Dressed to climb, then and now

Sports enthusiasm may skip a generation. I rock-climbed and ski-ed, daughter Occasional Speeder watched soccer, granddaughter Ysabelle climbs and skis, much better than I did.

As to climbing I was limited to gritstone outcrops in West Yorkshire. Bella ascends specialised indoor walls and includes a bit of “bouldering” (ie, shorter, lower but often fiercer rock routes).

I climbed in the fifties, Bella does it now. The most spectacular difference between us is sartorial. Bella ties her hair into a topknot, wears things like ballet pumps on her feet, slides into a blouse that could be Lycra but isn’t, and clads her bum in what looks like rugby shorts.

I seem to have escaped from the Monty Python “Oop north” sketch. My hair is longish but only because I’ve neglected it. The fabric of my knitted pullover has coagulated into a grim mat; when I reach for a hold a gap near my belly reveals unwashed shirt. My trousers may be corduroy but who cares.

My boots are huge; “big as coal scuttles” as the local argot has it. Given that modern-day climbers can support themselves on a foothold the size and shape of a tilted teaspoon I’d be ruled out as too cumbersome. As well as age, of course. For me a foothold would be a rock ledge which could accommodate a sofa.

Bella moves upwards sinuously and continuously. I used to pause after each move. The grading system - Moderate, Difficult, Very Difficult, Severe, Very Severe, Extremely Severe - terrified me and VD (the grade not the disease) was my highest aspiration.

Why did I climb given my incompetence? From reading Victorian tomes about the Alps, often written by vicars. The shabbiness of the gear also appealed.

Where we've been: 2

We went to France well-prepared; here's stuff we didn't use

Various US politicians, keen to appeal to tough-guy voters, have boasted about not wearing masks. Some have gone further and caught The Plague. I await with interest the first politico – hoping for sculptures to be raised in the state capital – to go further still and die in front of the TV cameras, a ventilator stuffed down his guzzard.*

France is not without its macho men. When the Eiffel Tower was first opened to the public citizens worried about a potential spate of aviational suicides. Cleverer administrators suggested a notice saying “Jump here”, knowing that such show-offs hated doing the obvious.

Trouble was I’d self-isolated back home and had no real comparisons. Even so I was pleasantly surprised, Masks were obligatory in the Intermarché. Not only did virtually everyone toe the line but they kept their masks on while loading their cars. And especially in the butcher’s shop (Ah, that terrific chunk of entrecote – I taste its juices still.) where the need for masks seemed visibly obvious.

We ate out several times: the restaurant tables were socially distanced and waitresses and waiters, resentfully perhaps, hid their sex-appeal behind scraps of pale blue. But you can’t keep an individualistic race down all the time. Halfway through one meal a long-haired beauty (I infer her loveliness since I only saw her back) lit up. How strange.

I go to France to inflict my imperfect, non-idiomatic French on the natives. Masks hinder this. No visits to the doctor or dentist this time. I made do with the pharmacy where I stumbled over turning the noun haemorrhoid into an adjective. Yes the pharmacienne knew the Anglo brand but handed over a French brand anyway.

When the temperature is in the thirties, the brief chill from squirted hand disinfectant is most welcome.

* This has happened since I posted.

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.

He didn't take long, thank goodness

To the opening of more bottles of champagne than I can recall we played Masks on Christmas Day. For once I was properly prepared for a form of competition, since Masks turned out be a condensed version of my professional life - the posing of logical sets of questions.

The victim holds up a card, unable to identify what's on the other side. The aim is to identify who or what the image is with the minimum number of questions. Only yes/no answers are given.

In my case the smirking Welsh windbag, Huw Edwards, who reads the BBC's News At Ten on telly. Quite soon the atmosphere of conspiracy became apparent from those supplying the answers and I got Fat Huw in fairly quick time.

But I can't say I'm proud.

