Where do you come from?

My family: both sets of grandparents; lived in the valleys. My parents got to know each other in Maesteg Grammar School. Although I had no personal experience of living for an extended period in the South Wales Valleys the majority of my immediate family had significant chunks of their lives in an environment which is essentially foreign to me.

The time that I spent in my maternal grandparents’ house in Vicarage Terrace in Maesteg was hardly the normal valley experience. Maesteg is not the conventional narrow sided valley; the main street is quite broad and, in my memory, bustling and affluent. Vicarage Terrace allowed extensive views from the window to the other side of the wide valley; the garden of my grandparents’ house stretched back (seemingly for ever to my juvenile eyes) into a field with a small stream bubbling over carefully constructed mini waterfalls, through a gate onto the side of the mountain, down which I had bumped my way on an improvised sleigh wearing a wildly unfashionable bobble hat at an age when I didn’t care.

My experience of the ‘real’ valleys was when we did a grand tour of the relatives and, as a child of some six or seven years old I was paraded, presented and kissed by a variety of kind, old, frightening (and hairy) men and women who all (invariably) told me that the last time they saw me I was only that high and now, just look at me. All of them, without fail, the same words. Cups of tea and hard biscuits. And on to the next.
It was during one of these epic tours of the valleys and the relatives that my father stopped the car on a mountain road, took me out of the car and indicated the small village at the bottom of the valley and said to me, “That is where I grew up!” He said it with pride and a sort of gentle affection. And then he looked at me. And I was staring with open mouthed horror at the idea of growing up in a place which so obviously lacked all the necessary requisites of a city. I may have been young, but I knew that green mountain sides and acres of open space could not compensate for the trolley bus that took me from the end of Dogfield Street in Cathays to the Empire Pool. I knew that the only safe open space was Roath Park, not the side of a mountain. I expected streets of shops not corner shops. And I knew that I liked the anonymity of a big city to the comfortable fraternity and community of a small town. It just wasn’t for me to the same extent as it just was for my dad and his siblings.

All of these thoughts came to the forefront of my mind when watching a BBC 2W film on the Rhondda Valley. I joke that for me Caerphilly is North Wales, but the number of times that I venture north of that town in Wales is somewhat limited. Uncle Eric is the only person I have visited in Maesteg over the last year or so. All my other relatives who lived in the valleys are mostly dead, or at least those great aunts and two-generations-ago-folk that used to populate the valleys for me.

It’s ridiculous to generalise from me to the city, but I do think that we Cardiffians have a problem with the valleys: they are so close and yet so far. My version of the Valleys is built on what my parents, their generation and my grandparents were and are: the economy built on coal and the primacy of education as the way out. The quality in depth in the valleys of educated people with socialist principles and the rest of the myth!

When I used to go to the valleys regularly there were still coal mines working. I did not experience the soul of the valleys being ripped out and a new entrepreneurial system being put in place.

The BBC programme used a photographer and art teacher to point to the colour and new spirit in the valleys and question the black and white picture of deprivation which, as Patrick Hannan has pointed out, often populates the holiday park of the past which is such a popular resort in Wales!

It’s a challenge.

The little things of life

Some things stay in the mind because they seem like something which should be found lurking in a novel as a particularly telling apercu where the reader will say to himself, “My God, yes, that’s it!”

A past colleague of mine seemed to attract unfortunate events as if fragments of misery were magnetically drawn to his steely negativity. Incident would pile up on incident in a ridiculously unrealistic rickety tower of misfortune wobbling perilously on foundations of risible unhappiness. His weary sadness (invariably wreathed in pungent cigarette smoke) should have attracted a vast quantity of heartfelt sympathy from his acquaintances and especially his friends but compassion fatigue had become the default response and sometimes it was hard to suppress a smile. This was not out of callous disregard for his situation, but rather because it was all too easy to look on his life as one out of a rather overwritten sensationalist short story.

One time when, as usual, his personal life; family life; professional life and simple casual living all seemed to be in the usual state of chaos, he came back to my flat for a drink and a chat. It was one of those times when the function of a friend is really just to sit there, refill the glass and listen. He was by no means stupid, so most of the ‘solutions’ to his impossible situations would have occurred to him, my function was to give him the opportunity to speak. And speak he did. His misery was palpable and of that sort of overwhelming negativity that would have made virtually any positive remark on my part crass and inappropriate.

After listing his current series of miseries he said that he almost felt submerged by their quantity and complexity and the lowest point in his response had been a day previously when he, like many before him, had taken refuge in the one place where a sense of quiet fortitude can be achieved: the loo. He being him, his evacuation was accompanied by a meditative and consoling ciggie and he felt better at the end of his time on the seat. And then he pulled the chain.

“I flushed,” he said, “and one turd didn’t go. So I waited until the cistern was full and flushed again and still it didn’t go. And I almost started crying. Because it was the last straw.”

As an example of the pathetic fallacy it’s almost perfect; distasteful, but perfect. It’s that final embarrassing detail which is simply not acceptable, because it forces itself on your attention as a perfect metaphor for your life. Well, his life at that time anyway. The image has always stayed with me because of the perfect exasperation that my colleague used when describing this low point. I’m still waiting for the moment in my first novel at which this image will be the mot (or phrase) juste!

I was reminded about this little moment of everyday life when I was looking for something to have for lunch. As we have not been to our local market for organic fresh produce, I was forced to delve into the recesses of the freezer in the hope that I had salted away some interesting morsel that I had forgotten about.

The freezer in the kitchen has little mystery, but what is lurking in the freezer in the porch, God alone knows. So it was with trepidation, yet anticipation that I decided to navigate the lower depths of this frozen cornucopia. The second freezer is tastefully hidden away behind a wooden door which is rarely opened. When it was opened today I discovered that the freezer door had been left slightly ajar and the machine had tried to freeze the surrounding atmosphere, with the result that extruded wedges of ice poked out from the sides of the door. Chunks of ice had filled up the spaces in the baskets and I idly wondered just how much electricity had been wasted on the Sisyphean attempt of this brave little piece of electrical equipment to solidify the interior of the porch!

This, like floating excrement, is the stuff of ‘the final straw’. From past experience I know how superfluous ice can have the same consistency as high tensile steel when you try and cut through it and its tenacity when sticking to the metal surfaces of a freezer makes superglue look like Pritt (a particular teacher-like simile there!) I have wasted many hours sitting patiently outside a freezer compartment with a bowl of hot water and eventually succumbing to frustration and attacking the ice with a knife.

Unlike my ex-colleague, things did work out and the extraneous ice broke off with alacrity, almost as if I was clearing the frozen stuff by tearing along the perforated lines of weakness; ice fell away almost in response to intention rather than full frontal attack. As disasters go this one was cleared up in double quick time.

The turd, as it were, flushed first go!

Now for the rest of life to follow.

Please.

Flowers of ice

Is there a word for finding out that what you have been lying about is actually true? I know I can always use my favourite word that has seen me through my entire teaching career, ‘irony’.

