Meal matters

The rain continues: viciousness combined with vindictiveness and a personal animosity, character testing, will sapping moisture. If I spend another Christmas in this god forsaken water washed sun denied apology for a country in which I will not be able to top up my tan I will not be responsible for my writing. And the food . . . don't start me!

Food is becoming something of a problem in Catalonia, well, at least the food for the Christmas meal on Christmas Day. We have been presented with a menu for some fifty euros (£35) which Toni has derided as ruinously expensive and he has urged his sister to look for another restaurant. For this absurd sum of money we would have various canapés to start with pan Catalana, followed by a Christmas soup which is composed of pasta and small meat balls in a consommé; followed by fish (for my choice); finishing with a dessert. Included in the price is Cava, wine, water and coffee. As you can see, hardly worth it, is it? I sometimes feel as though I am living in a different universe; roll on living in Spain!

While reading The Pickwick Papers I have been both surprised and also disappointed by the format of the novel. The picaresque style is deeply unsatisfying, with the incidents being insubstantial and facile. The characterisation is weak to the point of derision with the character of Mr Pickwick himself being the least satisfactory with Dickens constant reinforcement of the quality of the character being less than convincing. He is a cipher; a mildly amusing cipher but a cipher nevertheless. In the preface to the edition of the novel that I have Dickens says that he rejected the stereotype of various characters going off hunting as the basis for the book, but the early chapters do not show that amount of originality. What you can see are the first ideas of elements which are going to be of major importance in the future novels.

Now that I have come to the part of the novel where Mr Pickwick has been sent to the Fleet the ‘real’ Dickens is emerging: the whole tone of the writing has been changed. The intensity of the descriptions and the emotional involvement is markedly more personal and engaging. The descriptions of squalor and the unfair systems which produce personal misery are immediately emotive and compelling. A feeling of personal fury is apparent in the writing: this is the Dickens that I like to read, though the weaknesses in his vision for improvement are immediately apparent with Mr Pickwick’s money providing relief rather than suggesting changing the system. I am beginning to enjoy the read!

And think of all the volumes to come!

Toilet traditions

“Do the Sunday newspapers make your feel ignorant?” asked Jimmy in ‘Look Back in Anger.’

This is a question which is of perennial relevance when reading the small libraries which pass for Sunday papers nowadays, especially when they have the intellectual clout of a paper like The Observer. There was a time when the last part of that sentence could be written without irony, but just glance thorough the selection of features in the present incarnation of a once great journal and the intellectual level is not necessarily something to be lauded!

However, never let it be said that I cannot find something to stimulate my capacities in the wealth of newsprint that I have cursorily perused. A burning question was suggested by the tail end thoughts in Rachel Cooke’s column. She made an assumption which triggered thoughts and immediate opinions. I do like it when journalists fulfil their most pressing public obligation and force the reader into a whole wealth of speculation which seems to have an immediate, pressing reality and which uncovers passionate, previously unsuspected, strongly held convictions.

I speak of course of what reading matter might be considered appropriate in the toilet. As someone who demands books in every room in the house, using the ancient dictum (perhaps formulated by me) that “a room without a book is like a person without a soul.” It therefore follows that a small library should be within reach wherever you are in a civilized home. This is not a determination which is shared by Toni who is rather more of the opinion that a small brazier should be on hand in every room into which to throw any printed matter which may have insinuated its way into a visible position anywhere!

There is also the problem of Benthamite utility and Puritan correctness connected with certain rooms. The kitchen of course should have books, but those related to the function of the room itself: recipe books. God knows these days cook books seem to be expanding their remit to include virtually anything connected with the process of living rather than mere functional recipes. My point is that the modern recipe book is much more than a manual; it is almost a philosophical autobiography and searing revealing of psychological angst and therefore has the same enjoyment value as a good novel! The kitchen books then, while retaining a semblance of functionality are, in fact more sweeping in their range and interest.

What then of the bathroom, especially if a bathroom should contain a toilet? I have never managed to read in the bath with any degree of satisfaction: however careful you are you always seem to get water on the pages of the book and I hate the wrinkled appearance of water spotted pages which never seem to dry out to their previously pristine flatness. Even worse is water finding its way onto the top of the pages and leaving a corrugated reminder of the bath experience at the top of pages yet to be read.

I hate anything which reminds me of the physical reality of the page: page numbers in an unorthodox position; eventfully cheap paper with chunky undulations in the paper surface; strange typefaces smudgy ink; poor bindings; superfluous book mark ribbons; impossibility of opening the book fully and print which is too small. I am well aware that all of the above could be used in a post Modernist approach to reading, but in those circumstances I would have a different critical apparatus to cope with such fripperies!