Stuttgart - The reason why

German Christmas markets are fun - see, even I'm smiling. What wasn't fun was the apartment we hired, eighty-plus steps up, the same going down - unless you fell, of course.

Although not as large as the market at Cologne (Köln, to be nigglingly precise) Stuttgart's was huge, taking in two of the city squares plus the interconnecting streets. On the advice of a Stuttgart resident we sought a change of pace by taking the train out to Esslingen where the Weihnachtsmarkt was cosier, jostling among buildings which seemed original, seemed to have survived WW2. Note the church with its twin towers linked by a strangely rackety bridge. Note too the characteristic town structures as we got nearer.

OS (Occasional Speeder) was masterly. Found a restaurant with comforting worn woodwork, the door opening on a shabby interior which was just what we wanted. Alas it was full of Germans aware that Mittagessen starts earlier than we had expected. Quickly we found another but our hearts still dwelt among the shabbiness.

Never mind, there was adjacent entertainment. Two German businessmen, hosting two youngish Japanese functionaries, had cruelly ordered them gigantic pork knuckles. How gamely the young men chewed on food that couldn't have been further from sushi.

Outside men in medieval costumes re-enacted history, a juggler tossed flaming torches, a blacksmith hammered red-hot iron. We wandered among stalls offering sausages, wheat beer, eternal Glühwein, strangely dull lollipops with a bread roll replacing the sweetie bit, carved wood, and a piano-accordion player rendering an impossibly rapid version of the William Tell overture (or was that in Stuttgart?)

The best time is when the offices disgorge men in suits, carrying brief cases, to mingle among us commoners. Worth the trip, even a flight from Quebec.  

Stepping back a little

 Although I have CDs of music played on period instruments (memorably Melvyn Tan, fortepiano, doing LvB) and have seen period  performances on telly, yesterday was my first live concert. To Birmingham for The Academy of Ancient Music with two versions of Stabat Mater (Vivaldi, Pergolesi), Salve Regina (Vivaldi) and two concerti armonico (van Wassenaer).

Some things I expected. Gut strings detune quicker than the modern metal-wound kind and there's some messing about on their behalf. Not least for the gloomy, possibly French woman, endlessly attending to her theorbo (pictured). This cumbersome device seemed, to my gradually dysfunctioning ears, almost inaudible. Gut strings in general are supposed to generate less noise but this problem didn't arise. I am by now used to counter-tenors and Andreas Scholl, world renowned, offered beautiful, wobble-free tone over his full range.

What did surprise me was the structure of the music. The two cellos and double bass were reduced to an undemanding and repetitive drone-like accompaniment which I believe is called ground bass. Strange, given that Bach's dates are contemporary with these three composers and his unaccompanied cello suites - a growing comfort in my declining years - demonstrate what you can get out of a cello when you try.

The van Wassenaer pieces, both in four movements, were good fun but predictable. This Dutch nobleman favoured the "round" approach; each violin playing the same melody but entering the fray at different times. Very soon I was able to hum in advance what the next ten seconds would bring. Quietly of course.

There was no conductor, the leader (a violinist) did the cue-ing with a most eloquent body. Informality reigned. To the point where leader and counter-tenor crashed into one another when leaving the stage.

Shackled no more

Epiphanies are moments of revelation. Fifty-four years ago, almost to the day, one happened.

That year, 1959, I was liberated. I finally left the northern city of Bradford where my adolescence had dried like a peascod. London was my playground. My job consisted of filling two magazine pages a week, more or less any way I wanted. I had met the woman I would eventually marry. The weather was unseasonally warm.

The Christmas break beckoned. I walked along Tudor Street, close to Fleet Street, then the actual and symbolic heart of Britain's newspaper industry. My companion was JM, the handsome, confident, competent deputy-editor of the magazine I worked for. We had both had a couple of sherbets.

Walking towards us on the other side of the street were two attractive women, about our age, who had also been at the sherbet. Not helplessly so: just happy, chatting. A pleasing sight. I pointed them out to JM.