Looking at that last sentence I can see that the ‘irony’ I mentioned can have a far greater significance than I originally intended. I did not intend that it should suggest that the whole of my professional life has been subterfuge and deceit, though of course one of Waugh’s most telling phrases was in ‘Decline and Fall’ when wrote that teachers must ‘always temper discretion with deceit’ – mind you, his insulting description of the Welsh does not endear him to us: 'The Welsh,’ said the Doctor,' are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,’ he said with disgust, 'sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.' I might add that, when trying to find the exact quotation for the second extract from ‘Decline and Fall’ I was directed to a web site which has many more insulting quotations about the Welsh than positive ones; check it out on http://bdaugherty.tripod.com/wales.html and you’ll see what I mean.
The irony that I am talking about (if there isn’t a more appropriate word for it) applies to the climatic conditions that obtain in Wales at the moment. I have been living on the tarnished memory that on a visit to Barcelona at winter time there was a mound of snow; I constructed a snowball and threw it at Toni. I lived on the memory of that moment because snow seemed to be in short supply in Wales and I was able to say (with monotonous regularity) that, “the last time that I threw a snowball was in Barcelona” much to the fury of Toni who vaunts the climate of Catalonia above all others.

The arrival of undeniable amounts of snow was a problem which I solved by informing Toni that the patches of whiteness that he observed were due to the sudden blooming of snowbells; a shy flower of surpassing virgin whiteness whose delicacy is such that any handling of the plant would guarantee that the flower would deliquesce into mere water, almost as if one were handling ice crystals. The white flakes that we saw swirling through the air were the petals of that delicate flower caught up by the wind. Toni was, I assured him, very fortunate to see such a substantial blooming of this rare growth and, as it was protected under the Wild Flower Act he was forbidden by law to pick, trample or otherwise disturb it.

I cannot, in all conscience, say that Toni was necessarily convinced by my enthusiastic description of this native flower. So, for added verisimilitude I decided to look up ‘snowbell’ on the internet and, lo and behold! the ‘snowbell’ exists and flourishes; in Texas apparently.

It’s good to see that invention is closely followed by reality! I’ve even found a picture to accompany my apparent fabrication.

I have obviously taken the wrong approach, not only to this blog, but also to my life.

You are encouraged to write about what you know and what you have experienced whereas, the ‘snowbells’ incident obviously indicates that this approach is quite wrong. What you ought to do is write about what you want and then wait for reality to catch up with you.

Talking of reality, I can feel my grasp on that precious commodity slipping away though the malign influence of television.

I think that most intelligent people have a hate/hate/love relationship with the idiot box: two thirds of the time you hate the bloody thing, but one third of the time it is worth every penny of the license fee, whatever channel you happen to be watching!

Toni is sublimating his desire to decamp to warmer climes by watching every programme of ‘A Home in the Sun’ type: France, Italy, Spain, Greece – anywhere southwest of the channel and he’s watching as though he’s going to get the property at the end of the show as a prize for his devoted attention!

To me these programmes are merely sunny salt rubbing into the festering wound of rain soaked envy as I watch yet another couple try and spend the mere £350,000 that is their trifling budget for their holiday home. I am beginning to loathe the chirpy presenters who urge me every time I see the programme to join them again as they search for that perfect holiday home in the sun. I can feel hatred seep out of every pore as I watch perfect place after perfect place being paraded for my delectation and destruction of my peace of mind.

The worst aspect of the programmes is when a villa is photographed with four bedrooms; wonderful kitchen; infinity pool; double garage; commodious space under the house suitable for a library; amazing garden and within spitting distance of the sea and a private beach, all, we are told for £127,000. “That,” you think to yourself, “is not bad. Not bad at all. It is cheaper living there, and look how much more house you get for your money. It’s worth waiting a little bit, because I’ll be able to exchange my present life style for a way of life that I thought was only possible in my dreams!”

The programme ends, and it is only then that you see that the date on the end credits which indicates when the programme was made puts it firmly in the eighties. “Perhaps,” you think with quiet desperation, “inflation in the Costa Brava has been very much less than in the Costa Cardiff.” But the sad ache of native, instinctive intelligence is telling your unresponsive brain that, as more than half of your fellow countrymen are trying to escape the drip, drip, drip of our damp atmosphere by fleeing to the Iberian Peninsular, that inflation may possibly be a tad higher than at home and that a semi in Rumney is probably not directly translatable to a detached villa set in its own bougainvillea filled grounds next to the Mediterranean. But who, I ask you, ever listens to ‘the sad ache of native, instinctive intelligence’?

Certainly no one that I know.

Whatever they pretend to other people.

I am typing this in the conservatory to the harsh percussive sound of fat raindrops hurling themselves onto the polycarbonate roof, reminding me, if reminder were even partially necessary that, “We’re not in Castelldefels anymore, Tonto.”

And how well that last word translates from Spanish.

Sigh!

Science fails again!

Friday is the worst day to have snow. For a teacher. Why? Because the best you can do is one day off and then there is the weekend for this fickle climate of ours to do its thing and probably get rid of all the white stuff by Monday, so that lessons can be resumed as normal. I suppose that given the totally unexpected weather today, giving teachers a bonus day, they shouldn’t complain!

After my strictures yesterday, there was a sort of ironic justness to the sudden whitening of the City of Cardiff. After the protestations of the weather men that the city was over and done with this wintry interlude, there was a sort of poetic justice in the morning bringing further heavy snow showers. As someone remarked to me, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about, they did, after all, give a ‘Severe Weather Warning’ at 4.30 in the morning.” So all those fools who went in to work in schools and then found that they were sent home again had only themselves to blame that they didn’t tune in to the radio in the wee hours to find out that the weather men were wrong again.

And, as the ‘disgraced’ weatherman from BBC Wales plaintively bleated, “It’s the fault of the French!” It turns out that a ridge of high or low or, as the railway companies always say, the ‘wrong type’ of pressure drifted further north from the mainland of France and deposited its ‘wrong type’ of air on our good Welsh air and produced entirely unforeseen snow. How extraordinary; and in February too!

It’s easy to take a distanced, magisterial stance to the weather when it doesn’t really impinge on your daily life. My only concern was to get Toni to work on time, and the manic desperation that I always displayed in getting myself to work on time does not transfer to others and their places of employment. I’m sure that it is that distance which ensures that my blood pressure remains at a level where the doctor says, “I can live with that,” whenever he takes my reading. I’ve often pondered on his use of the personal pronoun in his statement, but always translated it into the first person plural and rather liked his association of his own well being with my health: a very good stance for a doctor I think!

On a more serious note the ironing situation is now rapidly approaching the critical. It is a well known fact that I do not iron. Because of various traumatic experiences including the time when I ironed a pair of trousers and it ended up with more creases than a pleated skirt, I scorn the use of the hissing monster of heated metal as I would the use of a Ford car. I have never understood how it is physically possible to iron a shirt, given the vicious turns and twists in the material to produce the finished garment.

Why is it not possible to manufacture garments which utilize the principle of the Möbius strip so that one continuous ironing plane, so to speak, results in the whole garment being suitably smoothed? I leave the practicalities to clothing manufacturers, but I understand that the idea is quite simple and you do not have to indulge in the belief in further dimensions than the ones readily to hand to produce results. For goodness sake, the ingenuity of man can invent the paperclip which is clever, simple and understandable and useful, so roll on Single Plane Ironing. I await with some impatience, as the gathering mounds of ironing are getting difficult and embarrassing to explain away.

