Mud Glorious Mud!

The River Rumney is not exactly at its most rustic and lovely when it passes through the district of Cardiff which bears its name. It is so near its outfall into the Bristol Channel that it is tidal and twice a day it flows sluggishly backward. The situation of Rumney Pottery adjacent to Rumney Bridge is an ancient one: the Pottery will tell you that there has been a pottery there since Roman times. The location was a good one because the potter would have been able to use the mud which comprises the banks of the river, banks which are exposed at each low tide.

So much for history! The reality is that the Pottery now imports its clay from elsewhere and leaves the swathes of dank, sticky, unattractive mud; so that’s what I’ve photographed today.

Toni did overtime this morning so I stopped on the way back from his work (after the obligatory visit to Tesco) to snatch a few shots from the bridge over the river. Parking in the entrance to the permanently closed wildfowl park and walking past the relentlessly pounding traffic, the sight of the river was a strange contrast to the activity behind me. There was a sort of tranquillity about the scene which, in its unlovely starkness, had a sort of otherworldly feel to it. When I took up position there was a distant heron standing on the edge of the mud flats and forming a perfect profile against the slab like river. Needless to say, it moved as soon as I switched the camera on!

I moved from colour (what little there was) to black and white to try and emphasise the strong contrasts between the elements in this river bank scene, but, of the fifty plus shots, most of the end results were disappointing not only through the difficulty of getting a clear enough definition of the textures in the river, but also in gaining a coherent balance between the linear and non linear aspects of the ‘ground’ and the water.

Of the six shots I have selected only two are in colour (and one of those is almost monochrome) while the others might have benefited from using ‘real’ black and white photography rather than its digital equivalent. See what you think.

On the culinary front the abondigas were a success, but I think that the sauce could have been more liquid. Toni had demanded ten meat balls for him before the meal and, with the team work of Carmen and me he was able to have his quota and some left over!

The patatas bravas were cooked with loving care and the making of the aioli from scratch (with milk!) never fails to impress.

This evening it is paella, which we are about to start. My favourite.

Well, we've eaten it; to be a little more truthful I have eaten the major part of it. How anyone can not love paella is beyond my individual comprehension. What is there not to like in it? A winning combination of rice, meat, fish and veg - how can it go wrong? This evening it didn't. And I wolfed down the results!

Challenges abound!

Two challenges today: will the abondigas taste reasonable and can I match Aunt Bet in her re-reading? (Not to mention the production of the obligatory photograph in the pouring rain!)

I have discovered that Spanish meat balls are very labour intensive and, with the extent of the chopping that I have done it is little short of miraculous that my fingers are still intact. For this meal I have chopped garlic, aubergines, red peppers, parsley and courgettes all of which have been reduced to a most satisfactory fried pulpy mass in the best traditions of the Iberian Peninsular! We have made an industrial quantity of meat balls and I will be interested to see how many remain at the end of the evening.

I will watch carefully to observe the secrets of Carmen’s recipe for Patatas Bravas. I have been astonished by the wide variety of dishes which seem to lurk under the general heading of Patatas Bravas from the fried diced potatoes from the ludicrous tapas bar in Cardiff Bay to the Rolls Royce of tapas found in the seemingly never closed restaurant in Barcelona. The sauce which accompanies the tapa has varied in piquancy from the totally bland to the tongue burningly assertive – admittedly the last was made by my good self after a more than usually vigorous judder with the Tabasco bottle! We shall see.

The second challenge is the response to the task that Aunt Bet has set herself: the complete re-reading of the works of Dickens. As she said, the only thing that was keeping her back was the assertion by one of her friends who said that he would read the Bible from front to back and died before he completed the feat. Aunt Bet is made of firmer stuff than that and will survive to read the letters and the Lesser Tales and go on to the entire oeuvres of Dickens’ contemporaries starting with Wilkie Collins! The Challenge will be to match her, book for book.

When deciding to read the Complete Works there is a necessity for a Reading Strategy to be put in place so that the whole enterprise can have a structure and form. I asked Aunt Bet how she would approach the task. I had considered various ways of doing it. The historical approach using chronology is a time honoured way of experiencing the developing technique of a writer and one I thought would appeal to her.

The next method I had considered was to take the Major Novels and read those first. The problem here is, of course, which of the novels you regard as major, and then which order you read them in. ‘Great Expectations’ would have to be in the top five and ‘Martin Chuzzelwit’ would not make it into the top ten, but which other four novels would you put into the Big Five? ‘Bleak House’ would have to be there, and ‘David Copperfield’ too, but ‘Oliver Twist’? What about ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Pickwick Papers’? And is ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ anything more than an unfinished novelty? Then there is the Marxists’ favourite ‘Hard Times’ and the truly disturbing (on so many) ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. And what about the ones that I have left out? Some people I am sure will say that ‘Our Mutual Friend’ and ‘Dombey and son’ are masterpieces. And what about ‘Barnaby Rudge’? and ‘The Old Curiosity House’ and ‘Little Dorrit’? You are on a hiding to nothing in trying to rank the novels.

Perhaps the simplest way of reading them is starting with your favourite novel and working your way downwards. So, by this method, you would start with ‘Great Expectations’ and then go on to ‘Bleak House’ and ‘David Copperfield’ then ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and . . . I don’t like doing it this way because, now I’ve put ‘Bleak House’ second, I’m not sure that I can justify it to myself and I’ve always had doubts about the sub-plot of Mrs Joe and Orlick in ‘Great Expectations’ so its prime position is not always assured.

So why not fall back on the tried and proved method of re-reading what is to hand and then worrying about what to read next.

Or my personal favourite: go down town, enter a book shop, find a really well printed copy of any novel and start there and then buy the rest!

Aunt Bet said that she was going to start with what Dickens novels she had lying around (though she did tell me that she had given so many of them away to family and friends that there had to be another plan to supplement this initial idea) and she did speak about going to her local bookshop! Aunt Bet is another firm believer in the Ruskin dictum, “If a book is worth reading, it’s worth buying.” My mother always had a feeling of warm hatred for Ruskin as I frequently trotted out this quotation when justifying yet another literary purchase to add to the claustrophobic construction of shelves that constituted the ‘library’ that had taken over my bedroom.

Which method have I decided upon? I think that I will start with the novel that was dickens’ major breakthrough in mass popularity and one that I am still not convinced that I have read all the way through. My confusion is based on the fact that I quote the novel enough and I have memories of whole chunks of the novel: the great scenes of the election, for example and the character of Sam. But have I read the whole thing through from start to finish? So, it’s purchase of ‘The Pickwick Papers’ tomorrow, immediately after I sign on!

Such a life of incident and neat juxtaposition.

To shop is to be!

