've happily experienced a painting. It could have been a novel, a sonata, a sunset, a conversation or a sausage-roll; in which case the language may differ but not the nature of the betrayal.

You feel you must communicate this happy experience to a friend. You say: The painting looked like its subject (But a photo would have been even more realistic.). Its colours were well-chosen (But didn't nature choose the colours anyway?). It was inspired (By what? To what end?). It matches the painter's style (So what's the painter's style?). You get the idea. In broad terms you lied, not intentionally but because what you said didn't get close to "the truth". Whatever that is.

Your verbal inadequacy has left your friend uninformed about your happy experience. Since you felt it important to pass on details of this event, you've let your friend down. Betrayed your friend. But don't worry, your friend probably betrayed you twenty-four hours previously. It is in the nature of being human. Words are all we have. Words - so easy to understand as singletons, so slippery in groups.

V, my singing teacher, used to apologise before correcting me. But we've moved on. Things are more difficult (Intervals: oof!); V now shouts "No!" and I rectify. The level of difficulty, I’m told, betokens my progress. A happy event verifiable on the piano keyboard. I am unbetrayed because what V conveyed did not depend on the meaning of words.

Going back to that painting you enjoyed, perhaps you should try la-la-ing your happiness to your friend. You don't sing? Well V's tuition is worth a guinea a box.

Dear Ellena

Lucy's just e-mailed me to say Ellena's died. With more time at this end (ironically there are doctors and hospitals to visit) I could have done better. Should have done better. Here's my comment.

O hell's bells. That's hard to take. And perhaps that's a measure of what Ellena meant to me; that I should immediately behave so selfishly without a thought for you and the rest who have lost so much. But then I can't help it; I can't of course hear her voice but believe me her writing was a wonderful ambassador on her behalf.

Her aim was to be modest, to go beyond modesty almost to invisibility. And she failed as she - a subtly intelligent person if ever there was one - must have known she would. Often her talk was of the smallest domestic matters but shaped in a way that made them glitter. Her style of writing seemed artless but it was the best kind of art - serving the subject never herself.

She said it took ages to come up with comment. At first sight I thought this was an ingenious excuse but quite quickly I knew it was the truth. Sometimes she'd leave less than ten words with me but the indirect angle and the lack of a single unnecessary word were unmistakably her.

One thing I can be proud of: I wasn't about to let her extraordinary skills go uncelebrated. Over and over I told her I was on to her; that no one who wrote as well as she did it for any other reason than a love of language.

And finally - how I hate that word - she brought her style to bear on a very big subject, her masterpiece: "The geriatric care wing of a pavilion attached to a nearby hospital" in April last year. A deliberately cumbersome title for a series of visits she made to old people. Here's how the first visit ends:

I push the glass softly against his mouth and slip a straw between his lips.    Glass empty..... his eyes still closed. 

I feel triumphant.

As well she might.

Although I've done this before I feel I must do it it again. EB White's children's book, Charlotte's Web, ends with a tribute I cannot better:

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte (and Ellena) was (were) both.

Tears dried. Ache remains

So Scotland won’t be “foreign”. How is it possible to be both glad and depressed?

Let’s take “foreign”. The cliché is to look outwards, the honest gaze is inwards. I am a United Kingdom citizen but during the Scottish referendum I, and 50m others, were more precisely English.

How foreign is England? Foreign means strange and unfamiliar, “foreign to” more ominously means “not belonging to or characteristic of”. Only a short step from that to “Please leave by the quickest route”.

England has been disliked for a very long time. Deservedly. Check out India, Kenya and especially the Republic Of Ireland (ie, that larger bit to the south). Even tiny bits of Pennsylvania! Consider too how Australians are delighted to thrash England at sport. Visceral joy.

The Scots have good reasons to dislike England: the battle of Culloden, the Highland Clearances, and (Thank you, Mrs Thatcher.) the Poll Tax. However, the referendum wasn’t based on dislike, Scots are too sensible. In any case, many English also believe Scotland deserves to be a free-standing nation – if that isn’t too patronising.

Had the vote gone the other way, would Scotland have become “foreign”. Given those extra meanings I hope not. Politically separate, yes. Quite, quite, identifiable, yes. Worthy of admiring scrutiny, yes. I’d have wished them luck on their perilous voyage.

Yes, I admitted previously, I’d have voted against independence. Perhaps for purely selfish reasons, as well some iffy economic arguments. But secretly… ah.

One reason I’m not a patriot is because the term is horribly debased. Also, there are aspects of England, apparently immutable, that I detest. I share those detestations with a good many Scots. Hence my relief, tempered with tearful sympathy. No doubt seen as hypocrisy – but then we’re world-masters at that.

Time to shed a wee tear?

Today (18/9/14) Scots may vote for independence, making Great Britain less great, and wrecking the U in the UK. The pro arguments are understandable, justifiable given England's historical hatefulness, occasionally tedious (especially in re. currency), and the polls say neck and neck.

I'm no patriot. My Country Right Or Wrong is a buffoon’s credo (How about  Faute de mieux  - for want of something better?) But I don't want to lose the Scots. As you would expect, my reasons are trivial.

I envy their ACCENTS except Deep Glaswegian which is impenetrable and employs a unique vocabulary. The others - especially Edinburgh and the Western Isles - are profoundly seductive.

