Upbringing updated

Keighley News district office
Myrtle Place, Bingley, West Yorkshire
1959

Impatience was my driven clockspring then,
Wound tightly by my adolescent need,
I yearned for girls but, even more, I sought
A better smithy for my wordsmithing.

A disliked workplace but, if truth be known,
That modest valley town was innocent,
A yardstick for the things that were to come,
An anvil base on which to shape and bend.

But youth confinèd to a teenage cell,
Finds just the bars and, through them, discontent,
Sees vaguest vistas of a sexual sort,
Dreams stories only wisdom may create.

I took the southern road, without goodbyes,
Swearing to flush these details down the tubes,
And found a wider, more rewarding world,
Plus all the doubtful gains of adulthood.

Yet, like dull bricks that built the house I own,
That old dull Place helped build the life I’ve led,
There’s time and space and even patience now,
The fire aspires and words gain relevance
.
What of that town that I once deemed to hate,
That sleeps, unhated, four hours’ drive up north?
Do lichens grow, are folks content, roads straight
But quaint? Adornment for my mantelpiece?

The furtive burn

I resist new domestic gadgets. I come from the surly part of Britain where they rub their nose and say, "Never be a pioneer." It surprises me they're not still hanging eleven-year-olds for stealing 20 p.

When I acquire something new it's become old, not worth talking about. But Occasional Speeder bought an expensive chiminea in terracotta and the wind blew it over, smashing it irreparably. My Hacienda chiminea is metal, cut-price at Tesco and I had to assemble it. The rivet-headed screws were a bugger and Hereford seems devoid of self-tightening washers.

I think OS's chiminea was intended to warm the family drinking mulled wine at ten below. Mine is functional. It did the job last night but I was careless, tossing in glossy out-of-date Wine Society brochures which turned the flames to smoke.

Yes, I know, we're supposed to recycle waste paper and I do most of the time. But what about bank statements, credit-card accounts, and intimate reports from the hospital? One day I came upon VR quietly cursing at a huge pile of paper as she cut off the bits with the secret info. Shredding?  My shredder was a gift (for which I was grateful) but it only does four sheets at a time.  Otherwise it jams.

There are incidental benefits. VR is a latent pyromaniac and regrets the passing of open fires in the UK. She was quite free with instruction as I stoked the Hacienda until we both calmed down, she with her G&T, me with a beer.

The neighbours? Next door admitted he did the same. With more planning (No brochures for one thing) and crumpling paper into balls, the bi-monthly burn should be over in ten minutes. After all, some garden waste is incinerated.

The fondue was OK too

It is now, in the present, and I'm sipping Jim Beam while reading John le Carré's autobiography.

Suddenly - for nothing travels as quickly as memory - I am transported back to 1965 and find myself in a bar in St Gervais-les-Bains, near Mont Blanc. VR and I, with my brother, Sir Hugh, have just been served a cheese fondue by the patron, a youngish chap who's disposed to talk. I look up at the b&w TV and see John le Carré being interviewed on one of the French channels. "What's his French like?" I ask the patron. "Pretty good," he says. Although I'm unaware of it, wheels start to turn and I'm now a different person than I was then, fifty-two years ago.

No big deal and of no consequence to anyone else but me. A decade later, back from the USA, I start French lessons and they've continued ever since. Two more decades pass and, after a couple of false starts, I buckle down to improving my prose. No doubt far far too late.

So am I merely and belatedly aping John le Carré? Yes, but less obviously. I admired his success as a novelist and his fluency in French but there was something else: his ability to pass through Europe without immediately trumpeting his nationality, discussing things other than being foreign, being accepted as a member of a polyglot community. It would have been foolish of me to want to be a citizen of the world, but a citizen of Europe would have done me just fine. To feel at ease in Bordeaux, Cologne and Gothenburg and to profit from this easefulness.

Should VR and I see if that alpine bar still exists? Never. But I'd like to buy the patron a drink.

Hard news

How much reality can you stand? How much reality do you think others can stand?

The answers seem to be: not much. A friend dies and we cannot utter those three words. Instead, that friend has "passed on", which makes death sound less awful. We may even believe "passed on" makes death itself more acceptable.