I suppose that it had to happen: Pandora always has to open the box. She is never content with life as it is; always thinking of what has been unfairly hidden or forbidden.

Not content with taking ordinary photographs I have, like so many others before me, now discovered the ‘effects’ pallet on the photo program I am using. You see the results. I must admit that I am rather taken with them: the things you can do with a cyclamen and a rose. May I be forgiven!

I think that I will keep my experiments hidden from now on, at least until the techniques dangled before me like exotic carrots have lost some of their tempting sensual allure and have become something useful and rather ordinary. At least I am still taking photographs so the attempt to improve my technique is on going!

The obligatory visit to McArthur Glen when any member of the family from Terrassa visits Cardiff went well, with 66% of the shoppers purchasing something and only the shopaphobe Toni returning empty handed.

The shopping frenzy which accompanies the lead up to Christmas has obviously begun with ranks of children demanding ever more expensive toys as their god given right and parents and other adults looking more harassed and impoverished as they stare with stony horror at the goodies all too visible for the potential acquisition by the hordes of budding capitalists.

Christmas is obviously going the same way as Halloween with the increasingly vulgar accretion of electrical impedimenta as a necessary adjunct to the only tolerable celebration by every family in the land. More and more artificial box trees with flashing lights; waving Santas looking malevolent and distinctly shady; nodding reindeer looking as Dickens described oil pumps, like elephants in a state of melancholy madness; black Christmas trees with black decorations and black tinsel (surely an oxymoron?); Christmas scenes of revolting sentimentality and questionable spirituality. The thrust of this year’s impulse to buy seems to be emphasising the outside of the house even more than the inside. Inflatable creatures with integral lighting at vast cost are now de rigueur for every house with the capability to harbour a gleamingly horrific representation of some aspect of Christmas card reality that stands for the Festive Season in the American Mind.

I like cheerful vulgarity at Christmas time; the more decorous attempts to make the Christmas Tree a fashion accessory in carefully calculated and tastefully colour themed displays I find more at home in the shop front than the front room of a home. I don’t want to feel that Christmas is the sort of festivity which can be tamed to fit the design fascism which dictates some modern life interiors. Christmas is the Christianisation of a much older pagan festival which emphasised disorder and useful chaos rather than the decorous (if homely) birth of the religious founder. It should be more to do with raucous parties; inappropriate behaviour; gratuitous purchases and nary a thought for the morrow. In British terms, that’s not a bad description of most people’s experience of the time of the year.

It is also the time of the year when restaurants can begin to fleece their patrons by giving them basically the same that they have been used to for the previous eleven months, but add a 50 – 100% surcharge on the meals that they can enjoy in the goodwill season which lasts until Christmas and the New Year. I will have to moderate my comments on this avaricious, rapacious and cynical behaviour until I can compare it with what I am going to experience in Spain (Catalonia) this Christmas. We will see if the difference in value for money deserves a whole rant to itself!

The meal we had this lunch time was in a Harvester. There are those who will say that if you choose to eat in a restaurant which barely deserves the name then you should leave your critical apparatus at the door and just sit down and accept what you are given.

Why should we? The Harvester chain has gained its reputation by providing a basic menu of limited choices of guaranteed quality throughout the country. Let’s take it step by step. Firstly we found it difficult to find a table in the restaurant, in spite of the time (which was late) because they were packed with shoppers wanting a cheapish meal which they could eat. The success of such places is obvious and perhaps deserved: but only in the sense that every country gets the culinary service that it deserves.

Take my meal. The salad (a feature of the Harvester chain) was uninspiring to the point of almost literal invisibility. The choice of salad items was limited with a rather desultory service to replace the gapingly empty spaces. The items themselves were insipid with the beetroot being a cubed masterpiece of fatuity in flavour. My main course was grilled tuna with a spicy tomato sauced and some sort of Cajun (?) rice. The tuna was overcooked and the vapid rice was uneventfully graced by wrinkled peas and other detritus. It was edible but a disgrace. Roll on Catalonia when the menu del dia will be something to consume not to condemn!

Tomorrow Carmen will show me how to prepare her own version of meat balls. I will be the diligent student and look forward to a delicious repast, when my belief in the redeeming quality of food will be restored!

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party!

A day has slipped by without my authoritative and opinionated voice shaping the time passing! I expect we can all live with that!

The day was taken up with some of the preparations for Paul’s 40th birthday party: it’s amazing how time greedy chopped salads can be! The event in the evening justified all of the effort (mainly from Paul Squared) and there was the usual mass of food left over, the typical result of a sudden fear that everything will have been consumed in the first five minutes and people will stagger home at the end of the evening gaunt and underfed to drop of malnutrition in front of their homes!

The only real reason that people would have fallen in front of their doors would have been because of the cost of booze in the Political Party Club in which we were having the festivities. (I simply cannot bring myself to name the Party because of deeply ingrained hatred and a cheerfully unforgiving condemnatory attitude towards a certain woman Prime Minister.) Indeed I think the refreshingly unhorrific price of the drink may be the real reason that the Party has any votes at all in each succeeding general election in this constituency when, for the umpteenth year in succession, they lose.

The music in the party was well judged by age group as, not only did I recognise the tunes but, wonder of wonders, also knew some of the lyrics: they must have been really old! Lucy was her usual manic self and whipped up other people to a version of the Dancing Frenzy that, like the dancing plague swept Europe in the Middle Ages after the ravages of The Black Death had just died down. The dance (both then and last night) was characterized by wild leaping, furious screaming and foaming at the mouth, which gave to the individuals affected all the appearance of insanity. I have photographs: all the proof that I need to apply the remedies which were used at the time from swathing in tight bandages to physical abuse!

With the wonders of the Internet it is possible (as I have found) to have one’s slightest and most whimsical similes given profound depth by finding a suitable site to extend and develop one’s knowledge. If you don’t believe me then try clicking on the following and read on! http://www.history-world.org/Dancing%20In%20The%20Middle%20Ages.htm

As I read this short account I was reminded of one of my favourite books in my history courses in university: The Black Death by Philip Ziegler – one of the most enjoyable reads about mass destruction that I have come across since I first lisped my childish way through the more bloodthirsty books of the unreformed first part in that blood drenched book openly recommended to the impressionable young called The Bible.

The dancing aside the most memorable moments concerned the arrival of the ‘Cardiff City Bluebirds Cake’ and its visual presentation as a post-modern ironic comment on the sexual ambiguity of football in a society where the macho quality of male sexuality is in hiatus.

The two tiers of the cake represented not only the hierarchical nature of the leagues and competition within the game but also was a playful comment on the seating areas within the stadium commonly referred to as tiers.

The circular nature of the cake was an echo of the centre circle on the playing field, while the circularity was reflected in the true roundness of the balls which ringed the two tiers; the latter items also relating to male sexuality with their monochromatic colouring – black and white – relating strongly to the concept of ying and yang.