Another thing awaiting explanation is the phantom house agent telephone call: no word from Peter Allan, I think, as my Aunt Bet might say, a letter is called for!

Dickens and ‘Barnaby Rudge’ are fading into the background. The saga of my contact lenses and the different prescriptions continues. I am now sticking with a prescription which gives me less distance and a little more close up, which means that virtually everything is slightly out of focus, but I’ve always been good at guessing given a vague outline!

The ‘off the peg’ glasses that I have to read are only really effective with the previous prescription and their use with the present selection of plastic on the eye means that reading is something of a labour of love.

The frameless micro lenses that I am wearing at the moment perch on my nose and allow me to peer over the top at distant objects. Unfortunately as they are slightly ‘out’ in their corrective strength it means that the rims of the lens and the arms and the point at which the arms attach to the lens are all clearly visible as irritating blurs on the periphery of my vision and vie for attention with the printed word. I know that my brain is supposed to filter out the minor irritations of blurred dead spots, but it doesn’t, and it never has. I can see that I am going to be suckered into the usual opticians’ trap of having to pay for vastly expensive prescription lenses for a pair of reading glasses, which I will be constantly searching for so that I can read.

If you have perfect sight then give thanks constantly that you don’t have to tolerate a whole life of irritation that constantly catches you out when you least expect it to. Just think about what happens to your sun glasses during the few brief weeks that we in Wales enjoy when there is some justification in the wearing of them: they get lost, sat on, scratched, stolen, broken, dirty etc. Imagine what it must be like to have the same frustrations all the year round. And don’t get me started on contact lenses!

The only positive thing that I can foresee in the near future is the excitement of bargaining with the optician concerning the worth of all the contact lenses that I have not used for the past year and which I have returned for some sort of monetary consideration from the optician. I am sure that all the money that I could gain will be hoovered by the opticians as they offer me a cut price pair of glasses which actually turns out to be hundred of pounds in good folding stuff. Ask anyone who has ever had a pair of glasses made and, by the time that you have said that you don’t want to look like the scientist in The Simpsons, you find that the cost of the processes which are used to make your prescription look less like two milk bottle bottoms held together with coat hangar wire and more like an ordinary pair of spectacles will empty your bank account. I think it is a technique which is taught to opticians during their first, second and third years of training, for most of the time of their training. Or am I just being bitter?

It’s obviously time for my sweet, sweet cough mixture which I am now drinking from the bottle.

Was there ever such dissipation?

Invisible buyers in the snow!

If there are any Canadians staying in Wales this week they must be stunned by the effect of snow on the daily life of the country. Five to ten centimetres of snow made front page news; top of the programme items on the radio and television; talking points on the street: it was the weather after all, part of our national obsession. And it’s pretty. Especially if you don’t have to got to work and have the leisure to look around at the cosmetic effect of a blanket of white over the imperfections of an urban landscape.

There was disruption, but not the usual total cessation of transportation which is the normal result of any deposit of the white stuff on the road system of Britain. And this is where the astonishment of Canadians must have kicked in; not so much about the difficult driving conditions which were constantly emphasised by the broadcasters, but rather the tone of self congratulation that the country was not completely destroyed by a light dusting of snow. Didn’t we do well? Only half the schools in Wales were closed! Gosh!

God alone knows what would have to happen for Canadian school to close; presumably massed hordes of rabid huskies armed with tactical nuclear weapons and helicopters spraying hydrofluoric acid might delay some pupils from reaching their scholastic destination, but they usually take what we regard as cataclysmic disasters in their comfortable stride. What we in Wales experienced today would, I’m sure, not even register on their news radar.

There is now eager expectation that we will be able to rise above the problems associated with the unprecedented phenomenon of temperatures getting lower during the night in winter time when things might even freeze. We’re ready and waiting to show that we can manage by not driving recklessly over ice; but this is a radical response and we are not yet fully comfortable with these strange and outré coping procedures.

The saga of selling the house took a new and odd turn today. There was another viewing of a lady from Marshfield who is thinking of buying a property with a view to renting it out. The viewing was set for eleven in the morning, so the usual procedures were instituted. The cleaning and tidying and sorting and putting away and, and too many things to enumerate.

And nothing happened.

Not just nothing happened, but nothing was due to happen. Let me explain. The house was prepared for a guided viewing at eleven thirty today and I duly vacated the house so that the agent could take the prospective view around. The cunning device of leaving on the light in the downstairs loo was utilised; by its being turned off when I return it indicates that the viewing has taken place. The light was still on when I returned!

When I phoned the agent they denied all knowledge of the viewing, any viewing; nothing in the diary; nothing that anyone knew about anything to do with a viewing of my house. The circumstantial detail that I was able to give seemed to prompt no knowledge. Who phoned? Who was the mystery buyer? This is something which will have to be taken further.

I have to know

America 'Tis Of Thee!

How much do we hate the Americans?

This is not as simple as you might think. The question was posed on a Radio 4 programme today where an American professor was responding to Professor Taylor about his book which detailed the negative European response to American values and culture.

A French commentator was dismissing the thesis of the American professor and pointing out the very real links that exist between, for example, the French and the Americans. Listening to her was odd because, God knows, if there is one nation that we do hate it’s the French! The entente cordiale is desperately recent in terms of European history for the British and you only need to scratch the surface to find the usual British response nearer to healthy hatred as far as the French are concerned. In the opera ‘Billy Budd’ by Benjamin Britten there is a wonderful duet of English naval officers singing a paean of detestation of the French:

SAILING MASTER
Don't like the French.
Don't like their Frenchified ways.
FIRST LIEUTENANT
Don't like the French.
Their notions don't suit us, not their ideas.
SAILING MASTER
Don't like the French.
Don't like their bowing and scraping.
FIRST LIEUTENANT
Don't like their hoppity-skipetty ways.
SAILING MASTER
Don't like the French.
FIRST LIEUTENANT
Don't like their lingo.
SAILING MASTER,
FIRST LIEUTENANT
These damned mounseers!
FIRST LIEUTENANT
England for me. Home and beauty!

This is what we know about, good, old fashioned anti-Gallic prejudice, when the two sides, England and France, were a little more equally matched.

There is no such match with Britain and the United States of America: the ‘special relationship’ is a sick joke which we continue to delude ourselves about. We are not even a junior partner in this relationship; we are just another European nation in that laughable organization which never actually flexes its muscle or uses its real strength and continues to allow the United States to be the only convincing Super State in the world.

We continue to believe that, as the United States speaks our language they must be like us and have sympathy for us and our ideas. This is deluded. Churchill once commented that we are two nations separated by a common language. I think that is perceptive: it is the elements which would seem to unite us that actually show our divisions. From their customs and Christianity to their politics and political institutions they are different, and disturbingly so. The simple idea of a local sheriff being a political appointee is anathema to us. The overt veneration of The Flag and the pledge of allegiance seem absurd. The size of the country is beyond our imaginations.

