LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 24 – Wednesday in Holy Week, 8th APRIL

 

I realise that, with all my bluff optimism, I have been affected by the lockdown!  In the poem that I wrote yesterday (smrnewpoems.blogspot.com) I actually questioned, even if rhetorically, the value of sunbathing!

     It is shocking to have to confront a possible breakdown in your worldview that can contemplate something as self-loathing as a negative approach to the appreciation of the nearest star!  It is certainly a wake up call to reassess my attitude and determine to be more positive in the future.  The idea of getting to June and July and behaving like a troglodyte is entirely unacceptable.

     If something as fundamental to my view of life is capable of mutability, then it makes me wonder what other, more subtle changes there have been in this period of self-isolation.  It would argue a self-deluding insensitivity to say that one can remain entirely stable when the world appears to be changing around you.

     The irony, of course, is that the micro world of self-isolation is unchanging and stable.  The continuing horrific catalogue of death and infection is all around us, but not part of the life that we are leading.  It is as if we are living in some sort of medieval fort with a water filled trench around us: part of our surroundings, but separated from them.

     Unlike some others, I have been entirely unable to wean myself from the news.  My addiction to the Internet radio, and more specifically Radio 4 is total.  It is at times like this that the Conservatives detestation of the BBC becomes not only partisan, but also self-defeating.  At times of National Crisis we united around the BBC as a voice of and to the Nation.  I certainly do not look towards the Conservatives and their slavish news lap dogs to give me a sense of what the Nation is thinking or feeling.

     And The Guardian.  As a life-long Guardian reader (with a brief fall from grace and adherence to The Independent) I now read it on my mobile phone with an intensity that goes beyond belief.  And may I make a specific call out for the writing of John Crace, a columnist of rare wit and perception.  His political sketches have been part of the reason that I have been able to maintain my sweetness and equilibrium during the past few years where Brexit and the bloody Conservatives have convinced me that I am living in a society where the dominant ideology is the death-wish!

My early morning routine is now becoming more and more established: set Moppy (don’t blame me, the app demands that you call your robot cleaner something) off on her hoovering circuit; make my cup of tea (English breakfast and Earl Grey) and have the World’s Most Expensive Augmented Muesli (at least I have stopped adding Smarties to it) with fat-free milk; do the Guardian Quick Crossword (with light cheating); change Moppy to her mopping sequence; go for my pool circuits.  And a chunk of the day is gone!  Which is a clear exemplification of the work expanding to match the time available!

     I do miss my daily early morning swim and I can’t wait to get back to that part of my routine, because that morning start include my first writing of the day when I sit in the café or outside having my post-swim cup of tea.  Ah!  How life used to be!

Just back from the open kitchen window where at 8.00 pm our time, we applaud the front-line workers who are keeping our society going.

     Talking of health workers and their battle against the virus: the British Prime Minister now in Intensive Care.  As I said yesterday, I wish him better health and strength to his family – and he should resign.  Now.  At once.

     The Prime Minister’s bravado a while ago where he was joking about his meeting Covid-19 positive people and shaking hands with them; his visible inability to maintain social distancing when his government was promoting it as essential, now appear to be a foolhardy, self-indulgent imposition on health services that are overstretched.   

     I might also add, that the Prime Minister’s inability to give clear indications of who actually has ultimate power in government is a dereliction of duty.   

     chocolate, retribution, judgement, ineptitude, Throughout his career he has been first and foremost a second-rate, shoddy, narcissistic, journalistic liar and, while I have sympathy for his present state of health, I have none for his political.  We deserve better than him.  Though with the cabinet of freaks that he has accumulated, god alone knows who (or in the case of Gove, what) might take his place.

     So far the Conservatives’ management of the Covid-19 crisis has been fatally inept.  How many unnecessary deaths is it going to take before the people of Britain demand the reckoning that should come sooner rather than later?

Determined not to end this post on a sour note, I can report that we were able to buy chocolate in the last shop and you can be assured that my writing has been sweetened by the confectionary. 

     So just imagine what it would have been like without!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 10

Hoovering, dishwashing, Guardian, tea, muesli, rant at renovations next door: all done!  What a domestic soul I am becoming.  As if.

     The sharing of homemade videos is becoming rampant and the innate lunacy contained within them is becoming more pronounced; but there is a sort of defiant dark humour that is positively uplifting in them as well.