The clear symbolic nature of the convoluted erectile array of candles around the cake needs no further comment from me.

The tip of this upwardly thrusting cake was decked with a string of silver stars reflecting the yearning for celebrity within a galaxy of luminaries while the glittering restraining wire, emphasised the interconnectivity of human aspiration which, while spiralling ever upward, is yet restrained by the essentially grounded nature of humanity. It is a visual representation of the Promethean Myth: ideas free and soaring, yet the reality bound in the quotidian concerns of life.

The witty use of feathers on the top of the cake represented the clouds, not only of unknowing (see also Saint Teresa and Thomas a Kempis) in a spiritual sense but also of the inchoate, of unrealised possibility. Their feathery lightness was the aspirational target (or goal) of the small birds which flew on the whiteness (a combination of all colour) their blueness representing preciousness (ultramarine – the most expensive pigment in painting) and sanctity (the colour of the dress of The Virgin Mary.) They also served to emphasise by their wispiness a certain androgyny and campness which is concomitant with the action of a football game with the obvious breaking down of barriers in male behaviour by the constant kissing and embracing which accompanies any achievement on the pitch.

The lighting of the cake was a coup de theatre which spotlighted it as in the stadium; emphasised the self destructive nature of the life of a sportsman - brief and bright and focused attention on the moment, soon to pass.

As the flames from the candles reached upwards the full mythic potential of this remarkable cake reached its apotheosis: the burning of the feathers forcibly reminded the audience yet again of the Prometheus stealing fire for the benefit of mankind, yet the singeing of the feathers reminded us of the woeful fate of Icarus who flew too close to the sun.

A cake with, I’m sure you will agree with a strong didactic theme and much for Paul to consider as he translates the messages cooked into his cake and literally inwardly digests their import. A true message in marzipan!

Rather defiantly I took a photo to keep up the photographic theme, although it has to be said that, yet again, I did not go more than two paces from my door to take it.

I will have to call my photos ‘Pictures from a Small World’!

Way of Seeing

The end of the Photographic Week and I feel that I should be enumerating the lessons learned, the techniques honed and the boundaries broken. Well, I’m not sure that I can. I have been looking at things in a fairly maniacal way as everything that has come within my ambit has magically transformed itself into possible material for a picture: talk about John Berger, a Way of Seeing has almost become a Way of Life! But not quite. The real test will be to see (quite literally) if I continue to take photographs; and I deem them worthy of visibility! We shall see.

Today was notable for my almost suffering an attack of Boots Enclosure Syndrome. This is a syndrome which is isolated to Boots the Chemist in Cardiff. It comprises a feeling of heat followed by an overwhelming desire to get out of the store, if necessary though people and any other obstructions. The more prosaic among you would probably say this is just a simple case of common or garden claustrophobia. But, I should point out that this only occurs in the run up to Christmas.

When I was a very small child, in the days when you could park legally in the small streets behind M&S (in the same days that it usually had a much longer name) and usually find a parking space, I used to hate the store. I remember that I couldn’t see over the counters and it was always too bright and there was nothing engaging for me in the store. It was also the place when, bored and tired, I traipsed after my dad, staring without interest at the back of his trousers which was my level of vision. Up around and down I went with the wooden walls of the counters blocking all sight on both sides and moving material the only point of interest. When the material moved, I moved; when it stopped, I stopped. After some time of this labyrinthine wandering had passed and the material had stopped and so had I, the inhabitant of the trousers looked down at me at the same time as I looked up – and it wasn’t my dad. I can still remember the sense of utter isolation and betrayal mixed with guilt: a useful melange of emotions which I have experienced many times since, but for somewhat different reasons in somewhat different circumstances!

I never had good memories of M&S but sort of grew up with it as a datum point in my existence. My mothers dream was to wake up one morning and find a branch of M&S magically opening in the parade of shops at the top of our road or to find herself locked in the store with all the lights on at night. I never did find out if this fantasy was about having the store all to herself of going on an orgy of taking whatever took her fancy.

Talking of taking: there was once a power cut in the centre of Cardiff where a local mains transformer or something blew up and Howells Store was plunged into darkness. This would not have fazed my mother for a moment as she had a sort of sixth sense when it came to navigating in, through and around shops in the city; no, it was the reaction of those people who found themselves in the store and in total moral vacuity. Apparently, when the darkness descended people just grabbed whatever was around them and stuffed it in all hiding places around their person. The staff in Howells had to station themselves at all the exits and check people as they left and (I hope) gently take back the property ‘stolen’. People who were there said that the stuff taken had nothing to do with what people actually wanted; it was just the proximity which was the operative factor. So one man was found with pockets filled with ladies knickers, and what, after all, would any man want with ladies knickers?

Boots the Chemists, however, was a different matter. Boots was filled with interesting and desirable things, like paper clips and drawing pins. For years I thought that I had a guilty obsession with stationery until I discovered that it is quite common for kids to amass quantities of ink cartridges, or staples or thin leads for propelling pencils. And then, miser like, let them trickle through fingers, without ever find a use for them. Yes you would use things like ink cartridges, but never in the quantity which you possessed. That was the thing: you had a surplus; you could become an emperor in the number of paper clips that you owned, fabulously wealthy, rich beyond the dream of Croesus – as long as the unit of currency in your state was the paperclip or the staple. Boots was the place which had an Ali Baba treasury of small things: small things sold in large quantities. You could buy 100 rubber bands for next to nothing; and they were in different colours and different lengths; useful and sensible and so many of them! I still feel quite weak when I remember going from counter to counter all of which were packed with things that I could afford and by spending six pence I would have dozens of whatever it was: from reinforcing rings for the holes in file paper to coloured pencils which would never actually be used but would disappear through constant shaving to keep the point sharp and ready for the use it would never have.

So, why in a store which has formed the man who is writing now do I have these almost overwhelming impulses to get the hell out of there? The store has changed: the muted lighting has given way to the clarity of M&S intensity; the homely, rattling and pliable floorboards have been replaced by harsh, unyielding composite flooring, and the acres of stationery have been replaced by the garish shoddy of any old store – and the ceilings are lower and the heat higher and it’s just plain sense to get out of there when those automata Christmas shoppers have that single minded look in their unseeing eyes!

To finish this week of photos I will leave you with a final image. This one was found well within the two minute limit of my home that I set myself (the swans were stretching that limit a tad, but not that much on an empty road!) but, with this image I have to keep reminding myself what it represents!

I think it looks quite dramatic and pleasing; but do you know what it is?

I look forward to your guesses.

Waiting and waiting

How do you stand when you are waiting for a person at an airport?