The French commentator observed that the relationship between France and America was strong because of the number of American influences in the country: McDonalds, Hollywood, pop singers etc. The American commentator pointed out that a country can adopt many aspects of a foreign culture without being sympathetic to its values. He cited foreign demonstrations where American flags are burned by people wearing NYC baseball hats and America T shirts. I find that concept convincing and with a French commentator speaking I was reminded of the attitude of the French towards film.

In ‘Les Cahiers du Cinema’ the French took an essentially American development and industry and gave is an essentially French interpretation: the study of film as a valid artistic and intellectual exercise is basically a French invention. So the French could talk about, for example, Buster Keaton, and in their idolization of his ‘genius’ and talking of him as a great artist almost claim him for their own, as their own special creation, talking about this comic actor in a way in which his fellow countrymen find mystifying.

Of course we hate the Americans. From what little we know of history, we do know that they are doing what we used to do and we are having to watch as they rule the world and do what they like.

But just as certainly we would be idiotic not to participate in the illusion of the ‘Special Relationship’. As the United States is the most powerful democratic nation in the world we have to link our fortunes to a country which offers so much as a major ally.

Doesn’t make it any more palatable when the leader of our major ally is someone as unprepossessing as the idiot Bush.

Could have been worse; at least he isn’t Nixon.

Though I still wouldn’t buy a second hand car from Bush.

Machine Aid!

While the deep rumble of a passing slag train blended with the metallic thump of a high pressure hammer and the sharp acidic smoke of a tall chimney was wreathed at its base with wisps of steam from the coke furnaces, a small group of platelayers was gathered round a hapless student working during his summer vacation.

He was the only one working. The sun was strong for once and the murky depths of the steel works gleamed in the unexpected radiance and the air glittered as the airborne coal dust reflected the light like tiny diamonds.

All eyes focused on the student as sweat slowly trickled down his forehead and dripped with increasing rapidity from his chin. He was trying, for the first time, to use a pneumatic drill. Part of the permanent way was set in concrete and, during an intensive period of woks restoration this piece of the rail network was being replaced.

The student tried vainly to manipulate the unwieldy piece of machinery to gain some sort of purchase on the smooth concrete and then to direct the force of the metal spike to break up the seemingly indestructible stone. As he struggled and fumbled he was acutely aware of the contemptuous looks of the other men as they waited for what they saw as an effete interloper cynically tasting their work until he was able to brush off the dust and dirt and return to the physically undemanding world of academe.

As my more perceptive readers will have gathered, the embarrassed student was my good self working as a platelayer in the (now defunct) East Moors Steel Works. This was a place which was able to terrify me on a fairly constant basis as I frequently came into contact with machinery and situations which could not only kill you, but do it without effort or even noticing your demise.

To be fair to me, I did make an effort and one worker actually gave me the grudging commendation that I was better than most of the damned students that they had had. Except he didn’t use the word ‘damned’; I have to admit that, up until that point in time, I had never heard the f-word used so much and in so many grammatical forms. No sentence was complete without the f-word; no phrase was uttered without the accompanying expletive. There was no emotion, aspiration, frustration, achievement, horror, pleasure or incisive political comment which could not be conveyed by the f-word alone. Chinese is an inflected language where the same word has a variety of differing meanings depending on the tone in which the word is spoken. The Chinese could have learned a thing or two by listening to the tonal nuances in the language of steel workers whereby they were able to restrict themselves to a single f-word yet, by tonal inflection alone, convey whole novels of meaning with a vocabulary of one word.

Out of sheer devilment I made an executive decision not to use the f-word myself, which was noticed by my fellow workers with a sort of grudging astonishment. I preserved this linguistic oddity right up until I dropped a steel bar on my foot. The only person near me was a fellow student who gleefully told me that my linguistic purity would be denounced to our colleagues as soon as there was a break. Which he did, and I (bless me!) stoutly maintained that I said no such thing and that the student was just being malicious. And they believed me! And mocked my fellow students as a scoundrel. Ha!

Meanwhile, the pneumatic drill: in spite of dripping with sweat and using all my strength to keep the bloody point of the drill on the same spot to penetrate the concrete, it remained stubbornly whole and without crack. The other workers in my gang watched with restrained hilarity until they could stand it no longer and urged a young lad to take over from me. This muscled school leaver picked up the drill with easy nonchalance and then by apparently resting the pulsating tip of the drill on the concrete caused the material to crumble. It is my personal belief that he (luckily) found the ‘sweet spot’ of the slab and used the sympathetic vibrations of the drill to do the work for him.

One member of our gang was an older worker who had been a gang leader himself when younger and was now working his way towards an easy retirement. He had the undemanding task of greasing the points on the railway system in the works, which he did with quiet dignity. However, sometimes the work load of the gang was so heavy that he was encouraged to help us in the more physical stuff that we had to complete and then you saw the experience of years of work. I was young and active and enthusiastic and yet, with all my effort, I did not actually achieve as much as the methodical, ergonomic method of working that he had developed over decades. He used directed effort to achieve more, whereas my effort dissipated itself in all directions!

So I’m not au fait with mechanical equipment; especially equipment that is electrically driven and is dangerous. So the de grouting machine has been something less than convincing in my hands. I hope to God that Paul Squared will be able to inject some sort of common sense and mechanical aptitude into the disaster area that is the shower cubical; has to be re-grouted by Thursday.

House viewing is tyranny!

Always learning!

Never too old to learn.

A lesson which is ever tripping off tongues which are too old or too young and which have not been asked to learn too much too soon. Learning is actually very hard. Especially learning those things which others find important or culturally significant. What is this all amounting to? What learning is bugging me now? Not the Spanish today. That is not just a language more a whole culture: you are allowed to find the acquisition of that a tad difficult.

The real learning difficulty I am encountering is to do with my eyes. This is not a John Berger way-of-seeing sort of looking but something much more practical; seeing the world in something approaching focus.

As my optician tries for the umpteenth time to find the right prescription for my eyes by varying the strength of the contact lenses to compensate for my long and short sightedness, I have now, graciously, decided that I can live with contact lenses and glasses for reading.

To optimise the level of sight my poor old brain is expected to learn how to see using the differentiated strengths of lens allocated to each eye which, by their combination, should allow greater flexibility in my sight. Does that actually make sense? I hope it does to my brain, because I am wearing the contact lenses to drive and to complete various other important tasks.

The addition of reading glasses to the contact lenses is another level of brain decoding expectation. It is too wearing for me to work out how my actual sight, compensated by contact lenses, modified by glasses moderated by a confused brain is all supposed to work. I look on it like those wonderful pictures which were so popular a while ago which looked completely non specific but, when viewed in a certain way, lo and behold! a three dimensional image would loom out of the multicoloured surface.

I remember these pictures because, after the initial phase of asking why a jumbled mass of markings was called ‘Elephants in the Serengeti,’ the images would snap into focus almost immediately for me.

There was a glorious incident in an arty shop in Albany Road where there was a whole series of these pictures. One customer was flicking through them and asked the sales assistant what they were. The assistant replied that they were those digital pictures with hidden images. When the customer asked where the images were, the assistant replied that he had no idea and he had never been able to see them. At this point I butted in and said that I could usually see them.