     The dark humour connected to the virus is best exemplified by the writing of John Crace, the parliamentary sketch writer, in the Guardian. 

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/johncrace

     He was a point of sanity throughout the whole Brexit farrago and he continues to be a guide through the shameful antics of the so-called government of the United Kingdom.  If you have not read his withering condemnation of the Blond Buffoon and Dom then you should.  It might be gallows humour in these dark times, but it always manages to raise a laugh, yes, that laugh might well be rueful but it is better than allowing yourself to plumb the depths of disbelief at what the Conservatives think they can get away with!  I recommend him without hesitation, as I recommend any and all of the books that he has published.  Long may his pen show up the vicious charlatans for what they are!

     While we are on the subject of the worth of our present government, you might like to read the following:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/confused-dangerous-flippant-worlds-media-pans-pms-handling-of-coronavirus-boris-johnson

This is a summation of the reactions of the rest of the world to the way that the Blond Buffoon and his circus have handled the pandemic in the UK.  When this is over, we must hold our political ‘masters’ to account.  It is more than likely that the Conservatives’ policy over the virus has directly led to more deaths than if they had adopted some of the measures that other countries have put in place.  There must be an accounting with an independent report that aims at transparency when apportioning blame.

     My jaundiced view has been tempered by the fact that the renovation next door continues (illegally?) with much banging and that is the last thing that you need when you have been locked up for the last nine days – with the prospect of months to come!

     Another irritation (if that is the right word for it) is that I have not managed to dislodge the various earworms of snatches of the operas that I recommended yesterday.  The bits and pieces of “Four Saints in Three Acts” by Virgil Thomson is particularly difficult not to hear.  Stein’s libretto is nonsensical and I pity the poor singers having to learn some of the sequences that they have to sing, but it is undeniably (for me) catchy.  When Stein was taxed about the fact that nobody could understand what the opera was about, she countered with the brave assertion that if you enjoyed it you understood it!  And the opera was popular and ground-breaking.  It had a black cast of singers in its first performances and the set design used the newly invented cellophane as part of the decoration: very avant-garde!  Well, for 1927 it was!  I do urge you to go to YouTube and listen and look at the fragments of this fascinating opera!

     I do also urge you to look at the classic repertoire as well.  It is easy to cheat your way through famous operas on YouTube as they often give you the famous bits, in terms of overtures, preludes and arias, in manageable bite-sized chunks.  And you never know what you might like.  I know someone whose first operatic experience was ‘Tristan and Isolde’ by Wagner, a long and dense opera.  She loved it and become an enthusiastic operaphile on the spot!  It takes all sorts.  And it has taken me a long time to honestly admit that I enjoyed a performance – which I did with the last production of the Liceu.  Some operas, like ‘Eugene Onegin’ by Tchaikovsky I first heard in a dress rehearsal and instantly ‘knew’.  It helped that I knew the dance music from it that I had given to me as one of my first EPs (extended play discs) when I was a kid, but operas like that are almost absurdly approachable.

Enough of this escape into Culture.  Back to reality.  We have now been in lockdown for 9 (or officially 11) days, so that means that we are getting to the end of the incubation period for the virus and this week may well be one in which there is a jump in the figures of those who are infected.  It has been suggested that people should think twice about ANY journeys outside the residence (yes, I am talking to you people next door!) for any reason at all.  Even bread buying, which is an almost sacred ritual in this country, is too weak an excuse to leave the house!

     We are not entirely breadless.  We do have individually sealed, square, flat, wholemeal, calorie reduced, ‘buns’ that seem to last for ever.  Whether you can actually convince yourself that what you are eating bears any resemblance to ‘bread’ is something else, but in times of crisis it is better than nothing.  Just.

     We have enough food to get us through to next week and we can assess the situation then and decide whether it worth while for (Toni) to venture out again for supplies.

I have just come in from my morning walk around the pool.  The weather is not as clement as it has been for the past few days and it was more of a chore than usual.  As I trudged my way around (varying the direction) on my lonely circuits, during which nobody has joined me, I felt like a Rudolf Hesse figure, plodding his way around the empty exercise yard in Spandau.  Having typed that, I realize that there are too many associations with that image that have nothing to do with my present situation.  But it is interesting that I did not delete it, but rather chose to discuss its inappropriateness; or on further consideration there are elements that illuminate: the sense of isolation in an institution made to accommodate more; the artificiality of the incarceration; the politics of continuation – and I think that I am overthinking an image of an aging man in a prison exercise yard!  A bit.