Bristol airport, very carefully, doesn’t provide seats at the ‘arrivals’ gates, so you have to stand and wait. There are possibilities: there is a cylindrical air conditioning unit of perforated metal anchored to the floor and available for leaning against; there is a rail blocking waiting persons from entering the ‘arrivals’ gates, which had the added advantage of being leanable and also providing a foot rest at the same time; there are walls for slouching against; a WHSmith spending the time (founding an expensive tradition) by choosing and then buying books while you are waiting, and, of course, there is the coffee shop. Which has chairs. For the sitting upon. But coffee in airports is infamously, ruinously, disgracefully expensive. How much is one prepared to pay for a chair? Surely not the price of a mildly flavoured paper cup full of hot water? There is an alternative: just sit there.

Now you have to understand that British people (my sort of people) do not actually like getting something for nothing. Generations of poorly understood versions of the Puritan Work Ethic have ingrained themselves in the soul of the ordinary person and, in spite of the fact that we know that we are being ripped off by commercial organizations on a fairly constant basis; we do not like to take without ‘justification’. Or perhaps it is more that we don’t like to be seen to be taking without justification.

Which explains why I sat at a table in the coffee shop which had two empty coffee mugs on it; thus allowing me to sit and read my recently purchased book with something approaching impunity, though, god knows I must have looked pretty shady to the totally bored looking girl, who was squirting a spray in a desultory sort of fashion in a generalised direction of the top of the table surfaces. If she had registered her surroundings in any analytical way I might have been in some 'danger', but she didn't, so that was OK. I only sat there until the notice board stated that the plane from Barcelona had landed, so that was the signal for me to move and get nearer to the arrivals gate.

This is where the new tradition of always buying a book whenever I was in an airport came to the fore and allowed me to develop a new technique: leaning and reading at the same time and therefore not having to have the trauma of standing and waiting trying to look intelligent by reading and re-reading the arrivals and departures boards. The real problem is you have to look at something and there isn’t anything there to look at; apart from the closed door of the arrivals; you’re looking so fixedly at the door that anyone appearing from the other side is momentarily taken aback by the stare of expectation that they know that they cannot fulfil. It’s always nice to come home from holiday and the first feeling you have as you emerge back into the world of normality is one of inadequacy. But that’s what holidays are all about: disrupting your sense of ordinariness.

I suppose that I ought to mention something about the mismatch between the ‘narrative’ and the ‘illustration’.

Cardiff has built a new park by the side of the River Rumney: a sort of wetlands reserve. It has a gate with an ornamental sort of arch on which metallic outlines of birds are attached. It has a car park and picnic tables. It also has monolithic stones obstructing the entrance which is further obstructed by bolted gates. I’m not sure that the meaning of the word by the Cardiff Parks Department has exactly the same connotations as it does for me. You also have to bear in mind that we do not have the best opinion of the Department because of the persistent awarding of Second Prize for the garden when, quite clearly, it was worthy of more! Perhaps.

Anyway, there is a way into the park and this morning that is where I went. There was no one else and, apart from the traffic thundering by on three sides it was quiet. The only inhabitants in the park were the birds who, as soon as I started taking photographs began to converge on me. Luckily I remembered reading a book by Jacques Cousteau of his filming of a shark which was making a determined way towards him. He carried on filming and when the shark was upon him he hit it on the nose with his camera. Exactly the same thing happened to me with the phalanx of swans who made their way towards me. I kept on taking photographs just like Cousteau; the only thing that was different was that the swans turned away of their own accord and I didn’t have to attack them with my Casio! Lucky swans.

Tomorrow I intend to go even further afield.

Be afraid. Be very afraid!

Captured Colour

In spite of my antipathy towards the trappings of the monarchical system which holds this sad old country in its upper class grasp, I feel that I am now in with a shout for a deserved gong. There are some things which you achieve which are worthy of some sort of national recognition; by the sheer, breathtaking strength of character; the single minded dedication; the mould breaking behaviour and outright star quality you show that you are above the common herd. This quality can be shown in the most mundane surroundings, during the most ordinary activities. Take, for example, the supermarket.

Up with the lark (yet again) and, on the return trip, calling into Tesco for the baguette. As usual, I was too early for the early bread so had to made do with the much more solid and expensive organic alternative. And this is where the achievement happened. Although it is rare, you can sometimes make a light killing by taking some of the ‘bargains’ the Tesco put on their clearance shelves; you therefore need to take a trolley so that your ‘bargains’ will not suffer further deterioration and look like something scavenged from the waste bins. There were none. Nothing at all. Empty shelves. Wait for it. Almost there.

So, all I had in my trolley was one loaf; looking, as I am sure the evil geniuses in Tesco had planned, as lonely as a Philip Glass enthusiast in a Puccini Convention. Keep with me; we’re getting nearer to an explanation.

We’re there! This is where the action of simple dignity took place. I walked out of Tesco with only a loaf of bread in my trolley; ignoring stares of bank disbelief on shocked faces; past trolleys looking more like the monolithic blocks being taken by oppressed slaves to a modern pyramid; past them all, with a loaf of bread. Not something my mother could have done: she would have been “ashamed” to have denied her buying gene to the extent of only finding a loaf of bread to buy! But I did it! I’d like a knighthood please.

The past few days have been misty: that damp mist which gets straight though clothing to the very marrow of your bones. The quality of light is depressing too. The hell with the so called ‘soft’ days of the Irish; they are depressing but, in spite of this, or more likely, because of it, I used the Fifth Day of the Photographic Odyssey to find something of bright colour to enliven things.

When I first went to Turkey and in spite of my almost complete lack of artistic ability, I drew something every day that I was on holiday. I’d like to say that three weeks of practise meant that at the end of the time I produced effortless sketches which used line in new and exciting ways. But I didn’t. What I did do was look more closely at things like monumental guns, tasteless marble veneer memorials, tennis club chairs and a bottle of aftersun to ensure that I made a version of what I was looking at which bore some sort of resemblance to the object observed. I don’t think I had ever ‘looked’ so intently at anything on holiday before (even on revealing beaches, because, remember, I probably had my glasses off!) I am finding with the effort to produce photographs each day that I am reliving that intensity of observation.

It was good to find a defiantly coloured plant to photograph, especially as I had previously thought that it was a weed, and I had only allowed it to continue to grow in the past two months because the greenery was so vigorous and comely! Other shots I took were similar to others taken earlier so I discarded them and concentrated on the non growing elements in the garden.

I think the shot of the trowels is somewhat sinister, while the other shots are intriguing, though I’m not sure about their success. The portfolio is growing and I’ve taken the ultimate step and have taken one photo to be enlarged and framed. It is supposedly for a present, but time will tell.