There then followed a bizarre period when image after image was shown to me and I told the pair of them what they were supposed to see. I can remember one of them was an eagle returning to its nest on a mountain side and I even tried to point out to them where the shape of the image was with a vague finger pointing.

This was not as easy as you might think because to see the image it was important not to use both eyes to focus, so it was in fact impossible to point to one specific point in the picture as it was composed of two areas of the surface for it to work.

I think that the reason that I found it easy was that the focus of my eyes normally was not exact and it was easy for me to slip out of focus and find the image.

This is one of the few times that faulty eyesight has been an advantage, and even that has been limited as the magic of those digital 3D images has faded into obscurity.

I have conducted a search for these magic 3D images and have managed to find some which I will scatter through this blog. I wonder how many people will be able to see the images hidden in the pictures. I hope that I can spread a little frustration and, just as you gnash your teeth, I might point out that I have not lost the old skill and the images popped out straight away for me!

Take credit where you can find it, I say!

If you get really desperate, you can always ask me what images are hidden (not for me!) in these pictures.

Happy looking!

Time for Culture?

An infection on the wrist (who is surprised, this is 2007, what good happens in this year?) precludes my wearing a watch and I have been depressed to discover just how much I need a timepiece strapped to my body. I had thought that the loosening of the stranglehold of the demands of a school timetable would mean that time would become a little more malleable. That has not proved to be the case.

I think that the only thing which still ticks to the school clock is my bladder! It seems that my urinary system is geared to ‘first break’ for the ‘empty and refill’ which is the toilet break and a cup of tea. The other significant time markers are lost in a normal non-school day where the pace of living and the organization of events do not fit the highly artificial ‘day’ which is the modern school time allocation.

From time to time I idly wonder what I might have been teaching based on my last timetable: but as my timetable was never hard wired into my memory even when I was in school, it is hardly likely that it will spring to mind when the necessity for paying lip service to remembering is not even remotely present. What I do recall are vague lesson times, and from my experience, I can remember virtually any class in any position in the timetable! Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are usually particularly memorable; especially in that never-to-be-forgotten year when I was free for both. Though, as I recall, the reality of staff absence meant that the mythical double never actually happened in my case!

For me, thinking about school is like translating the cost of things in 2007 into pounds, shillings and pence – good old Lsd. It’s superficially interesting, but more frightening than illuminating and, eventually, an empty exercise.

When I spoke to Gwen about her coursework poem a few days ago I could feel the old pedagogical juices begin to flow; but that was one receptive pupil, not a class – so I am not romanticising my feelings of loss at having a receptive class in front of me to snuffle around to find the pearls of wisdom amidst the acorns of digression! But I do sometimes feel the need to learn by explanation: it’s my way!

The book which I might discuss with a class is the one that I’ve just finished, ‘The Sound of Laughter’ The Autobiography of Peter Kay. The book was a present to Paul 1 which has been loaned to me, and I have to say that I am glad that I didn’t actually spend any money on it. This ‘autobiography’ is intermittently funny in a formulaic way. Kay’s writing style is faux amateur, with some cringe making asides to the reader and you feel that this is more the substance of his stand-up shows rather than a real attempt to create a comic life story.

Kay’s writing is undemanding and he rarely develops the funny situations he describes: he creates types and no real characters. His understanding of himself is carefully regulated and this is one of the least revealing autobiographies that I have read in a long time.

He does have an eye for the absurd ordinary situation, but he spotlights this skill and it lacks the guilelessness that would make this technique particularly effective.

This is the sort of read which is perfect for the doctor’s waiting room: you can pick it up and put it down with equal ease. It is beach reading, and none the worse for that.

The other delightful cultural experience today has been a viewing of the British film, ‘Severance’ “SEVEN COLLEAGUES. ONE WEEKEND AWAY. IT’S TIME TO GET SLAUGHTERED.” That pun is an accurate touchstone of the quality of the film.

It starts well enough (in a way) and seems to be developing into a nice little blackish comedy in the British Style. Absurd caricatures with quirky traits set on a bus going to a team building weekend in Eastern Europe; unoriginal, but a good enough vehicle for humour. With nice judgement this could have been a sort of slapstick, zany, unsettling but funny film. As it turned out the balance of the film was hopelessly skewed, and the different elements of humour and horror constantly juggled for prominence, not in a productively artistic struggle but as a woeful series of misjudgements.

The humour is basic and the bloody horror gratuitous. There are a few funny moments, but the tenor of the film leaves you feeling both guilty and slightly dirty because of the confusion of style.

‘Severance’ was a thoroughly unpleasant watch in a way in which ‘Sean of the Dead’ wasn’t. There the humour was subordinated to the narrative comedy of the piece and laughter was sometimes shocked, but never shameful.

The film was made with money from The National Lottery and the British Film Board – they should both look to their funding policy.

My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen!

What reserves of human endurance does it take to be the Secretary General of the United Nations? I ask this after seeing Ban Ki-Moon addressing the gathered talent which made up the African Union (AU) summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The television coverage showed Ban Ki-Moon arriving in the conference hall, progressing through the ‘dignitaries’, mounting the podium and looking out at his audience. There was then a ‘point of view’ shot of his listeners, with the camera lingering on some of the more choice specimens, sitting in sharp designer suits or colourful local dress or splendid military uniforms. And that brings me back to my opening question.

As he looks at the smug, murdering, callous, hypocritical, vicious, inhuman, and whatever other unappealing epithets you can apply to the men (mostly; exclusively?) who lead Africa’s nations, what sort of despair must grip his soul?

It’s easy to feel this way when we are constantly bombarded with the failures of Africa: from the relentless famine seemingly policed by AK47 toting gangsters; the interminable wars fought with hi-tec weaponry watched by starving civilians; the stark contrast of high rise buildings juxtaposed with squalid shacks; basic medical conditions exacerbated by bizarre local prejudice; religion in all its inhumanity being vaunted as a panacea, to the oleaginous faces of corrupt politicians sending their children to western finishing schools.

But it’s too easy to feel like this. My generation has grown up with our shouldering the burden of guilt in the form of Africa since our earliest schooling. Africa has always been the continent of need, the convenient depository for charity, the perennial black hole of deprivation.

Since that black hole can never be filled, it is a useful way of throwing away a few spare pence, confident in the knowledge that it will be just as black and just as empty tomorrow. Futility can have its uses: you pay a little money to assuage your guilt and, since nothing ever really improves, you don’t need to pay in a more realistic way. Corruption, nepotism, bribery, theft – all the abuses we used to list in history lessons for the pre-Reformation Catholic Church are alive and well and thriving in Africa.

But let’s put this another way. What does the Secretary General of UNO think when he speaks to the European Union? Does he feel any better? Is there any reason he should do? How is his view different? Fewer black faces? Fewer uniforms? The same suits, the same haute couture, and, the same corruption? Plus ca change, plus C’est la meme chose?

Well, no – I think that’s ridiculous. I am not one of those bleeding heart liberals who think that all our western systems, conventions, institutions, politicians, laws and parliaments are irredeemably and post colonially evil and no good can come out of them. But the idea that looking at the leaders of Africa and looking at the leaders of Europe are ‘the same’ is simply unhelpful.