I envy their ARTICULACY The BBC's coverage involves many vox pop interviews. The sentences parse, the reasons are well marshalled, the tone is temperate. Damnit, they sound well-educated, their opinions bubble with gaiety.

I envy their GEOGRAPHY. From a good map examine that raggedy west coast, imagine the brown contours. There's beauty there.

Luckily I have no vote because it would be no. Thus siding with our dreadful prime minister. His origins lie in public relations. He too wants the Scots to stay (losing them he'll be blamed); his voice cracked, tears incipiated on one occasion. But a lifetime devoted to insincerity only evoked Mathilda - who told such dreadful lies.

JOE’S NUDGE
For once it isn’t anonymously chosen. Burns, who else?

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Note: Bear the gree: be successful

Acceptance, gloom, anti-gloom

The mini-adventure didn't happen - medical matters intervened. Never mind; old age teaches us to be philosophical.

Less easy to be philosophical about Alzheimer-stricken brother Nick (the best dressed one in the centre). At his "home" I  presented him with a pot plant - a strange, unbrotherly thing to do. I emphasised how his yacht Takista had invigorated my latter years. Mentioned sailing north at night with the Cote d'Aquitaine to starboard. As I spoke I saw flashes of recognition, then shared his suffering as he tried  to dredge up responses from a mind shot to hell by disease. As if we were alone on an alien and uncongenial planet.

Sir Hugh and I drove away looking for lunch in the Yorkshire Dales. Came upon the village of Leyburn, where the centre was devoted to a heaving mass of shiny car roofs. Two hundred beetle carapaces? Drove on, depressed.

Back at Sir Hugh's house I drank gin, wine and Scotch knowing there'd be a price to pay. Somehow Proust cropped up in talk; Sir Hugh has read A La Recherche (he has the necessary doggedness) and told me he enjoyed it. This cheered me.

Spent the following afternoon with Ron and Frances at their house in the tiny Lakes village of Mungrisdale. Ron and I started out on the same Bradford newspapers at the same time. He went on to write about Everest attempts, yachting, rock climbing, sub-aqua stuff and choral singing, travelling the world betimes. Frances has an honours degree in music from the Open University. Time after time I was conversationally outgunned. Parked outside was Ron's 600 cc metallic red Honda but happily there was no spare crash helmet. Instead I played the first line of God Save The Queen on Frances's harpsichord.

Driving home today I managed to transfer from the M6 motorway to the M5 motoway without being mired in a traffic jam. Almost a miracle. 

A goodbye and a hug

Yesterday people gathered in Tunbridge Wells to affirm Heidi's life. We were late. We missed the actor reading Manley Hopkins' Pied Beauty, missed Joe's choice of hymn, God Moves In A Mysterious Way (minus the dodgy verse), but  heard Caroline and Jenny Bush celebrate their mother in quiet voices. Ending with four lines from Milton's Lycidas:

And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay:
At last she rose and twitched her mantel blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

As one who regards the possession of a soul as an unlikely luxury, I was comforted by the celebration's general view: that the only permanence is how others remember us. VR had described Heidi as "cheeky" in facing life's difficulties. I remembered Heidi's face challenging me in conversation; best not to be a fool because she didn't suffer fools gladly. A challenge I happily accepted.

Beyond the chapel, Joe emboldened by painkillers against his wretched ailment, wearing a tie, moved down the line of celebrants. I dared myself to hug him - the first time I've ever hugged any man in my life. And he, catching at the awkwardness, drew away afterwards in mock surprise: "Robbie!"

At the house we shared brief memories of Breton holidays with Joe's children, Pippa and Toby, now ridiculously assured adults. But after less than an hour VR and I had to be away. Joe protested, he wanted to talk about "writing". I chided him: now was no time to recreate a Blogger's Retreat dialogue, to exclude his other friends.

But we had another reason for leaving, heavily ironic. To do as much of the return journey in the light. For light had been the curse from Hereford to Kent. For nearly five hours I had driven east, against a capricious low-lying winter sun waiting in ambush round each curve of the road. A glare so intense it was like entering and re-entering the doors of a furnace, blotting out all reference points, my streaming blepharitic right eye trying to cope,  picking out shreds of reflection, a quarter-second view of the kerb.

Made worse by a satnav which took us down short-cuts choked by commuter traffic. On a dual carriageway near Bracknell we entered one of those jams which only south-east England can nourish, a long, long, constipated turd of a jam in which all our marginal time was dissipated. At this rate we would miss everything and we talked of turning back. Suddenly the reason for the jam became apparent, we were through and the satnav - performing heroically - took us round tiny rural roads on TN's outskirts delivering us quarter of a hour late.

The return journey went smoothly, Until, out on the M4, I recognised a legacy of the morning's excesses: milli-second pauses when - at 70 mph - I kept falling asleep at the wheel. Does coffee help or is it a myth? A bowl of Costa Americano, toxic in its strength, worked a miracle.

Changed into my PJs at home I was remarkably relaxed. An ordeal but glad we persisted. I reflected on "ordeal" and noticed it resembled the far more evocative "odyssey". A journey made against difficulties towards a worthwhile and emotional goal. Turning back would have been a weak end to the day. The act of a timorous fool. And fools... As I say, I agree with Heidi.

The above exceeds 300 words. But I'm making an exception here.