It's called euphemism, the refusal to call a spade a spade.  And we excuse our euphemisms by saying they're used for the best of reasons, conveniently forgetting the surfacing of the road to Hell.

Governments and others use euphemism for quite bad reasons. "Quantitative easing" sounds like getting into a warm bath, not staving off financial ruin. Officialdom prefers this obscure phrase, believing it will stop people asking who's to blame.

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army leader, has just been put away for life, found guilty of "ethnic cleansing". Something like sweeping the streets, perhaps. There's an irony here; that phrase is literal English for the Serbo-Croatian "etnicko ciscenje". Mladic comes from a country which invented a term that appears on his charge sheet.

Even a full definition (Systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group... etc, etc) damps down the full horror. Words, said Tweedledum...

Luckily there are cameras. Dzezana Sokolovic with her son tries to cross Sniper Alley in Sarajevo in 1994. A bullet passes through her stomach and kills her son. He's lying there, the pool of blood still widening. No need for euphemisms, nor for words.

Other than an expression of gratitude for the force of law.

I owe it to edewcayshun

Bad education can pay off.

I left school knowing nothing about Greek or any other kind of myths, Roman history, poems other than a dozen rumti-tum pieces found on calendars, politics in general, physics, chemistry, musical notation, literary analysis, mathematics beyond simultaneous equations, the formalities of cooking, economics, the way my body works, morality, the emotional nature of love, DIY, most plays other than force-fed Shakespeare, the necessity of mortgages, opera, ways of earning a living, the fact that I would age but not necessarily become adult, the foreignness of "abroad", healthy practices, astronomy, honesty, and any sense of my own potential.

I left school disadvantaged by adolescent lust, insatiable hunger, a thirst for alcohol, unfounded cynicism and unperceived selfishness.

Last night, sixty-six years after I left school, I discovered Ovid, the Roman poet who died in exile two thousand years ago and whose best stuff concerns such characters as Phaeton and Phoebus, Diana and Acteon, Narcissus and Echo. Remained silent through the explanatory hour and cried a bit when Niobe's fourteen children were killed by the capricious gods - for I too am a parent.

What were the odds, sixty-six years ago, that I might arrive at that period of absorbent silence? Lengthy, I'd say
.
A good education would have prepared me for Ovid. On the other hand my bad education left me as a tabula rasa, a blank slate waiting to be written on.

VR and I discussed which translation of Ovid to buy. Ted Hughes is presently the contender. 

Who's that at the door?

"Bicycle Maintenance/Repairs. Home Visits." announced a passing van - a service new to me. In Monmouth too, Wales not renowned for forward thinking.

Obviously I'm out of touch. I took bikes seriously for yonks, one benefit being that maintenance and repair were up to me, no arcane skills needed, thus no rapacious invoices. Once, from curiosity, I disassembled and reassembled the bearings in my bike's bottom-bracket. Only people with time on their hands and nothing in their heads do that.

I was shocked when brother Sir Hugh admitted (reluctantly; he could see I was a disbeliever) taking his mountain bike “in” for servicing. As to house calls it seemed a van would hardly be necessary; vagrant bike mechanics could travel by bus, tools a'pocket, reading an improving novel.

Is there further potential for house-calls?

● Medical emergencies: but it may have been tried.
● Extracting thick-ended corks from Italian wine bottles.
● Cat manicures.
● Stripping film-wrapped CDs (Patience a must).
● Finding and bringing in nomadic wheelie bins.
● Priest to forgive lefty for being lefty.
● Hungry immigrant to eat last cold slice of pizza.
● Ringing doorbell (Is-it-audible-on-the-loo? check)
● Tory utters Brexit agitprop through letter-slot
● Maternal type comforts smoking pariahs outdoors.
● Choir sings national anthem to doubting patriots.
● The Police! (Just joking.)
● Michael Gove! (Not joking at all.)
● Michael McIntyre! (Incapable of joking.)
● Reporting all Hallowe’en pranksters now in jail.
● Unexpectedly touting for garden work, post-dusk.
● Distraction ploy for thief presently ransacking kitchen.
● Delivering End Of World Is Nigh flyers.
● Commandant, so-called ISIS, seeks sanctuary.

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.