I remember looking at a book about Africa (I think about Ghana) when I was in primary school and being genuinely shocked at a picture of a judge in full wig and gown; not so much because of the incongruity of the transplantation of western legal dress conventions, but rather because the judge was black. I couldn’t understand how it could have happened. How could a black man achieve the status of a judge? There were certainly no authority figures in my Welsh childhood who were black: no teacher; no policeman; no doctor; no dentist; no clergyman; no shopkeeper – and so the list goes on.

Hardly surprising that the childhood sense of wonder at any mimicking of the achievements of civilization by emergent African nations [please feel free to pepper the preceding statements with as many quotation marks as you think necessary] should, and must, inform and help explain my present day attitude.

A telling counterpoint to these ruminations occurred when I read the ‘Indie’ when sitting alone in the living room during the early hours when coughing in bed prone had lost all of its attraction. When you can’t sleep and the only thing you have to hand is a newspaper then you tend to read it all – from beginning to end. It was during this marathon sitting that a small photograph of a pair of feet caught my eye; sad feet, with socks, with two big toes poking out.

They turned out to be the stocking feet of a gentleman who had removed his shoes because of his visit to a mosque. He, it emerged, was the director, head, emperor of the World Bank. The head of the World Bank cannot afford, or doesn’t care, or has different imperatives, or . . . no, holes in his socks. Like the black judge, how could it have happened?

I am constantly unsettled by the incongruities of my understanding of life. The paradoxical basis of the use of ‘constantly’ in the previous statement is not lost on me either.

The constant tug of cynicism, the easy waving away of idealism, the depressing recognition of sad, bad scenarios continually playing themselves out could depress a more receptive person than myself, even without the constant tickle of an incipient cough to remind him of old mortality; but I think that I lack that necessary imagination to be a true depressive.

So I’ll smile instead.

And smile, and smile and smile.

Contact! The prodigal returns.

If I had discovered my erring tortoise before six pm on that fateful Sunday then my life would have been, if not necessarily different, then at least differently paced.

As my mother and I (not my father, never my father) got ready for evensong I discovered the devastating truth that Timmy, my beloved tortoise, was missing: he had made a bid for freedom, escaping from the back yard of 25, Dogfield Street into the scary veldt of endless Cathays. My take on the situation was simple: no tortoise – no God; therefore no church. I refused to move from my prone, weeping position on my bed and my mother had to trudge to the evening service alone.

Search parties were dispatched to Malefant Street, Twkesbury Road, and Monthermer Road and even towards Whitchurch Road. For Timmy to have made it anywhere near some of these locations he would have to have had some form of motorized personal transportation a damn sight quicker than the scaly legs which he sometimes deigned to move, sluggishly, when whipped up into a frenzy by a succulent piece of greenery wafted directly in his eye line.

Eventually my father interrupted my wailing misery and told me that Timmy had been found. My take on the situation was simple: Timmy found – God exists; therefore to evensong!

I arrived in the middle of a hymn and, fully (and enthusiastically a member of the congregation now that Timmy was restored) asked my singing mum for the hymn number. She did not stop singing, but gestured to the front with her right hand. I asked her again for the hymn number. Rather irritated my mother told me that the hymn numbers were listed on the column by the pulpit as usual and couldn’t I see them? No, I couldn’t. I asked again for the hymn number. My mother’s reaction to my lack of vision was so strong that we almost left the church immediately.

I realise now, of course, that my mother’s mind must have gone into a series of flip flaps of the “if he can’t see the numbers, his sight must be faulty; how bad is it; how long has he been short sighted; how does he see in school; o god how have I missed this?” sort of thing.

For me of course this was nothing out of the ordinary. I sat towards the back of the class and assumed that it was just a normal part of school life that you had to ask the kid next to you to show you the sums you were supposed to be copying into your book. Some things you could see, others you couldn’t. Wasn’t it always like this for everyone?

No it wasn’t, and within days I was in an optician and tested for my first pair of National Health glasses which, as my father delighted in recounting, made me look like ‘the owl of the remove.’

And the world sharpened up: gravel was made of small stones; houses had roofs made of individual slates and trees had lots of separate leaves. Only the short sighted with progressive sight loss know the wonder of having the world and the artefacts in it suddenly crisp out of their blur status with each new prescription for lenses!

I wore glasses until I was eighteen, when with money that I’d saved and with generous grant aid from the parents my first pair of contact lenses was bought. They were the old fashioned hard type lenses; ones you had to take treat carefully and handle with fastidious hygienic attention. No, of course I didn’t. Neither did anyone else I knew who wore them. One other thing I can guarantee is that every contact lens wearer will have an ‘impossible’ coincidence story to tell about the loss and subsequent finding of a rogue lens. Everyone, without exception!

Until, that was, the advent of the ‘single use’ lens: the daily disposable. The lenses designed for real people in the real world. In the disposable world, coincidence is irrelevant; you can always break out another one. And another source of myth is lost.

I’ve always hated wearing glasses and contact lenses; they served a purpose but perfect sight was something which I would have paid a fortune to have restored - and before you ask, laser treatment was not a possibility for my type of sight.

My contact lens wearing was a compromise between long and short sightedness with one eye dedicated to reading and the other eye dedicated to distance and the brain being asked to order the information to make it work. It was never quite satisfactory and therefore, when work slipped away, so did the use of contact lenses and a greater reliance on glasses. Rejection of the lenses that I had sworn by for years. An apostate falling away from the True Faith of the lightweight plastic circle!

Today: a reassessment.

Eyes tested, new prescription and another step to senility: contacts for distance and a pair of old man’s glasses for reading.

I am a living Dickens illustration!

Be nice!

To be fair, it doesn’t actually take a great deal for a Cardinal in the Roman Church to unsettle my equanimity. Most of the time I can luxuriate in the Jesuitical sophistry of the Princes of the Faith and be quite jocose about their sheer hypocrisy and callous disregard for actual life experience but, sometimes, the joke wears a little thin. One of those thin times was while listening to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor talking about the new single sex parental adoption legislation not being waived for Roman Catholic and other faith adoption agencies.

I am more than prepared to believe that the Cardinal is a decent person. I have heard him speak on various topics and he seems to be quite reasonable for a clergyman: not enlightened, that would be to expect too much, but (allowing for the burden of faith) at least slightly in touch with the verities of modern living.

My previous response evaporated listening to his explanation of the response of his church to its political impotence when trying to change the government’s mind about the inclusion of faith organizations in the anti discrimination legislation.

One of the many reasons for despising fundamentalist faiths, especially the Christian fundamentalist sects, is for those aspects of the human condition they choose to identify as the litmus paper of their beliefs. Before I list the two most ‘popular’ moral issues for unscrupulous faiths; a digression.

My father was a very gifted rugby player. According to family belief, and my reading of contemporary newspaper accounts, he was denied a place in the Welsh team by sporting politics. His talent was, however, widely recognised and he was asked to play for a number of teams. At the time that he was at his prime, just after the war, Rugby Union was an amateur sport: players played for the love of the game not for any cash that they might want to make from the sport. If they wanted money then they could ‘Go North’ and play professional Rugby League for a northern English rugby team. Indeed, such was the attitude of the governing body of the amateur sport to the commercial aspects that, any suggestion that a player might have been paid any money other than expenses, would result in an immediate ban from playing Rugby Union games.