Two books read this morning. The first was by Tom Baker (yes, that Tom Baker) called “The Boy Who Kicked Pigs”. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable read which I thoroughly enjoyed. It is ostensibly a children’s book, though there are telling moments which show that Baer is fully aware that adults will be reading it. Knowing the man, it is very easy to imagine his voice reading the words and there is an oral quality to the writing which gives it an added liveliness. It is formulaic, and it would never have existed without the disturbing quality which has been added to children’s writing by the enjoyably distasteful book by Roald Dahl. I thoroughly recommend it and the drawings by David Roberts are grisly and a more than adequate complement to the narrative.

The other book was an impulse buy when looking for cds by Mecano: “Kant’s Very Large Morality Handbook” - the title sells it doesn’t it? Ironically it is quite small and even so the extracts from Kant’s philosophy are gnomic, at least to me. Far more understandable are the comments by the editor, Richard Osborne, throughout. There are also pictures (which take up space) and large hand drawn titles (which make it all seem trendy) and quotations by other philosophers (which are often funny) - so, all in all a good buy.

Tomorrow Toni’s mum arrives and our hope is that she will demand to be tied to the kitchen to provide us with full examples of her expertise in Catalan Cuisine.

I shall eat for Wales!

Mellow musings

For a frustrated pyromaniac like me, the fact that the actual day of November the 5th was a Sunday and therefore people set off their fireworks on the Saturday, thus creating a two day Guy Fawkes Night spectacle was a Good Thing. With the house perched as it is we have a panoramic view of the whole of the south of Cardiff and surrounding hilly estates and can merrily count up the millions of pounds launched into the sky with cheerfully detached enjoyment. Also, you might think, a golden opportunity for Day Three of the Photographic Experiment to include spectacular bursts of fiery colour. Well, you will have to judge for yourselves. Never mind, there’s always next year and, if I’m lucky, the Christmas and New Year Celebrations in Catalonia!

Half term has ended and the real hard slog towards Christmas has begun. The autumn term should be one of the most rewarding in the school year; this is the term when the back of the year’s work has to be broken if you are not to spend the rest of the year trying to catch up. It is the term when, the pupils still being relatively fresh, they can gobble up some of the educational dainties spread before them with visible results!

It is also the term, however, of started theory driven educational initiatives spawned out of fear of Inspectors; coursework; fine tuning of, or sometimes wholesale reworking of, specifications; coursework; absence of colleagues through illness and the Grim Reaper; coursework; non arrival of oft promised teaching material and resources; coursework; the arrival of new colleagues and the sickening knowledge that there will be two more terms to go after this one before the sort of holiday in which you can really recuperate! Not something I miss.

Though in an abstract sort of way I do miss teaching. That is the actual standing up in front of a class sort of teaching; not the sort that needs complex administration! Once or twice in the past few months I have found myself in the sort of situation when somebody needs to say something to get something done; and I open my mouth and inside my head I can hear the Old Teacher still alive and kicking. There is the automatic saying of something three times before you believe that anyone has understood anything; the note of authority wrapped in a tinge of egalitarianism; the Teacher Look; the . . . the other things that make teaching such a life changer and a character developer!

Talking of developing characters, I listened with triumphant complacency to the news report that recounted the results of a survey which noted that British teenagers are the worst behaved in Europe. Such news must be a godsend to the tabloid press and a quarter of a million teachers!

I shudder to think what The Sun and, more particularly, the obnoxious Daily Mail made of such rich pickings. Ugh!

I was more interested in thinking about what the pundits (self styled) made of it all, especially in their analysis of the possible reasons for our lowly position. (Sorry Daily Mail not 'innate evil' in all young people under the age of twenty five.)

Many concentrated on the finding that young people in Britain tend to spend much more time with their own age group than with their parents or other adults. The modern habit of ‘grazing’ for food; the lack of family meals and the lack of adult organised ‘activities’ were all cited as part of the reason together with the lack of a town square.

Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I cannot recall frolicking at the feet of my parents as they sipped a glass of wine in one of the many boulevard cafes of Whitchurch Road, watching the evening promenade along Dogfield Street with the distant sound of the fountains gushing heavenwards in the town square of Cathays! And I don’t recall my parents recounting such idyllic scenes in the Blaengwynfi, Mountain Ash or Maesteg of their childhoods and adolescence! This has never happened in these damp and gloomy climes. We must surely look elsewhere for the real reasons.

Taking the age of the youngest teenager today and adding to it the likely age of a young parent we get a figure of something like thirty five. That would give us the date of about 1970 for the birth of the parents. What was happening in 1970? Heath became Prime Minister and oversaw a period of something close to economic chaos, not made much better by the Labour Government which followed him and, by the time our young parents to be were nine years old, and beginning to take an interest in the world around them, they were citizens of a country which had as its Prime Minister Margaret Hilda Thatcher and the start of eighteen years of Conservative rule.

I used to blame Thatcher for most things that went wrong, and lots of times I still do, but the one unforgivable element in her attitude was to create generations of self seeking what-can-I-get-out-of-it children; as a head teacher is responsible for the ethos of the school, so a prime minister is responsible for the general attitude of a country profile, and her deep selfishness transmitted itself to young minds. Those corrupted youngsters are the parents of the worst teenagers in Europe today.

It’s worth quoting what are perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s most famous quote and one which has been taken as the epitaph for the eighties, “there is no such thing as society.” The quotation in full is taken from an interview with Woman magazine in October 1987.
"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

Like Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech there is, surprisingly, much with which I agree: but only if you take the speech as a whole and think hard about the philosophy behind the words. A politician knows that a whole speech is not a sound bite and they are perfectly capable of reading the public mood and providing the titbit that the media likes while hiding behind the casuistry of the excuse, ‘but I didn’t say just that you have to read all of it.’ Enoch was a wrong-headed rabble rouser and Thatcher revealed her true sentiments in this speech, not in her theoretical explanation, but rather in the popular reading which urged those 'with' to realise that those 'without' were coming to take everything they had. We should be so lucky in this country! Revolution? What revolution?

So, our young parents will have come to maturity and childbearing hearing, subliminally, the banned verse of ‘All things bright and beautiful’ ringing in their ears:

The rich man at his table,
The poor man at his gate;
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Hardly surprising that their progeny is not the most socially conscious generation that this country has produced.

Generalisations are dangerous and tempting!

I know that this analysis (if it deserves that appellation) is simplistic in the extreme but, for a man with a Margaret Thatcher candle, waiting for the obsequies to start before ignition, it has a sort of ‘rightness’ to it.

A Brown Study

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and Sigri estate coffee from Papua New Guinea and central heating: an autumn to savour. Looking at frost is so much more pleasant when you see it through double glazing.

