And the next thing?

 

 

 

  

It says something for my state of underwhelmed-ness about the new Amazon Prime Series The Rings of Power, that I have not bothered to watch the latest episode, which was released last Friday.  The idea of my ignoring something that plays to all my sci-fi fantasy weaknesses, does not say a lot for its impact!

     I am more even more disappointed because I read previews by trusted critics like Bradshaw in The Guardian which were so enthusiastic that I watched the pedestrian opening episode with an avidity that was soon rapidly dwindling to disinterest, bordering on boredom.  I’ve now reached episode three and I am still not engaged, in the way that the books or films of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit captured my reading and watching dedication.

     The Silmarillion on which the new series is loosely based, I found unreadable in its book form, and regarded it as a piece of donnish self-indulgence – as indeed is the series, if you think about it in terms of the commercial hopes of Amazon who made it!

     Yes, of course the look of the series is spectacular, the landscapes are staggeringly beautiful, and the set piece grandeur of fantastic civilizations amazing, but then it should look good given how much cash has been expended on it.

     I find little ‘new’ in the series, and the clunking reveal of ‘random human who turns out to be an unrecognized king” etc tedious, and a weak re-run (pre-run?) of Aragorn/Strider.  I do recognize that the series is a prequel and that there is a sort of satisfaction in seeing the ancient pre-history of the more interestingly critical moments in Tolkien’s created world that far better known, but it does take the sting out of what might happen as we do know how things eventually turn out, and this series does not have the ‘wow’ factor that the films had.  We have assimilated director Peter Jackson’s epic visual conception of Tolkien’s world and we now take for granted visual effects that would once have blown us away.

     I will, of course, watch the whole of the series.  And I will maintain my hope that there will be moments that justify the time I spend watching and the money burnt to make it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have completed my open-air-early-morning-swims.  The fortnight of local pool closure for maintenance is over today, and I have already checked that the pool will open at the normal times for normal use from Monday.  I have been relatively lucky with the weather so that I have not had to swim in challenging circumstances – or cold water, but I still do feel a sense of Mission Accomplished that I have swum all fourteen days in our community pool.

     One of my lecturers used to swim, every day of the year, in Swansea Bay.  I am not made of such stern stuff, though I can say that I swam on Christmas Eve off a beach in Sitges.  When I say swam, that is something of an exaggeration: I immersed myself in the water and immediately exited the sea.  The sunshine that was streaming down, did not, as I vividly recall seem to have any part in heating the icy wavelets.  There is a fine line between resolution and stupidity and staying in the water for any longer than I did would clearly have been an illustration of the latter!

     The pool-absence period has jinxed my writing by changing my routine, and I have only scribbled ‘thoughts’ in my notebook on a couple of occasions, whereas I always write in it when I am taking my cup of tea and baguette in the pool café.  Have jotted down a few phrases and ideas, but it remains to be seen if they are actually worth working up into something real.  There again, even ‘failures’ are interesting, and it is rare that I can’t salvage something from the wreckage of a poem ‘gone wrong’!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Opera Season is almost upon us, and I still haven’t decided if I should take out a ‘Saturday Afternoon Subscription’ to a series of orchestral concerts in Barcelona.  This is an odd hesitation on my part because I am essentially an orchestral music sort of person, with my going to Opera being something of an indulgence for me.

     As is usual with any subscription series, there are some concerts that don’t really appeal, though from past experience, the concerts with low expectations very often surprise with unexpected delights.  At least that is what I keep telling myself.  And afternoon concerts mean a Barcelona exit at a reasonable time!  Worth considering.  And going.  Perhaps I will buy a subscription.  There you are a decision made in under one hundred keystrokes!  If only the other things in life were so easy!

Search and ye shall find

 

The one aspect of the Internet that is clearly superior to using books is that if you type in specific information it will give you a specific answer. 

For example, I was wondering who was the author of the aphorism, “Politics is too important to be left to politicians”.  It seems to be that the sentiment is particularly appropriate to the present situation in Catalonia and I felt that it would be wrong to use the phrase without giving the source.  So, in an atavistic moment I turned to my books.  My dictionaries (well, just a small selection of them if I am honest) are within arm’s reach, which explains why they were a possibility.  If I had had to get up and walk to a bookcase I would have used the computer.

But I didn’t.  And, while I have the Encarta Dictionary nearest to me (a hefty tome bought by me through one of my sixth form students at a discount while she was working in Blackwell’s) next to my (well, Toni’s actually, but I use it more than he does, so there!) Macmillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners, next to seven dictionaries of quotations, a Dictionary of Ideas and The Pelican History of Art: Painting in Italy 1500-1600.  A heavily weighted shelf!

My first choice to look up the quotation was in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations with an irascible Isherwood staring leftwards towards the back cover and to a rather more serene looking Don Bachardy in Hockney’s double portrait of the couple.  I opened the book at random, hoping to read through a thematic section on ‘Politics’ to find that the dictionary had been arranged by name of author.

This was a disaster. 

My random page had a quotation from my favourite composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and I was surprised to learn that he was the man who first said, “a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic”.  I must have know that, mustn’t I?  But, whatever, it is back in the forefront of my memory now! 

Just before Sibelius’s entry was one by Manny Shinwell (1884-1986) a Labour politician from my youth and, in the next column another Labour politician, Sir Hartley Shawcross (born in 1902 and still alive according to my book published in 1991, but actually deceased in 2003) saying after the victory of 1946, “We are the masters now!”  Except that is not what he said, the exact wording was, “We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.”  If only that had been true!