The toilet is a problem. The British and the Europeans have a different approach to the evacuation of the bowels. The French and the Germans seem to have a positively unhealthy interest in the products of the digestive system, with German toilets designed for close inspection of the results! The British have tended to be euphemistic about such things and to want to get them over with as soon as possible. The process of evacuation is seen as an animal necessity and should be completed with disinterested efficiency while maintaining a type of total concentration to get the job (!) done as soon as possible. Reading would therefore be considered as a species of frivolous behaviour when such a serious physical necessity is in progress. In and, as it were, out are the keywords here.

There is, of course, an alternative school of thought which states that time on the toilet is quality time and should be treated as such; so that reading could be seen as a worthwhile activity.

We now come to a consideration of what should be read. Rachel Cooke notes the increase in the number of rude and vulgar toilet books which are being published for Christmas and are designed to live on the cistern and provide jocular amusement to evacuees. At this point I must disagree, I dispute the connection of toilet and rude. I do not think that the vulgarity of the reading matter should match the action. Indeed I feel that the word ‘vulgarity’ linked to a natural process is totally inappropriate: it shows, surely, a depressingly Victorian denial of the details of ordinary human existence.

My own choice of reading in the loo has included such diverse volumes as ‘The City of God’ by Saint Augustine – given the sometimes contemplative nature of excretion the amazingly detailed discussion of theological minutiae is ideal material; books of quotations – which I am sure will come as no surprise to those who know me; ‘A Poem A Day’ – an almost perfect toilet tome, not only short but also day appropriate; An Illustrated History of Christianity; The Penguin Book of Comics, and A history of the World, to name but a few. None of them exactly frivolous, even the book of comics was more of an illustrated history more than a series of pictures. I am considering placing the book I mentioned yesterday (top 500 poems) in the loo replacing the purpose printed book which combines a book of themed quotations together with summaries of great works of literature, lives of famous people and improving manuals. It turns out to be by an American publisher. What a surprise.

Carmen has returned to Catalonia for a short period of rest and recuperation before returning to the fray with reinforcements in the form of her two daughters and young grandson. The only response that I have to this onslaught is to plan the ‘traditional Christmas meal’ that I said that I would provide.

Now I am beginning to worry about what food exactly is suggested by the world ‘traditional’ in that context. I will have an interesting fortnight in considering what to spread on the festive tables for them.

Poetry to Putrescence

I shall mark this day with a white stone. That was what Lewis Carroll used to write in his diary when something of moment which gave him pleasure occurred. I seem to remember reading somewhere that it was an old Roman custom and one worth keeping up.

The reason for the celebration was discovering two undiscovered books shops in Cardiff, both of which were discovered because Carmen wanted to buy a Welsh souvenir for a particular friend of hers. I wasn’t of course allowed more than a few seconds to consider the unsuspected existence of these emporia before the needs of a guest were considered, but I was able to find a book which I purchased for later gloating.

The book is called ‘The Top 500 Poems’ edited by William Harmon and published by Columbia in 1992, although second hand, it is in good condition. The title is fairly confrontational in its assertion and it takes a little time before the raison d’etre of the book is revealed. The selection of the poems is based on their inclusion in a series of anthologies; the anthologies are not listed by the authority which has been used is cited as ‘The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry.’

What this selection purports to be is “the story of poetry in English” for the last 750 years. What it allows is a collection of poems which are exclusively Anglo-American. There seems to be no representation from other English speaking countries which are not directly connected by the Atlantic! However, this is merely a quirk which does not necessarily affect the quality of the individual poems selected. It should be the sort of selection that allows me to dip in with a fairly good chance of knowing the poet and a good chance of knowing the individual poem. This I tested as soon as I revealed the presence of the book in the shopping bag “just to see” and sure enough, it turned out that even if I didn’t know the whole of the poem cited, I certainly knew the ‘famous bit’ which made the poem famous! This was a relief, as I suspect that more and more of the poetry that I once knew is seeping away from my brain into the ether as if the poems were some sort of Mission Impossible tape which continues to self destruct after a short stay in my memory!

The volume is very satisfyingly thick and, although there are a fair number of sonnets in the collection there are also a goodly number of more substantial poems to read. Given that these are some of the most famous poems in the English language I hope that my reading will actually be more of a re-reading and if it isn’t then at least I will be filling in gaps which should have been plugged years ago.

As this volume is published in America and I suspect that the anthologies which are counted in the data base are American in their bias then there is a good chance that there will be a distinct leaning towards ‘famous’ American poems which may not necessarily correspond to the selections of poems in a predominantly British collection.

The poem in the first position as the one which h has been most anthologised is ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake and the first non British poet mentioned is Frost with ‘Stepping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The first poem that I thought I did not know was number 28, ‘Helen’ by Poe, described by the editor as “seemingly a conglomeration of imperfections” yet, nevertheless “has been the greatest American lyric poem” for the last 150 years. Reading though it raised no real recognition in my mind until the lines:
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Was Poe the first to write that? If so, and given that I do know those lines, the first poem of which I know neither the poem nor its famous lines would be number 66 ‘Mr Flood’s Party’ by Edwin Arlington Robinson, an American described by the editor as unsuccessful in his early years but becoming in his last twenty years “among the most honoured American poets” with three Pulitzer Prizes and someone of whom I have never heard. I hope that there will be other discoveries along the way.