The number of Covid-19 infected people in Spain has not surpassed that of China!  The largest number of cases is in Madrid, which is not locked down in the same way as Barcelona.  It seems foolish not to be truly Draconian in a situation of absolute crisis, but that is politics for you!

I have always taken a ghoulish delight in following the build up to each Olympic Games.  I am not so much interested in the sports as in the various crises: political, financial, social, architectural etc that illuminate the via dolorosa from the moment the games are awarded, to the opening ceremony.

     It used to be the almost comical corruption of the IOC members and the shocking ways in which the successful city managed to capture the games that added to the delight of nations.  The IOC has (allegedly) cleaned up its act, a little and there is more transparency about the awarding of the games, so my prurient interest has to concentrate on unrealistic timetables for delivery and the corruption in building that seems an Olympic Event in its own right.

     I well remember the tune of the BBC presentation of the Olympics in Tokio in 1964 - I am humming it in my mind as I type)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw1mgjrXZ0c

Only surpassed as an Olympic tune by the brilliant song for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgVGl5bnf8c

Tokio 2020 has had its share of scandal, but is obviously going to be overshadowed by Covid-19.  If (and it’s a big ‘if’) the games take place in 2021 they will still be called the 2020 games apparently.  I like quirky things like that!  Does this mean that the next games will be three years later, not four? 

     Such considerations keep me occupied.

Playing The Game

 

The fact that I am tapping the keys to my laptop early in the morning is a tribute to my determination to lay off my compulsive reading of The Guardian as soon as I had eaten my muesli.  The unrelentingly awful news contained in its pages, that seems to bring to mind the worst excesses of the 1930s, and the feeling that I could do nothing about what was happening, was certainly beginning to get me down.

I now give the Guardian headlines a rapid scan on my phone and do the quick crossword and then leave the gruesome details for later in the day.  I still listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 - there are limits about how far I am prepared to go to set myself free from negativity – but there is something more transitory about hearing the news rather than reading it, and that makes it easier to take.  At least for me.

There is always the problem of 45.  I, like so many others, have never (and will never) come to terms with the reality of the present POTUS.  You see, try as I might I cannot get the news out of my mind, no matter how early in the morning I get up!

I have been struggling to find an image to sum up my understanding of how characters like 45 and the ex-third-rate Foreign Secretary actually see the world.  I know that both of them are incapable of seeing anything without the opaque filter of their own egos, but I do wonder about characterising their views of the political reality around them.

I suppose the easiest way for me to consider them and their activity is to find a game that can act as a metaphor for their respective approaches.

To start with 45.  I think that he sees the world as a game of Jenga, but his concept of the rules is not to see how many pieces he can pull out without destroying the construction, but rather to find the piece that will bring the whole structure down to ruin – and then reveal that he actually owns a much better, gold plated, Trump-stamped version of the game that will make everyone (i.e. himself) much better off.  And, after all, it’s only a game – and a game that lacks the seriousness of, for example, golf.

Johnson, (I refuse to call him by his Christian name because that gives a faux chumminess to his selfish egotism) is the leading instigator of coulrophobia in British life.  Dangling from a zip line while waving a toy Union Flag, tousling his carefully unruly hair, roguishly spouting Latin to liven up his calculated throwaway phrases, he assiduously works to polish his upper-class-twit-of-the-people image to mask his embarrassingly naked ambition.

His game is a more sophisticated one than 45’s, it’s the game of tea leaves.  You wait until the dregs are left in the cup, swirl them around and invert the cup then gaze at the pattern that is left and interpret it as a sign of the future.  Johnson is a master of pareidolia, apophenia, patternicity and agenticity – all of those are words that define the ability to perceive patterns where none, perhaps, exist.  Johnson wittingly or unwittingly (both work for him) situations and then he defines the resultant chaos through the refining lens of his own ego.

And, of course, Johnson has perfected the “delete all and insert” approach to life.  The term comes from my experience in General Body meetings in university where in student debates someone would propose an amendment of the “delete all and insert” type which converted the original motion into its opposite!  Johnson is very good at that because he lacks historical perspective – at least as far as his own ethical narrative is concerned.  So, to play his game, all you have to do if the last set of tea leaves were not satisfactory is drink another cup of tea and get a new set.