How clean! How pure! Except, of course, it wasn’t. Many good players were paid ‘boot money’: a cash amount deposited in a player’s boot, no questions asked. And sometimes without even that subterfuge. But the public line was that the sport was purely amateur, and if there were ‘rotten apples’ taking money, then they were the corrupt few. Pious duplicity! Wilful self deception. Payment was widespread and everyone who mattered knew it happened. My father was a decent, honest man who believed that a good workman was worthy of his hire.

Although there are few similarities in content to ‘boot money’ there are many comparisons in attitude when I think of the less enlightened churches’ attitudes to homosexuality and abortion.

I do not deny that there are moral questions which need to be addressed about any person’s response to these two aspects of human life. They pose immense ‘problems’ for some people who regard the ‘issues’ of almost equal ‘quality’ and their ‘resolution’ being almost a basic entry requirement of the faith.

I have no intention of exploring the ‘issues’ (and I’m getting tired of using quotation marks), though I would say that the equation of an aspect of human sexuality with a woman’s right to choice is somewhat mystifying.

The two do seem to polarise conservative opinion and allow the more bigoted elements in congregations to concentrate belief in two easily appreciated ‘problems.’ Abortion is murder and homosexuality is perversion. Easy! No grey areas; easy judgements; excellent rallying points. And, of course, the churches have no ‘experience’ of the ‘problems.’ Homosexuality and abortion happen outside the faith, not in it – and we are back to the ‘boot money’ attitude of denial.

It would be facile (if entertaining) to enumerate the number of Popes who were covertly or extravagantly homosexual, but, on the other hand, without the proportion of the present clergy who are hardworking gay Christians, the Church would find it very difficult to survive. The Church knows it has homosexuals as an essential working part of its structure, but finds itself unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge that fact.

The Cardinal tried, in his comments to differentiate his attitude towards gay couples and a straight couple, by talking of an optimum family situation which, to him, would entail a mother and a father, which in turn would, of necessity, predicate a man and a woman. He emphasised that he meant no disrespect to homosexuals, but in this case there was a justification for differentiation. Unfortunately, saying it doesn’t mean that what you’ve said is true. It is disrespect and it does denigrate a gay relationship. It is unfortunate that the Cardinal is forced to tailor ideas to make paradoxes seem palatable.

The Cardinal Archbishop is a public personality; he has a high profile and is not reticent about placing his views on the record, but he is by no means the most objectionable of the demagogues who spread division by offering simplistic judgements to the howling delight of their followers.

‘Boot money’ happened, and now Rugby Union is a highly commercial and lucrative money making organization with individual players getting handsome remuneration for their sport – and quite right too. I wonder if Rugby might indicate a sort of lesson for his Eminance.

Ever the optimist, in spite of the cough!

Hydro literacy

The world divides, quite neatly, into three groups based on their attitudes towards reading in the bath.

Firstly, there is the group that enjoys reading in the bath.
Secondly there is the group that enjoys the idea of reading in the bath, and thirdly, and lastly, there is the group that thinks that a bath is solely a way of getting clean.

Let us take it as axiomatic that we can ignore and dismiss the last group as being composed of unimaginative poltroons of a baser sort and fellows unworthy even of contempt. As Shakespeare so tellingly almost wrote in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ “The man that hath no bath reading in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet volumes, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.”

The members of the first group are the masters of the universe. They have surmounted all the obstacles to literary perusal while immersed and have become adept at such mysteries as regulating the temperature of the water by big toe adjustment of the tap; moderating the suds level so that it does not threaten to deckle edge the book; maintaining a dry hand to ensure the preservation of the book; never resting the book on damp flesh, and always having a water free resting place for the volume when actually deciding to wash (optional).

I place myself firmly in the second group: the one which enjoys the idea of reading in the bath. I even go to the extent of finding a book I might read while soaking myself and making sure the towel is near so that dry hand will handle the precious volume, but it never works out. I have an inordinate fear of the hundred page wrinkle.

I dislike anything which detracts from the virgin page of print. I detest the American habit of augmenting the page numbers with decoration, or producing some sort of design feature on the top of the page. Indeed, I dislike page numbers altogether. When reading a novel for the first time you should use a book mark and there should be a way in which all page numbers could be removed or suppressed. After the book has been read then there should be some sort of process which turns the numbers on, so that discussion of the book can be made easier by reference to specific numbered locations for textual evidence.

With this sort of puritan fastidiousness you can imagine that an ink blot on the edge of the volume which squats on page after page until the blot has worked itself out is torture to me. A rip or a ruffle in the pages is irritation and a water wrinkle which creates ridges and valleys for letters and words is an intolerable invasion into my suspension of disbelief as I try to commune with the pure text. With this neurosis waiting to pounce on any blemish in the text, you can understand my reluctance to risk the disfigurement of the book by water.

But I like the idea of reading in the bath so much that I sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the appropriate volume to accompany the immersion! You never know; the moment might arise when The Read becomes a possibility; and without The Book, The Read could never occur. It is a gentle sort of literary Catch-22 situation.

These thoughts came to me as I hunted around in my depleted stock of books (my library being in the commodious pallets of Messrs Pickford in storage) for a volume to accompany my soak after my less than convincing ‘help’ given to Richard and Sue as they packed the van with another load of furniture and other oddments to take to France.

Most of my energy was obviously given over to my rigorous system of cough training which has been the focus of my physical exertions for the last few weeks. The world class racking coughs which I am producing are not mere vocal arabesques which can be bestowed on a germ filled world without considerable preparation, delivery and professional follow through. You know if a cough has achieved an international star rating by the extent of complete physical prostration which is its aftermath. Devotion to one’s art obviously precludes total participation in less demanding activities like loading a van.

As I type this, Sue and Richard should be at the boat and are, I hope, settling down to a decent meal on board, secure in the knowledge that the cuisine is French!

It will be interesting to see how their odyssey to sell up and get out goes. I do not envy them the depersonalisation of their home: an essential element in the presentation to future buyers. The advice to ‘de-clutter’ will start to seem like an insult, then a threat, then an impossible dream, then a moral imperative, then like a glorious release. If I have any advice to give (and believe me I gave plenty!) then it can all be compressed into one clear mantra: “You always need a bigger skip than you thought.” They have happy times ahead!

My happy times over the next two days are confined to visits to the dentist and the optician.

Happy days indeed.

Coughing to victory!

I do not suspect vicious intent on the part of our doctors in our local surgery. They have set up shop in a pair of semi detached houses and the waiting room on the ground floor is a strange shape meandering past the receptionist’s window and working its way to the back of the houses and into the next one. This means that leg room is at a premium. There are very few spaces that a patient waiting can actually stretch his or her legs. Now, given the waiting time that ensues before a patient is seen there must be a need to stretch and find something to do.