On the same page are the last eight of the 130 quotations devoted to George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) including one of my favourites, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”

There are song titles on these two pages (200-201 if you must know) “Goodbye cruel world” Gloria Shayne; “Little man, you’ve had a busy day” Sigler and Hoffman, extracts from songs like “Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today.” Silver and Cohn; “And here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.” Simon; “Down in the forest something stirred: it was only the note of a bird.” Simpson.  We have the title of a musical, “A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum” Shevelove and Gelbart, and title of Sillitoe’s novella “The loneliness of the long-distance runner.”

I am not listing these just for the sake of doing so (though they are worth reading) these phrases have survived because they have associations.  We may not give true credit to the authors whose names we might not know or have never know, and even if we have we soon forget, but we might remember their words.  And there are historical, cultural and personal resonances that each one of these phrases unlocks.

For example, the extract from a speech to the Electrical Trades Union conference in Margate in 1947 that is Shinwell’s only contribution to the book is not one that I know, but I remember the character.  I can remember him speaking on the radio and television and I have a picture of a rumbustious, amusing and socialist firebrand.  A living (if ageing, even then) representative of the Labour politics of the Wilson era, during the time in my early teens when I became interested in what the good and the great (yes, that is irony) were doing to my country and trying to understand just why they were doing it.

Some of the songs have come down to me in snatches that my parents sang; I remember seeing the old black and white film of “The loneliness of the long-distance runner” and of reading the book; everyone has his or her own memories connected with “Mrs Robinson”, I would have been 17 or 18, just the right age to appreciate the angst!

The Sitwells are on these pages, Dame Edith and Sir Osbert; B. F. Skinner (always a good name to drop into conversation) with his observation, “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten”; Red Skelton aka Richard Skelton with his deathlessly acerbic comment on the crowds attending the funeral of Harry Cohn in 1958, “Well, it only proves what they always say - give the public something they want to see, and they’ll come out for it.”

And I still haven’t mentioned Georges Simenon (1903-1989) honoured with two quotes, the first about having sex with 10,000 women and the second where he asserts that, “Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.”

Memories, delight and instruction from two pages that I “shouldn’t” have looked at and of course wouldn’t have looked at if I had used the Internet and got the information at once.

If nothing else, my meandering around the two pages touched on memories, courses and reading I had done.  It reminded me of a play “One Way Pendulum” by N F Simpson that I haven’t re-read in half a century and the equally dated concept of a “smoke-filled room” (Kirke Simpson) about where the male power brokers were when they chose Warren Harding as Republican presidential candidate in 1920.

Eventually, after much cogitation and amusement I turned to the back of the book and looked in the index for politics, and found an entry,

                              p. are too serious a matter   DE G 66.3   

and was able to find what I had been looking for quickly and efficiently.

Two adverbs that cannot be applied to the continuing disaster of Catalonia’s quest for independence and the authoritarian PP led minority Spanish government’s violent and mendacious response.  It appears increasingly improbable that any real sort of accommodation will be made between the two sides.

With Rajoy’s typically lethargic approach to tackling a difficult problem before it becomes intractable, we now have a situation where Catalonia is probably going to announce or proclaim unilateral independence from Spain on Monday.  The situation has not be ameliorated by the schoolmarmishly negative contribution from the king yesterday where he reprimanded Catalonia’s people and politicians for trying to break up Spain and his cosy kingdom.

Although the referendum had over two million voters participate, the majority of the voters did not.  Three of the main national political parties vowed to have nothing to do with what they termed an “illegal” referendum and urged their supporters to follow their lead.  Many did.

The violence that the national Spanish police used to try and stop the referendum will have revolted many more than those who voted, but Rajoy knows that his tactics (if his woeful indecision and negativity can be called that) will play to the prejudice that many Spaniards have against Catalonia and the Catalans and he will lose little electoral advantage by playing the heavy hand with an area which has long been the subject of envy and distrust by the majority of their fellow citizens and the source of few votes for his party.

If the President of Catalonia goes ahead and declares independence then Rajoy will have to respond.  As Rajoy seems incapable of any political subtlety, and as he has shown himself incapable of any reasonable compromise he will have to resort to force.

Over the past few weeks the central Spanish government has been stealthily taking over control of certain aspects of the Catalan government’s responsibility.  If independence is declared then the Spanish government has a number of choices available.

It could regularise the taking away of responsibility by invoking article 150 of the Constitution.  This article that has never been invoked before, will allow the central Spanish government to take over all the functions of the Catalan government.  This will and must lead to massive civil unrest.

I hope that the Rajoy minority government are not so cynical as to hope that their constant pushing will produce some sort of violence that will ‘allow’ the state to bring in the armed forces, above and beyond the armed national police, to restore ‘order’.  I do not like to speculate on the consequences of such action.

In a positive sense I would like to think that even at this late date, some sort of common political sense will prevail and the two sides will settle down to serious, real negotiations in which nothing is ‘off the table’ - up to and including a binding referendum about independence for Catalonia at a future agreed date.

I have to be truthful and say that nothing over the past few years in the political field of Spanish government has encouraged me to think that anything approaching common sense will guide our political masters.

I ask those inside and outside Spain and Catalonia to keep watching what is happening and use your voices to try and get a settlement to the present situation that benefits all sides.

And if you don’t feel that you can do that, then please note how power is being abused in Spain and Catalonia and use your voice to tell the perpetrators that they are being watched and that there will be a time when they will be held to account.

Your voice and those of your friends and neighbours are going to be increasingly important in getting out to the world exactly what is happening and what is likely to happen in Catalonia.

Keep watching.

Oh, and in case you were still wondering and hadn’t worked out the clues in the index listing, the quotation at the start of this piece came from the mouth of Charles De Gaulle, perhaps the quintessential non political politician!  And the actual, accurate quote is, “I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”