 Johnson is a ‘crisis manager’ not, in any sense that he is able to calm the situation or even manage it competently, no, his type of ‘crisis manager’ is the type that makes the most of a self-made crisis to advance his career.

Johnson is working to emulate his role model, 45, so that he can walk down Oxford Street and shoot someone and get away with it.  Given the way that he is regarded by the so-called base of the Lower Than Vermin Party, Oxford Street might be a no-no, but the High Street in one of the more rural shire villages might be a possibility.

It is now time for my swim where I can wash away the import of the previous thoughts, at least for an hour or so.

And then back to my work on Elsheimer, who is proving to be a much more elusive character for my research than I would have thought possible for a painter who is, undoubtedly, famous.  But that makes it all the more interesting and I have ordered books!

When 45 and Johnson have been consigned to the ignoble waste heap of grotesques, the paintings of Elsheimer will still, in their jewel-like intensity, be providing delight.  And that is an article of faith that I keep hold of whenever I listen to the news!

Present sounds: past emotion

I am now firmly plugged back into BBC Radio.  Like The Guardian, I can only do without it for the length of a short summer holiday.  No longer.

It is odd to consider that the whole concept of ‘going on holiday’ has changed utterly in my lifetime.

My first foreign holiday at the age of 7, was with my mother and father and my uncle and aunt.  We went by bus, train, train, boat, train, coach, train, train, coach, coach (taking well over a day) to Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in Catalonia.  I loved it.  I spent the majority of my time in the sea, trying out my new swimming mask and losing one of my new flippers.  I ate my first squid. 

And I realise that as a well-behaved and utterly polite child with four grateful adults, I must have been spoiled rotten!  Perhaps that holiday more than anything, ingrained in me a love of sunshine that has lasted up to today – though ‘today’ is not the best advert for Catalonia as it has been raining solidly for the last two days!  That is, to be fair, unusual.

We spent 15 days on holiday and during that time we didn’t have any British newspapers, we didn’t phone home, we didn’t watch television – except for me to see, with wonder, Bonanza in Spanish, that I found endlessly funny!  We were, in effect, cut off from home – and thoroughly enjoyed it.

When I was old enough to go on holiday by myself, then all my parents expected was the odd postcard letting the know that I was still alive at that point in my vacation.  My only attempts to phone home were total disasters that ended up in my feeding public phone boxes with money for no link to Cardiff. 

Three weeks going down the Greek Islands from Athens to Crete and staying in what could euphemistically be called ‘basic’ accommodation; five weeks travelling across the United States; a couple of weeks in Italy – none of these had me phoning home, nor reading a newspaper, nor listening to the BBC. 

My holiday effectively erected a cordon sanitaire around my previous life that was only broken through when I came back to Heathrow, or Luton, or Paddington and made the phone call home.  While the ring tone sounded I mentally wiped out all my family and waited, with a concern that I had not (oddly) felt for the previous weeks of the holiday, for my mother or father to answer.  And then my first question was inevitably how my other parent was!

My next task was to catch up on the world news that sunbathing or scouring galleries or swimming had allowed to pass me by.  And, as I did so, each day would bring in the post cards that I had posted weeks before!

Nowadays, thanks to the mobile phone, kids are never beyond their parents.  Pictures can be sent immediately.  Keeping in touch costs nothing, no matter where you are in the world.  News is a click away.  Google Translate is there for those tricky moments that used to be solved by a combination of mime and use of any foreign words you might have known said in an accent appropriate to the country in which you were stuck!

It is deeply ironic that “getting away from it all” usually involves sharing with everyone you know exactly where you are and exactly what you are doing moment by moment!

Young (and indeed the old) are all linked in to modes of instant communication that will make the 3 week hiatus of my first backpacking Greek holiday as a situation akin to travelling with maps that had areas marked “Here there be dragons” on them.  Communication is good, but sometimes-enforced separation is good for the soul!

These thoughts came to me when listening to my new Internet radio, a Sangean SIR-100 (that looks suspiciously, exactly like a Roberts Stream 107 that it is replacing) and, having worked out how to use the pre-sets enjoying the morning music programme on Radio 3.  They played the second movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony with The Tune.  Beautiful.  Hackneyed?  Well, it is very well known and the sort of thing that Classic FM plays at least twice a day – but I wondered when the last time I had heard it was, and then, by progression on to the first time I heard it.