Where I hang my hat

IN HEREFORDSHIRE, my present county, people are thin on the ground – 85 to every square kilometre. Even thinner in rural parts outside the city of Hereford which accommodates a third of the total. You want crowded? Try Surrey where I used to live: 683/sq km. Or the London suburb of Islington: 14,000/sq km.

This under-population is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s still possible to “go for a drive” on uncrowded roads, on the other hand there isn’t really enough council tax income to administer quite a large area. Much of Herefordshire’s character has disappeared or is under threat.

I wonder how much longer Lock, Stock & Barrel will survive. It specialises in brass bits and pieces and it’s difficult to pass down its jam-packed aisles. The owner’s attitude is, shall we say, idiosyncratic; perhaps rude. He doesn’t clean his windows and his crowded displays are comical. A rubber tap nozzle exposed to the sun for several years has perished. But at least LS&B is not McDonalds or JD Sports.








NEW INVENTION is in Shropshire, north of Herefordshire, and consists of four houses on a cross-roads. Why the name? A farrier is thought to have attached horse-shoes backwards way round to confuse people. Or possibly the horses.

AS AN anniversary present I bought VR a silk pillow stuffed with silk gubbins. It cost a fortune and replaces an earlier silk pillow she much favoured. I think the pic conveys her enthusiasm.

ALL PIX courtesy of Sir Hugh, my younger brother, who lives in Arnside a swanky townlet south of the Lake District. He’s available for commissions.

A golden era indeed

I can fairly say la jeunesse dorée passed me by. It wasn't society's fault, you understand. Society had more important fish to fry, notably surviving a world war. Thereafter enduring war's endless consequences.

These days society recognises children are vulnerable and tries to compensate. In those days... I remember my first day at primary school. I'd lived a sheltered life, lacking nearby friends. As my mother left the school's main hall I began to scream. Perfunctory attempts were made to calm me, then Mrs Cox said, "I think we'll just leave Roderick where he is." And so they did, a small pile of misery on the rough wooden floor.

Had I been older I might have reflected on my good luck. Kids in the Warsaw ghetto were then definitely worse off.

Being a child denies you the bigger picture but small things leave a lasting memory. Post-lunch at Thackley PS children were made to slumber for half an hour. On two types of bed: one which allowed the user to hang off the ends of stretched fabric, the other an intractable, miniaturised wooden frame. I was tall for my age and I got the frame. I cannot remember sleeping a single minute. No one noticed.

Children who faltered with multiplication tables were smacked on the thigh - skirts and pants legs slid up to ensure proper contact. If you cried, the teacher encouraged the rest of the class to laugh at you. Which we all did. Five-year-olds!

Had the subject been raised the teachers' response would have been: I went through it and I'm OK. I agree. Dishing out punishment was then a pedagogue's perk.

Gilded youth? They say kids from wealthier families had even sterner educations.

At least it's not whingeing

 The old discuss age - or their maladies. This must cease.

How about double-glazing? The phrase is as unevocative as double-digging (gardening), double-entry (book-keeping), double-fault (tennis) and double-talk (conversation). A dull domestic necessity, frequently misunderstood. Many Trollope-readers imagine such windows mysteriously generate heat. They think the same about thermostats. It isn't true.

We have just been re-double-glazed. One unexpected side-effect is the house is quieter. Passing cars make less noise (Not true; less noise gets through.) Not surprising - the gap between the two sheets of glass is twice as wide as that in the old windows. And air is a poor conductor of both sound and heat. But no, I'll not be technoid.

Double-glazing encourages fantasy. The windows and the door fit tightly. Were the house to be carried away in flooding I am pleasingly reassured it would float. Yes, that's untrue too but we may dream, may we not?

The handles are more substantial, more akin to those on safes. They clunk shut. I feel less vulnerable (no, not that; it relates to age), Aroused - sexually, if you like - by something that works well. I go to sleep expecting erotic dreams. There's a bonus.

JOE’S NUDGE
In memory of JH who encouraged poetry in me

TO THE LORD HIGH TREASURER
My Lord, Poor wretched States, prest by extremities,
Are fain to seek for succours and supplies
Of Prince’s aids, or good men’s charities.