This is the sort of book which I need from a Spanish perspective so that I can find out the commonly accepted poetic knowledge of that Spain: discovering the equivalent in Spanish of things like ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’; ‘The burial of Sir John Moore’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

Talking of differences in national psyche, today in the international edition of ‘El Mundo’ there was a large notice on the obituaries page for a certain Franco; the same Franco who died in the seventies to general rejoicing in Catalonia. The notice described Franco as dying a Christian and urging people to go to the Basilica in the Valley of the Fallen for a service. This Basilica houses the tomb of Franco in a structure which was hollowed out of rock by slave labour provided by captured soldiers from the Spanish Civil War. It is a living disgrace and it’s something that decent Spaniards would like to see destroyed. I find it hard to believe that this was in the Spanish editions of the paper. Worth finding out. It will be very interesting to see what happens on the actual anniversary of the dictator’s death which is on the 20th of November!

I shall keep my eye on the internet!

Wet! Wet! Wet!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversational confusion!

One of the true delights in not speaking a foreign language is that it allows for humorous delight in the attempts that you make in carrying on a conversation where the level of language you need to be understood is not available to you. A case in point is a conversation that I had with Carmen today in which I was trying to explain some of the history of Cardiff (in Spanish) and the importance that the city had in the export of coal. [I have just tried to use the internet to check what I am going to say next, but have been unable to find any evidence yet so you will have to take the following on trust.] I seem to remember that the first cheque for a million pounds was signed in Cardiff and was connected with the vast wealth that was being made in the city in the late years of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth when Cardiff and Barry together were the greatest coal exporting ports in the world.

In this lengthy discussion which turned into a serious disquisition about the growth of Welsh industrial power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the increase in immigration to fuel the employee needs of heavy industry; the decline of the Welsh language and the rise of King Coal, I found myself becoming more and more hysterical trying to find the Spanish words!

For an English teacher it is almost a perfect example of frustration when you find yourself struggling for the words in a foreign language to express yourself when you know perfectly well that you would have no problem at all as long as you were able to use your own tongue.

I was reminded of my optician who explained that my eyes had deteriorated to the extent that I was both long sighted and short sighted and I would have to start having bi focal assistance. As a confirmed contact lens wearer I rejected the idea of wearing glasses and so tried various forms of bifocal contact lenses: they were all failures. Eventually the optician said that he would give me one lens which I should use for reading and the lens in the other eye for distance work. In other words, each eye would have to do a different job and my brain would have to adapt to the different focal information. Over the next few months I trained myself to see different things with different eyes. It was only a partial success, but at least it meant that I didn’t have to wear glasses.

My attempts at Spanish are similar experiences in that I have had limited resources with which to attempt reasonable communication. If your foreign language skills are anything like mine then you will constantly find yourself in linguistic situations which are beyond your ability. You can actually feel new neuron pathways being formed as you frantically struggle to rearrange the limited Spanish vocabulary you have at your command to create new conversations!

One conversation with a monoglot Turk on a beach in Cinarcik is seared on my memory. After acquiring a few words in the local language my natural confidence, born of life long chattering in English encourages me to embark on such topics for foreign conversations as the Byzantine dispute on the dual nature of Christ (this example, I might add is not plucked from the imagination but from bizarre experience!)

After a simple start concerning names and domicile with this innocent Turk it escalated rapidly into a lecture about how to play squash and the differences between Islam and Anglicanism. This conversation is seared on my memory; not only because of the difficulty with individual words, but also with the realization that, the more I explained the intricacies of squash and Anglicanism, the less was I convinced about the sense of each, and eventually about their respective existence! I wonder if Kerem remembers our first conversation. I like to think that it was this bewildering logorrhoea that started his determination to master English – and look at how he speaks today!

My conversation with Carmen was on a level with my great conversations of the past; where the listener has to do a bloody sight more work than the talker! The only thing that kept her going was my unintended confusion in my use of words when talking about coal (‘carbon’ in Spanish). I was trying to say that Cardiff was the greatest coal exporting port in the world but, instead of using the word ‘carbon’ I used the word ‘cabron’. I will leave the word untranslated, but it did lead to hysterical laughter on both our parts.

Who knows what fortuitous infelicitous utterances I may commit tomorrow?

Mud Glorious Mud!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges abound!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a life of incident and neat juxtaposition.

To shop is to be!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Way of Seeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look forward to your guesses.

Waiting and waiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow I intend to go even further afield.

Be afraid. Be very afraid!

Captured Colour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shall eat for Wales!

Mellow musings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generalisations are dangerous and tempting!

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

A Brown Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodwill to All!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ho! Ho! Ho!

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