Music for me carries a personal history.  I can still remember the LP covers of the Music for Pleasure and Classics for Pleasure 

budget LP manufacturers when records could be bought for ten bob (10/- or 50p) and I was getting to know the Classical Canon.  Some music I recorded, Beethoven’s 1^st and 8^th Symphonies on cassette in my (ground breaking at the time) Philips portable cassette recorder.  Hearing the music takes me back to my bedroom in 32, Hatherleigh Road in Cardiff where they were first recorded and listened to, amazed at what sort of sound could be got out of such a small loudspeaker and even more amazed when played through my Boots Stereo Record Player.  But the tape hiss and the slightly cramped sound still stays with me.

Mahler’s 4^th is bottles; Nielsen’s Helios Overture is corn fields; Beethoven’s 5^th is a Constable painting; Immortal Melodies is a large flower bloom; Sibelius’ 1^st is broken snow mounds; Britten is Aldeborough; the 1812 is that graphic cannon – and so I could go on, remembering the cover art of my LP collection (now long gone in favour of CDs) but forever imprinted on my mind, and having some sort of intangible effect on the way that I heard the music and continue to hear it.

Place is also important.  The quickest way to learn new music is to play it.  As an inept trombone playing member of Cardiff Youth Orchestras as well as a member of a various Brass Groups and the School Orchestra I ‘learned’ a lot of music by being there.  I have to admit that in most orchestral pieces the trombones are usually tacet (i.e. being silent) and much of our time is taken up with counting bars (or asking the members of the orchestra in front who play more to give us a nod when ‘figure E’ has been reached in the score) and then lurching into action hoping that the embouchure was still good enough to get most of the notes!  But you did learn music and appreciate the structure of orchestral sound.

For trombone players the best pieces of music (or the most threatening) were when We Had the Tune.  The overture to Tannhäuser is an excellent example where the trombones come into their all, though the first time we played through this piece the awful realization that we were the only ones playing in the orchestra brought us all to an abrupt embarrassed silence!  I still get a little rush of combined panic and pleasure each time I hear the music!

All music, no matter how hackneyed it might appear to be, is new and original to somebody who has never heard it.  I was played the 4^th movement of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony by my piano teacher in the days when it was still thought that I might be able to do more than the first few bars of Für Elise on the damn thing.  I was much taken by the music and bought a cheap LP of the symphony and when I listened to it, I was stunned by the second movement: simple repetitive and magical!  I was not at all surprised to discover that this movement was given an encore on its first performance!  My listening to the symphony is always in some ways bound up in my abortive attempt to master the piano, together with the patience and feel of the piano in my music teachers dining room in a house exactly like my own home but made so different by the decoration and the smell and feel.

There are also parts of well-known musical pieces that have associations.  The BBC National Orchestra of Wales has given me many and varied delights and I used to go to the concert series in St David’s Hall when I lived in Cardiff where some of the performances were among the best I have ever been to of the pieces played.  The orchestra that one hears today is a development from other variations on a National Orchestra that have been tried in the past.  I can remember as a school boy going to performances in the Assembly Rooms of the City Hall, other performances in Broadcasting House in Llandaff and yet others in the Coal Exchange in Mount Stuart Square.

One early performance stands out.  It was of Beethoven’s 3^rd The Eroica and the part that particularly stays with me is the horn’s solo.  The symphony was taken at a lively pace until the entry of the horns when everything slowed down for them to try and get the notes, then the music returned al tempo for the rest of the orchestra.  I still can remember my exquisite embarrassment for the horn section and my relief when such an exposed passage was over.  I still feel some of the tension whenever I hear that particular section.  Still.

Lest this memory be the abiding one from this piece, I should mention a couple of performances of the Turangalîla Symphony by Olivier Messiaen that I heard in St David’s Hall.  These were played spectacularly well and left me literally open mouthed in astonishment and musing about how far the orchestra had come in terms of sheer technical accomplishment. 

And, after all, I have an abiding debt to the orchestra from the time when I went to a performance of The Firebird that I had never heard before.  I was sitting in the middle of the audience and when the fff chord introducing a piece was played the entire audience jerked back in their chairs.  That sort of thing spoils you for every other performance because not one of them, on record or live, has had the same effect!

But, as always, I live in hope!