Wet! Wet! Wet!

Somerset Maugham wrote a short story about it; there are various poems concerned with it; conversations centre on it and recently it’s the first thing that I notice in the morning. Yes, you’ve guessed: rain.

You find yourself remembering the most arid moments in your last summer holiday; the memory of trudging though soft sand looking at rocky landscapes devoid of vegetation; the harsh rays of the nearest star beating relentlessly down on sun scorched earth and the wind raising dusty whirlwinds. You remember not the heat and the omnipresent aroma of Boots sunscreen and the slight feeling of nausea from drinking warm larger in the afternoon, no, you remember thinking to yourself, “This is all very well: but where is the greenness, the lush grass of home?”

Well, god knows its all around me now. The one thing that you can say about my country at the moment is that it is definitely green. Very green. The grass is growing, even though it is November and this fertility should be starting to slow down. Growing and growing.

It’s also easy to see where the idea of hydroponics came from: anyone making even a cursory visit to the principality of Wales could not fail to notice the growth of green shoots reaching for a notional sun though the still waters which surround the growing plant in the paddy fields which pass for pasture in this country.

Every day that Toni’s mum has been in Cardiff it has rained. Every stinking day! Not missing one. Sometimes, just to make things that little bit more ironic, the sun has cheekily shone for a nano second before disappearing like new Sony Playstations in a crowd of geeks.

I now have rain overload; rain fatigue; rain exhaustion. I have tried to rely on the well known inexhaustible ability of the British to use rain as the basis for a civilization; as the be all and end all of our conversational ability and the essential component in the foundation of our culture – but I can’t. My skin is fading and I hope to god that there is some unseasonable sunshine in December in Catalonia when I finally get there for the Christmas celebrations.

I have started to mirror my Aunt Bet by deciding to reread Dickens myself, but at the very start of this enterprise, I find that the text I have chosen to begin with is not one which I have read previously. This is the first time that I have read ‘The Pickwick Papers’. It is a very odd experience as so much of the novel (if it can be called that) is so familiar. I know the characters and I know that I have read chunks of the novel itself in the form of extracts. There are also moments when, for example, you read the poem ‘Ode to an expiring frog’ where the humour becomes acute and perceptive and well as something which is so much part of your literary experience that it hits you with an extra force as you actually read the whole of the context for this little gem. As usual I search for the comparison and one comes easily to hand. I remember buying my first copy of Berlioz’ [Is that right? Is a ‘z’ the same as an ‘s’ when making the possessive is impossible by adding another ‘s? Or should I just add an ‘s’ to Berlioz as in Berlioz’s? No, it looks better with the z’] ‘Symphonie Fantastique’.

Like so much else in my early literary and musical career the individual elements of it were determined by the superficiality of the packaging of the item rather than the artistic worth of the music or novels.

Most of my reading of Modern Literature was based on the choice of Modern Art chosen by cover designers in Penguin; similarly my choice of music was to a large extent determined by the cover designs of such music labels as Heliodor and Classics for Pleasure. The design of Heliodor was particularly impressive with the house style incorporating two banks of grey at top and bottom and an imposing, if often odd, choice of photograph to ‘illustrate’ the music. My first Nielsen and Mahler were courtesy of Heliodor and were chosen because of the seductive appeal of the photograph. The photo chosen for Mahler’s 4th symphony was a very tasteful photo of rustic and not so rustic looking bottles – I’m still trying to work out the significance of that one! I wonder if the cover art of the old record companies is now available in various web sites? Something to research!

The Symphonie Fantastique had a photograph of lightening: very impressive and promising that most essential element in my listening pleasure – quantity of loud sound. I much preferred the sheer volume of Bruckner than the more restrained moderate audio levels of Bach. At my first listening to this symphony I was quite taken with it and was enjoying the developing musical journey when the waltz music came through the speakers courtesy of Boots – the first cheap ‘stereo’ record player – and I recognized it. It was music I didn’t know I knew. Always something which is an enjoyable experience.

Almost at good as listening to something for the first time and being instant converted and buying the disc. Music in this category includes: the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony; ‘Jeux sans frontiers’ by Peter Gabriel; The Manfred Symphony by Tchaikovsky, the movement when the organ comes in is electric; Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen; Le Roi s’amuse by Delibes and the March from the Nutcracker suite by one of the above.

So much of The Pickwick Papers is familiar in another way too. Some of the (it has to be said) crudely interpolated stories within the narrative are reminiscent of other narrative devices in later novels of Dickens, one, for example, has the device of the transported criminal returning to his home country and finding himself in a churchyard which later was transmuted into the melodrama of ‘Great Expectations’ while there are other ideas which include elements of ‘A Christmas Carol’.

I am almost at the end of volume one in the Heron edition of the novel (“run your hands over the luxurious skivertex” I seem to remember as one of the commercial tags to sell edition after edition of Heron editions of the masters) and am looking forward to volume two, because that one has Christmas at the Dell to enjoy. I have not yet reached the description of Pickwick skating which opened the essay which gained Aunt Bet her highest grade in literary appreciation in Maesteg Grammar School some years ago.

Which novel to choose next? I think that I will consult with my Aunt and decide then