It’s rather sad looking at the more fleshy plants in the garden some of which have now been reduced by an icy kiss to a rather depressing mush leaving the remnants looking like a series of gaunt reminders of vegetation blasted by war in no-man’s-land in a canvas by Nash. In the midst of this killing coldness the chrysanthemums are thriving, indeed the weather seems to have brought on a second growth and the two plants provide the only real splashes of colour in the garden. Amazingly, a lone snapdragon has chosen this time to burst into a restrained bloom, with autumn pansies seemingly oblivious to the weather reminding one, if you want to continue the First World War analogy, of Brave Little Belgium! There is one rose left in the garden dying decorously and held together by the frost. (See yesterday’s pictures.)

The roses in today’s photos come courtesy of Tesco. I did not actually step outside the house to take any of the pictures today: so much for the ‘wandering further afield’ assurance of yesterday!

The news from Iraq is depressing if predictable. Saddam has been sentenced to death. Saddam used chemical weapons on his own people; he was instrumental in the death and torture of countless others and, in common with other dictators had execrable taste. And now he is going to be legally murdered. The moral questions around this trial are the questions that we shy away from. We always behave as if we were right in the western world. And let’s face it, to a large extent I think we are. We pay at least lip service to fundamental human rights which are enshrined in the UN Charter; however cynical we may be about our institutions they do give us a level of protection which is only a fond dream in the countries around Iraq.
The response to the death penalty is surely a litmus paper test of the degree of civilization of a country. I do not pretend for a moment that if any one I love were to be harmed then I wouldn’t want to kill the perpetrator myself: but laws are put in place to limit my actions when logical response is lost in passion. The desire for the ultimate revenge is understandable, but can never be justified; and please, don’t trot out the old ‘What would you do if you could go back in time and take a pot shot at Hitler’ argument. I am not a devout believer in the Great Man of History Theory where the forces of historical change are concentrated in the hands of one person who directs the flow of history rather than acts within in.

I can see many arguments for the death of Saddam but none of which do I find convincing. So I sit in my comfortable living room looking out at my garden, safe in the country with the fourth largest economy in the world, governed by a parliamentary democracy which, in one form or another has been around for a very long time and as I sit here, I pontificate about what country, whose history is a shameful catalogue of cynical intervention by western powers; racked by a bloody sectarian civil war after a recent history composed of bloody wars and invasions, should do. Their ‘democracy’ is, to put it mildly, fledgling and their understanding and belief in the institutions we take for granted is limited. But how far should the, admittedly horrific, situation be allowed to dictate (ha!) their actions? Remember the Diplock Courts; the suspension of habeas corpus; policemen with guns; the suspension of mobile phone lines after the Tube Bombings; restrictions of movement – all the concomitant paraphernalia of tin pot regimes which have at some point in our recent past been part of our experience in this country too, as a, perhaps, justified response to terrorist action or its threat. Our fundamentally solid society can wobble with depressing ease at the slightest touch: what the situation and mind set is like in Iraq we can only guess at.

So does that justify legal murder? For me no; it never can. It’s a conviction which is close to a belief which seems to me to be necessary for our continuation as a society for which I can have any respect.
Should I expect a country in chaos to have the same convictions as I: yes, a thousand times, yes. It is only at times like these that the quality of the moral basis of a society is tested. If it fails now, when it needs to be strong, then the actions taken in the good and easy times are irrelevant – there are unlikely to be any.

Goodwill to All!

My cultural plan for the edification of my sophisticated reader has been stymied on Day Two of the Photographic Week by the refusal of the system to allow me to download photographs, so I will just have to struggle along with mere words.

I will try and download them later, thoughI’m damned if I am going to change this opening; so if you can see any photos in this writing, you will know that the system relented eventually and allowed this user to use it usefully.

Getting up so early certainly does give one a different perspective on life. I had completed the few quotidian tasks that I had set myself by 8.45 am and had a long, long tea break to look forward to!

As usual the disjointed snippets of news that wormed their way into my conscious mind while applying myself to the rigorous intellectual demands of gentle dental abrasion and epidermal laving meant that only a partial element of my natural ire was ignited by the honeyed tones of the Radio 4 announcer and, by the time I had stumbled downstairs to have a cup of coffee (“Not tea, it’s the weekend!”) the more wearisome elements of the world situation had resolved themselves into the burning question which took the form of trying to decided which Tesco biscuits I would buy on my way back from taking Toni to work.

The real trouble about entering Tosco’s at seven in the morning is that the night and early morning vultures have picked the ‘Reduced’ cabinet clean and the back room boys have not restocked the shelves with exotic bargains of foods you never buy and which are, consequently, hard to resist. Leaving the shop with a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk seems to be spitting directly at the whole ethos that has made Britain Great and kept the people poor!

Another problem associated with browsing through the deserted aisles in the early morning is that it does nothing to prepare you for the full horrors of the ‘School Out Shop On’ experience if you forget your schedule and make inappropriate visits to the store: mothers, children and other humans fill your path and your ears with their very tangible presence. It is at times like this that you remember old novels which frequently described characters who ‘laid about them with riding crops’ with efficiency and determination clearing paths though protesting humanity to get to their rightful destinations. Or perhaps it’s just me who noticed those incidents? Further, not fully realising that it was always the baddies who behaved like that and not the clean cut heroes and heroines. Well, I’ve always had a grudging admiration for Satan and ‘Paradise Lost’ and Iago in ‘Othello.’

In the on going battle between Owner and Customer Tesco has taken another psychological step against the natural cynicism of the purchaser: they have taken to Odd Price Labelling. This consists in marking the price of an article as £3.47 or at some things which are marked at 71p. What is the twisted logic behind this? Have people finally realised that £4.99 is, in fact, only a single penny short of a fiver? Have they (we) finally realised that in spite of the ninety-nine part of the cost we still respond to the price as being substantially less than five because the first digit is a four? Surely not! I’m taking in by it all the time and I have taught recognition of this technique as part of the necessary analysis to tackle Paper II in English GCSE to Year 10 pupils.

Obviously knowing what retailers do does not make you immune from falling for the techniques. So, if the old 99 trick still works, why change to 47 or 71? There must be deeper and more sinister reasons. Let’s get the positive spin out of the way first: we can, I take it, dismiss the idea that this odd sum of pence is a result of cutting the price back to the lowest possible sum and when you can reasonably cut no further, that is the price you charge the consumer? Facile, childish and jejune.

We must look deeper. Surely this is another example of the double bluff: you think it is a cynical attempt to get you to believe that Tesco is a charitable institution; but if they were that cynical then they would be still at the Old 99 trick; but they aren’t so they must be being truthful and it is the cheapest they can do it; therefore you buy and are grateful.

Think about it: say Tesco could make something and make a profit and the cost came to £1.99; that price seems calculated, but, if you were to charge £2.23 then that price seems real and fair AND Tesco could make an extra 24p profit.