He nodded. Whereupon (this is an anecdote, so whereupon is permitted) he sauntered over and presented himself. I could hear what he said: he complimented them on their looks and admitted he was consumed with a desire to kiss both of them. This, like whereupon, was permitted. He sauntered back.

I was a mere observer yet my heart overflowed with joy. Welcome proof I was no longer resident in the blackened, mean-spirited, navel-contemplating, misogynistic city of my birth. An epiphany.

WIP Second Hand (50,650 words)
During her first month Francine had worn business suits which she hoped would imply she was serious. A contributing editor, specialising in biology, and who attended staff meetings in shorts and flip-flops was the first to break ranks when he asked her, mock-seriously, whether she was looking for promotion to a higher tier of management.

Zippa-di-doo-dah, zippa-di-ay

Hey, I'm so content. The artificial Christmas tree is back upstairs in the attic (Oh, catharsis!), Joni's just started up on the computer with Big Yellow Taxi ("They put all the trees in a tree museum. Charged a dollar-and-a-half just to see 'um."), there's one of those Danish series starting at nine on telly, political not murder, with the most lustrous, most voluptuous lady PM ever elected, and I can afford to break off from Blest Redeemer because every word between now and The End is clear in my noggin and Judith will break down in tears - as will I - at a moment I've worked slavishly to create over the last month and a bit. Riding a horse called music.

Went to Specsaver this AM, the most efficient human enterprise ever since the boats headed south and D-Day became a reality. People, in a chain, pass me from one link to another, never halting, and my eyes are measured, from left and right, up and down. One device confirms my left eye (the trick one) is focusing on a hot-air balloon taking off from what looks like Arizona.

Frank now sings Luck Be A Lady Tonight.

The cataracts can stay put for another six months and the optician - from Central Europe, surely with that accent - passes a thousand lenses past my eyes. How can he keep track of the sequence? What will be the effect of  losing the cataracts? A reduction in opacity, he says. And I savour the slipperiness of that word, visited by a massive attack of smugness that I had the good luck to be forced to learn English as my first language. Who wouldn't be content? Just think of another word: lobelia. Two ls and ls are good for pronouncing.

Just finished with Warren Zevon and An Excitable Boy.

Sublime horn now silenced

I only learned of his existence a few months ago. And now he’s dead. Maurice André, Frenchman, 78, the best trumpeter in the world. Don’t take my word for it; note the length of his obit in The Guardian.

“Solid technique, superb breath control and seemingly inexhaustible stamina” is the obit-writer’s judgment. Herbert von Karajan puts my claim slightly differently: “He’s undoubtedly the best trumpet-player but he is not from our world.”

That’s André the performer but there’s also his influence. He was in great demand for the fearfully difficult playing in baroque works such as Bach’s Mass in B Minor. To expand the limited trumpet repertoire he arranged violin, oboe and other instrumental pieces, then played them on the piccolo trumpet which made high notes more accessible. He even collaborated with the manufacturer, Selmer, in adding a fourth valve to the trumpet which again helped with high baroque notes.

While learning his trade he worked down the mines and this gave him the power to manage this very physical instrument.

Some 209,479 fans have clicked on this 2 min. 27 sec. video of 56-year-old Maurice blasting his four-valve piccolo through the finale of Telemann’s D-major sonata (which looks more like a concerto, but never mind). LEND HIM YOUR EARS

TRIBUTE TO BERNIE Way, way back when BBC radio programmes came in b&w I enjoyed late-night Bedtime With Braden, a comedy show by Vancouver-born Bernard Braden. Insults were a speciality: “And now a song from Bennie Lee whose only musical training consisted of learning to read record labels while they were rotating.”

OK, so nothing moves on a MP3 player. But you too will look foolish thirty years hence when music emerges from an orchestra of ants embedded in the brain of your grandchild.