Disease the Enemy, and his engineers,
Want….

Reasons why. Initially the outmoded language charms. Re-read, especially the first two lines, it’s poetry: succinct and rhythmic. And emotional. That beautifully expressed (yet horrific) sentiment – want as an engineer of disease. Who can this be?

Ben Jonson

... to have wings on your heels

Tuesday. First day of real deprivation, without car: regular weekly appointment in Monmouth, 20 miles away.

Normally (by car): Leave home 50 min before scheduled time, drive scenic route, arrive Monmouth car park with 10 min to go, walk to appointment.

Now (by bus, by foot, by tested patience): Leave home 2 hr 40 min before scheduled time; wait 10 min for local bus; bus from home to Hereford Shire Hall 15 min; kill 55 min over 15 min walk from Shire Hall to railway station; regional bus Hereford to Monmouth 60 min; kill 20 min over 10 min walk to appointment.

Walking across Hereford. What better way to pass time (decision rapidly becomes a necessity) than go to toilet? But which one? The bus station - Urghh? That would be Nome, Alaska. Choose Morrisons, the supermarket. Hook on back of door to hang jacket and shoulder bag - luxury.

Waiting for regional bus at Hereford railway station (see pic). Bus arrives 20 min before departure. Spherically fat driver gets out, locks bus, goes to railway station to get coffee. Returns, unlocks bus, gets, in, locks bus. Drinks coffee. A desolate wait: Hereford feels like Nome, Alaska. Passengers allowed in 3 min before departure. Spherically fat bus driver turns out to be a woman.

Pensioner bus pass covers cost of journey £3.60. Hurray!

En route. Absorbed by conversation behind me: sixteen-year-old boy and girl, prob. from Hereford's swanky Cathedral school, talk animatedly and naturally about this and that. (eg. Boy: I can't wait for Christmas. Girl: I love Christmas.) I am overwhelmed and saddened; why wasn't school like this for me? On arrival I let boy get off first: he says thank you. Ah!

Buy four partridges from Waitrose, killing time for return journey (in total darkness).

Norwegian surprise

Post deleted as a result of authorial dissatisfaction.









WIP Second Hand (55,164 words)
“You remember the crackpot officer in Apocalypse Now: talking about the smell of napalm in the morning? I’m paid well and this is what I’m paid for. A magazine launch is a huge gamble – and this one’s as huge as it gets. I’d deserve to be fired for being uncertain. I want to fight the odds and beat them. Boast about this when I’m in my forties… I want to be a myth.”

Ready, steady, draw!

 Life classes are comparatively rare, at least in Hereford. So when VR's art group heard of a course being set up in Hereford city, several members signed up. Quickly the life class was sold out.

The rules are not everyone's cup of tea and have something in common with blitz chess. The two-hour class is broken down into individual sessions a mere 2 - 5 minutes long which means you hardly have time to flex your finger joints. The emphasis is on instinct, leisured contemplation is out.

VR wasn't sure she would survive such a whirligig but I was pleased she took it up. Speaking as a non-artist (ie, close your ears now) I have always felt that human bodies represent the ultimate challenge in representational art; I mean it applies in writing so why not in pictures?

Inevitably some of VR's early stuff reflected the breathless nature of her task. But I seized on the one I've reproduced here, convinced she'd got it right. Those external lines seem to follow the routes they should. Work in progress, you could say. Down below is some of mine.

WIP Second Hand (50,220 words)
When Francine took her reserved train seat opposite Alan Pratt it was obvious he’d done more than merely exercise his fungiform papillae. On the table dividing them were three cans of lager already acquired from the train’s bar. Pratt said, “Miss Embery, our resident Stakhanovite. I thought you might like to wet your whistle after your working lunch. We’ve been joined by Parky from the big catering magazine, he’s in the bog, shifting his cargo.”

Husbandry

Education is a practice that rings in my ear like a cracked bell. Out of tune, arid theory. Sour grapes too. Money was spent fruitlessly on my "education" and my father grew angrier.

For the fifth time I watched Etre et Avoir, a 2003 French documentary about a one-room school in the Auvergne where a single teacher nourished the lives of children aged 4 to 11. It won awards and made money, leading, alas, to a sad squabble I prefer to ignore.