As is usual in doctors’ waiting rooms, dentists’ waiting rooms and hospital waiting rooms, there are the ageless magazines that you find nowhere else displaying a studied tattiness that you only see on period sets on television drama series! They are also the sort of magazines that no one anyone knows ever buys. Where do they find them? These grubby pages clinging forlornly to rusting staples are reminders of the interests of a class far removed from that enjoyed by the majority of inhabitants in Rumney!

So with nothing to read and no space to spread out the only thing that you are left with is to have recourse to conversation; but the layout is not conducive to easy linguistic interchange and so the usual mode of talk is actually whispers, giving the atmosphere in the waiting room more of a church like mood.

It is always a relief when your name is called, though you have to run the gauntlet of the people left waiting as they assess the appropriateness of the name called out to the person walking towards one of the consulting rooms.

Luckily, given my chesty cough, there was no problem about being prescribed antibiotics so I am now taking nine tablets a day. That it should come to this!

On a more positive note: ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ was handed back to the library this morning and by the early evening the very excellent Rumney Library had managed to get me a copy of ‘Barnaby Rudge.’ Superb service! Though I was hoping for a little respite before I had to plunge into another 800 page novel, I am eager to re-read (yes, re-read, I read it first on my handheld!) this relatively unpopular novel by Dickens.

Coughing should be recognised as an art form, or possibly a sport (and thinking of London 2012) surely, an Olympic sport, at that. I say this in all humility because I could now be a major competitor with a realistic chance for the Gold. Again, being realistic, we stand a very good chance of being, with Canada, one of only two countries to host the Olympic Games without actually winning a single gold medal. Or indeed, if you scratch gently at our raw neuroses, any medals at all. All of our metal ware is going to be made cheaply in China, flown over to London, only to be re-exported to China at the end of the Games. Let’s hope that the National Mint in Llantrisant has won the contract to produce the medals for the Chinese Olympics, ‘cos that’s the only way that we are going to see any medals in Wales.

But perhaps I am being too pessimistic. Perhaps the awarding of the Games to London in 2012 was not, as I now suspect, a dastardly plot by the French, in a typically Gallic game of triple double-dealing, to humiliate us by not only forcing us to host the most expensive two weeks in the world in the 80% of a lustrum from 2008 to 2012, [Note: this is a tediously pretentious way of saying four years; a lustrum being an obscure word for five years, therefore 80% of it being four years. Ed.] But also an empty achievement which will trumpet our lack of sporting talent to the world. Damned cunning those Froggies! [Remember Jade! Ed.]

Enough of this self defeating pessimism: Vivat! Britannia! What if Spain won 13 (Dear God!) Gold medals when they hosted the Olympic Games: we can do that. Can’t we?

I’m too ill, practising my chest rattling cough, to be any more positive.

I’m going to bed!

Leave the kids alone!

Mrs Nickleby still retains her accolade as the Monster of the Month from the novels by Dickens that I have read so far. Quilp in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ is more of a grotesque than a monster and the grandfather at least has the good grace to die decorously on Nell’s grave; he is not allowed to live on with his crimes of selfishness unpunished!

For me the real interest in the novel, apart from the apocalyptic descriptions of industrialisation, lies in the descriptions of infantile sexuality. There is a thoroughly unpleasant series of questionable relationships. Nell is constantly described as Little Nell, but her position as a child is constantly compromised by the burden of adulthood which she is forced to bear because her ostensible protector cannot fulfil that role. People’s responses to her emphasise her physical attractiveness and there is often a sexual tone in the way in which she is positioned in the novel: often the narrative allows a sexual responsiveness on the part of other adult characters to the child. Her grandfather’s confusion takes the idea that Nell’s mother and grandmother all have a physical similarity, which almost encourages sexual confusion.

Other examples of child sexuality are found in Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, where the proprieties are preserved by Dick paying for the education of the Marchioness until she is of marriageable age, though it is obvious that he entertains more than platonic feelings towards her when she is still the very small servant. His naming of this unattached female is interesting, choosing the appellation of Sophronia Sphynx which makes the girl into an object, almost like some form of dramatic act, while the surname Sphynx emphasises the danger inherent in Dick’s views of women: part lion, part woman.

Kit in his responses to Barbara undergoes a ‘ripening seed’ experience as Barbara encourages him to think in sexual terms about their relationship rather than in terms of friendship. Kit, like Nell is forced by circumstances to adopt the role of an adult so with his mother, he often appears more like a husband than a son.

Quilp has the most amoral approach to his relationships, though given his hatred of ‘everybody’ his actions are understandable, in a way you could even say that he is true to himself! His bullying attitude towards his wife is expressed in physical abuse as well as verbal contempt. Quilp often accompanies his diatribes against humanity with physical blows. Although Quilp is an adult, as a dwarf he shares his size with children and his wife constantly is in fear of him, but at the same time is fascinated by him and wants him as a husband. Her sexual reaction to this hideous dwarf is incomprehensible and compellingly realistic. Tom Scott too, although constantly attacked by Quilp has a sympathetic reaction when his master dies. Whatever the reader might think about Quilp, he is physically vital and exudes a sort of raw animal power.

The one unalloyed success in terms of marriage is the partnership of the Garlands, but their happy marriage produces a fairly vapid son who, amazingly, falls in love, “How it happened, or how they found it out, or which of them first communicated the discovery to the other, nobody knows.” This is an unconvincing relationship manufactured by the author to tie up loose ends at the end of the novel, and another relationship where the sexual experience is questionable, to say the least.

The ambiguity of relationships is taken to a different level with the brother and sister partnership of Sally and Sampson Brass. The masculine appearance of Sally and her strange dress constantly confounds strangers and, while we can appreciate a strong woman held back by convention from taking a full part in the profession in which she is expert, her lack of morality is depressing. Her brother is outwardly expected to be the stronger, but as his name suggests, he can be easily tames by a woman. Their surname also suggests the emptiness of their enterprises, the sounding brass signifying very little. That Sally is not immune to male attention makes her even more grotesque as in the flirting between Dick and herself, he constantly refers to her as a man! The sexual ambiguity there is too complex to contemplate with equanimity!

The schoolmaster with his obsession with his favourite pupil which is then transferred to Nell is an uneasy portrayal: his dedication is clear but his concentration on the physical melding of his dead male pupil and his live young friend suggests that this androgynous pedagogic creation is fulfilling a particular physical need in the schoolmaster’s life.

At the end of the novel I think that I am most impressed with the portrayal of a gambling addiction and the lengths to which the old man goes to satisfy his physical need to gamble and also the literally fatal convoluted justifications that he needs to find to allow him to continue in his destructive path.

Although there is the usual Dickensian ‘happy ending’ at the
end of the novel you are left with a heavy burden of misery and the intolerable burdens that some of the characters have had to bear. I know that this novel was immensely popular when it was published with Americans meeting the boat which brought the next instalment of the story, and crying out to the crew about the fate of Little Nell. Its obvious sentimentality is not to the modern taste and I think that many readers will and have shared Oscar Wilde’s naughty observation that, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

An uneasy read.

The next novel is ‘Barnaby Rudge’ not one of Dickens’ most popular novels, though taking the Gordon Riots as the basis for its major action it keeps alive a most discreditable incident in British history.