Now let’s get one thing straight. I am not for a moment saying that Tesco (or any other noble purveyor of comestibles) would, are or have been doing this; I just say it could be an explanation – and one which could get GCSE candidates a few extra marks if they were able to express this in cogent English in their English examination.

On the run up to Christmas when punters seem to lose any concept of sufficiency and act like hyper active consumer driven sheep on acid, believing that, if they don’t buy something immediately (and in bulk) it will disappear from the shelves and NEVER EVER be made again let alone stocked, the subtle gambits of canny shops like all supermarkets are directed towards tempting (no, forcing!) hapless punters to buy ever more surreal gifts for Christmas.

Gifts priced under the magic £5 limit are stretching even my fairly elastic credulity to breaking point. I know people who have never played, will never play and know no one who plays golf who scoop up composite golfing gifts (you know, the ones that look like golfing 'Lucky Bags' filled with artefacts made of plastic, metal, rubber, glass and cloth, looking like a particularly vicious form of Kim's Memory Game) from the shelves marked ‘Seasonal Presents’ with the jubilant exultation of Carter at the tomb of Tut!

“Wonderful things!” be damned; it’s incomprehensible rubbish that barely make it to Boxing Day and was probably thrown out with the packing paper on the previous day of mild family disputes and serious drinking.

As you can see, I am gearing myself up for the festive season: Peace and goodwill to all will be my motto.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

This picture is my favourite from the pick (pun intended) of the crop today. I have to admit that I did not actually go further than about ten steps from my front door for these, but I do promise to go a little further afield tomorrow, while still staying within the two minute radius!

Click!

What is the point of having slogged my way through a copy of Hogarth’s ‘Line of Beauty’ if the end result of the reading of this treatise on art is that I still cannot compose good photographs? Why is it that if Toni and I stand in the same position pointing our camera towards the same object at the same time with the same weather conditions, his photos always look better?

I traipse from world famous art gallery to National gallery emoting like fury in front of some of the most revered artistic endeavours that mankind has laboured to produce and still my photos look as though I had vaguely noticed a point of interest and had thrown the camera in its general direction hoping that serendipity would depress the button at the opportune time and take some sort of interesting image.

I suppose that it is a common conceit to believe that merely reading about something and passively regarding it will result in the triggering of some type of innate ability and, hey presto! You’re an expert!

In education you have a prime example of this: as everyone has been through the educational mill they assume that as clients (i.e. pupils from a previous generation) they have a perfect understanding of the modern demands of teaching and that they must share their incontrovertible understanding with the professionals whenever they meet. One could, of course, extend the examples to include doctors and patients; solicitors and paying victims; politicians and voters, not forgetting dogs and their owners.

We shouldn’t go overboard [captains and their passengers] about this; parents [adults and children] and everybody else should be concerned about education and take a view – the more passionate involvement the better, but do remember the professional point of view. The point of view of those practioners who actually are doing what others only talk about: they have a right to be respected. Teachers like doctors and lawyers do have access to a body of professional knowledge they have been tested on both theoretical and practical aspects of their work; they have earned the expectation of consideration in their professional lives.

I’m aware that I’m on thin ice here because the comparisons with doctors and lawyers and painters and architects get somewhat attenuated to the disadvantage of teachers. But, I will press on regardless.

Having your photograph taken and being given the result to look at doesn’t make you a photographer; yet, noticing how a good photographer goes about selecting a setting and a pose, how he adjusts the lighting and focus can lead to an increase in knowledge by the subject; while looking at great photographs and seeing (if only though visual repetition) how the framing of a successful photo works must have some sort of effect. So the observation of the whole professional experience of photos can lead to better efforts by the amateur. Should lead to better efforts. So why isn’t it working with me.

This morning was crisp and bright. As Toni was working overtime I had extra time to contemplate the wonders of nature without the intrusive presence of the rest of the population who were, god rot them, mostly still in bed. I made a decision. Without going more than two minutes away from my house I was going to take a series of photographs over the course of a week which would show that I was capable of producing visual images which reflected some sort of artistic appreciation of my immediate surroundings. With light frost covering a swathe of grass opposite the house and the ivy clad oaks standing stark and gaunt, how could I fail to find a subject suitable?

I have recently bought a new camera on the specious grounds that the screen on the back of my present camera is far too small. The camera I now have is a 10 million megapixel job with a screen which virtually covers the back of the machine. It also has a multitude of ‘helpful’ settings to ensure that the rankest amateur is able to take photographs of acceptable and obviously effortless interest.

So, the challenge is set. The camera is primed (well charged up) and the epic journeyings of not more than two minutes from the house have begun. The fact that the evidence of my efforts will be plain for all my reader to see is a sort of incentive for me to rise above the mediocrity that has characterised my previous efforts and produce something which will . . .

And it was at that point that my enthusiasm left me. The work, as they say, will have to speak for itself. You’ve seen it: does it speak? More tomorrow.

Cartier Bresson eat your heart out!

Peel me a grape!

One of the many pleasures in foreign travel is being able to glut yourself on what would be hothouse fruits in this country but which are available ‘cheap as chips’ in the country that you happen to be visiting.

I remember once incident in Istanbul during one of my perambulations consequent on getting lost.

(By the way, the ‘lost traveller system’ is a technique I heartily recommend as an excellent way of getting to know a part of a city and its inhabitants. People usually go out of their way to get you back to a hazily understood destination described in any language to hand. Even if they have absolutely no idea of where you want to go and are totally and unutterably foreign with nary a word of the Emperor of Languages, English, they will all have very decided opinions about which direction you should go. Helpfulness personified part of the great fellowship of humanity, and all that. Though, thinking about it, it could be, of course, that they merely want to get you out of their lives, but that is far too pessimistic a view of our fellow Johnnie foreigner for me to contemplate.)

Anyway, lost as I was; hungry and thirsty, but taking a keen interest in the colourful Turkish drivers taking no interest in the colour of the traffic lights, I decided that I would have to help the local economy and buy something from the street traders lining the thoroughfare. I decided, from the plethora of vegetation on offer to settle for grapes. By various facial grimaces and hand gestures the man weighed out a bunch of grapes, put them into a cone of brown paper and then held up the number of fingers for the total amount of lira that would complete this quaint interchange. It was at this point that I realised that the man who was smiling in anticipation of my cash was actually charging an exorbitant amount of money for the grapes. I was immediately furious: here was this man taking a poor tourist for a ride. But, I had been in Istanbul for two days, I was no greenhorn, I was a seasoned resident in the city, I was wise to the ways of wily street traders – and told him so in loud and fluent English. To which the man immediately replied in louder and more loquacious Turkish. This could have gone on for some time in the tradition of the best of all regulated discussions where what one side was saying was not only irrelevant to the development of the argument it was also, literally, incomprehensible. The contretemps was brought to an end by a polyglot passer-by who soothed both our tempers. I paid less and the trader scowled. I walked on eating my grapes with rather more vigour than was strictly necessary for a soft fruit, but secure that right had triumphed. No gullible fool I. No indeed! It was as I was walking and eating (a multi tasking feat which put me in touch with my feminine side) that I realised that the amount of money over which I had been in dispute was the British equivalent of 2p!