I cannot accept that the movie depicted education - that hollow abstraction doesn't fit. In guiding faltering infantile hands to write better numerals, gently sifting through the reasons for a falling-out in the playground, persuading Jojo to finish his painting, and comforting Julien whose father faced surgery to remove his larynx, M. Lopez seemed only to be encouraging growth. A benign insistent force impelling his charges towards more effective versions of themselves. At the end a large percentage left for the summer holidays and then for middle school in Issoire. M. Lopez himself was due to retire. Emotional kisses were exchanged and it was clear that the children, having gained something, were also losing something.

I tried to imagine the circumstances under which I would even have shaken hands with any of my educators. My imagination failed me just as my so-called education had.

WIP Second Hand (31,364 words).

TO UNDRESS behind screens, put on an ill-fitting nightdress and to be at the beck and call of nurses was to cross the boundary of authority. Others clothed in suits and differing uniforms moved around purposefully into and out of the ward, jobs to do. Francine lay on her bed, trying to read a paperback, making no contribution, unable to identify her sense of unease.

Eat your heart out Hereford

Ice Age Art (above): The swimming reindeer.

The Guardian  gave our Emerson Quartet concert (Bartok qt 3, Janacek qt 2, Berg Lyric Suite) four stars out of five and I was pleased this eggheaded programme more or less filled Queen Elizabeth Hall, also drawing a high percentage of under-forties.

P and C, with whom we were staying, live in Lewisham in south-east London. Normally we take London's motorway ring-road, M25, from which it's a 20-minute drive. Instead we plunged into London's suburbs on the western side of the capital to pass by our old house in Kingston-upon-Thames. Since I know this quadrant I tried to override the satnav but finally (for complex reasons) I gave in. Needless to say it took ages and the satnav came into its own during the final three or four miles of hilariously zig-zagged narrow streets liberally endowed with sleeping policemen (Speed bumps in the USA).

C, who paints and sculpts, had chosen the British Museum Ice Age Art exhibition the following day. A salutary display. Carvings in mammoth ivory and reindeer antler, some dating back 40,000 years, evolved from realistic renderings of, say, a bison and (my favourite) a tiny, perfectly detailed sole, into impressionistic and very beautiful shapes evocative of the female form. The mental processes on which modern painting and sculpture are based were already there and active all those years ago.

At the Courtauld two-dozen paintings by the nineteen-year-old Picasso revealed him stumbling his way through imitation, low-grade Toulouse Lautrec and ending up with a masterpiece, Girl With Dove. All in one year.

Docklands Light Railway down to Greenwich for a couple of pints at London's greatest pub, The Trafalagar*. London has it all.

*Superior to the pub on Roupell Street in only one respect - it has a view.

Will it gain webbed feet?

Unfeeling technology cut HHB adrift from her blog but her still small voice continues to make itself heard via beguiling email links. Given she lives in Perth, Western Australia, I am put to shame by a link which takes me to a radio programme, Darwin Tunes, broadcast in my own backyard by BBC4.

The proposition is this: Is music subject to natural selection? Does it evolve?

Don’t worry, there’s more to this than blether. A computer programme generates a hundred loops of “funny sounds”. These are made accessible via the web and listeners are invited to record their reactions. Listener ratings are quantified and applied to the loops and, lo, the “funny sounds” start turning into something recognisable as music. More reactions and more modifications lead to an independent bass line emerging and the lengthening of the melodic line.

Calling it “the most democratic music ever created” the evolutionary biologist presenter optimistically lauds this composer-less tune as “sublime”. Others found it “static”, although an expert in digital music grudgingly rated it “pleasant”.

There is a serious point here. The presenter admitted this is more like cultural selection than natural selection but listeners do play a part in the development of music, especially in fast-moving pop. One fashion replaces another; the latest arrival is either accepted or rejected depending on audience response. Of course, there’s rather more to it than this, plus a bit of tongue-in-cheek, but I haven’t the space or the intellect to pursue it further.

Musical developments in posh music are more obvious because of the longer time scales. But yet again these changes are to some extent controlled by our presence in the paying seats. Why else would Beethoven’s Fourth (rather than his First) be the least played of his symphonies?