In my defence I did feel ashamed and I immediately set about forming a defence for my actions. (You’ll note that I didn’t return to the trader and give him the difference.) And eventually came to the conclusion that I had adopted the Turkish system of values and that, in Turkish terms the amount of lira was significant, even if it really wasn’t to me. It sounds a bit weak, doesn’t it? Well, it’s the best that I could do.

But that attitude is around today; best seen in petrol. Every driver needs petrol. No driver knows the cost of petrol. You ask anyone the cost of a litre of petrol and they will start flannelling and say something like, “Depends on where you go” and that is exactly my point. Drivers drive around for the best value, thus wasting the gain in the amount of time and petrol that they waste in their search.

For me (I buy my petrol from Tesco, ‘cos it’s easy) the nit picking analysis of best buy comes to the fore when I am buying water.

I think (I know) that the purchase of water in a country when the stuff that comes though the taps has been shown (by Which amongst others) time and time again to be of exceptional purity, is one of the most stupidly fatuous purchases you could possibly make. The fact that we buy French (French!) water makes me nearly speechless with the total follie de grandeur of it all. The further fact that some idiots actually buy Fijian water at a cost which places it on the same level as wine is surely a pathetic upper middle class attempt to ape the grandiloquent gesture of Queen Elizabeth dissolving a pearl in vinegar and drinking it. At least she thought that it was going to do something more than quench her thirst! Tesco gave me a choice of all the home countries to squander my money on. Which should it be? The rugged, heather infused peaty fluidity of Highland Scotland or the loquacious smoothness of the Emerald Isle, or could the well bred, spiky class of the English tempt? Surely I would pick the liquid essence of the sheep trod hills of my own country? Ballocks to the lot of it.

The only reason I buy water at all is because Toni insists on it. I therefore spent ten minutes debating which of the thieving organizations was going to take the least of my cash. Tesco of course, do not make that easy to work out. The usual trick of pricing the water using price per litre and well as price per 100 ml was well to the fore. To complicate things further they had a selection of special offers. Special offers on water! Just say it and you’ll see how stupid it sounds. It does actually drop from the sky, placing it in a different category say, from bread. Anyway, special offers which were on buying one and getting another at a different price; special offers of a simple reduction; special offers because other stores sell them at higher prices. It was a mathematical jungle, but I was determined to hack my way though the lianas of misinformation, confusion and deceit that Tesco uses to bewilder its customers and get to the cheapest. I did. I came away thinking that I had waged a war of sense against the cynical leer of capitalism and I had been victorious. But, rather like that younger version of myself eating grapes, I came away with a saving of 2p!

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Wild Drink is Raging!

‘Schadenfreude’ is one of those wonderful German words (or phrases) which sound to my ears like some sort of vaguely threatening expletives but which will, given the wilful nature of Germanic pronunciation, turn out to mean ‘candy floss’ or something equally innocuous.

The word sits comfortably with such English stealings as ‘Zeitgeist’, ‘Sturm und Drang’, ‘Gotterdammerung’ and ‘Angst’ as words heard, but rarely fully understood, when used in casual conversation. (Though what casual conversation would utilize that portentous vocabulary is difficult to envisage.)

They are words used for effect and as an attempt to arrest communication rather than facilitate it. Oh yes, I’ve just thought of another one, ‘Weltschmertz’ (roll it around the mouth!) – And I’ve also just thought: a casual conversation about Wagner would be able to justify (nay, would demand) the use of all those words with no effort whatsoever.

‘Schadenfreude’ however, was the one that rose unbidden to my mind today as I listened to a friend recount his drunken ‘conversation’ with a mutual acquaintance. He took, it appears, the opportunity to expatiate (at length) and enumerate (in detail) the failings of the stunned recipient of this tirade. A recipient, I might add, who had just provided him with dinner. It was a situation in which the onus of guilt fails squarely on one set of shoulders and one set of shoulders only. There is, at it were, one ‘baddie’ in this scenario, and one only. Black and white, pure and simple: J’accuse!

At this point, let the ex-teacher take over. ‘Schadenfreude’ is one of those German words made up of separate words, in this case, ‘schaden’ meaning ‘harm’ and ‘freude’ meaning ‘joy’. So, when you put them together ‘harmjoy’ they are a meaningless oxymoron. But the story does not end there: it does have a meaning and it is usually interpreted as meaning something like “deriving pleasure in the misfortunes of others.” Now it begins to fit together.

Our responses to wrong doing are complicated; the same fault can have very different responses when the circumstances are altered. Take, for example lying. Lying is always wrong, except when it isn’t. I will not insult my Reader (literal not figurative) by giving examples: think of today and just count up the ‘necessary’ lies you told, or like the great lie told at the end of Conrad’s ‘The Heart of Darkness’, the saving lie. Take instead, theft.

This seems to be clearer cut, though I remember in my first year of teaching, I presented by top set year 10(or form four and they were then called) with a moral problem. What would they do, I asked, if a local shop had been robbed and, when involved in a police chase, the robber had thrust the stolen money through the letter box in your house? Would you, I naively asked, expecting a 50/50 divide, keep the money or give it up to the police. Not only did no-one say that they would give up the money, they also had zero understanding with my position of wanting to give it back. Total incomprehension. My ‘open ended’ moral discussion became a sort of revivalist sermon putting a (no, MY) clear moral point forward in a more and more this-is-what-is-correct-and-you-are-all-wrong sort of way than the open ended (!) discussion that I intended. I had the same problems with lying to Insurance Companies and taking money to which you were not entitled; evading VAT in any way possible, and keeping things by finding them.

Now I do not want to give the impression that I have led a blameless life during which I have no deviated by a nano millimetre from the straight and narrow, so there is, understandably a sort of harmjoy or, one might say, a certain sense of Schadenfreude in watching the moral writhing of a friend as he tries to come to terms with the drunken outburst of the night before. Sympathy (for both sides) yes, but also that little gleam of happiness that mainly consists in knowing that someone else is at fault and, not only are you blameless (in this instance) but also you were not even there to share the blame of association or proximity.

The aftermath of such an exhibition is, of course, different. Just hearing about it implicates you. This is where character and human sympathy comes in.

And that, as they say, is quite another story.