"Our virtues lie in th'interpretation of the time"

So, shouty acting is alive and well and being presented on stage in Stratford. Thirty years after being deafened by Alan Howard as Coriolanus I was similarly assaulted by William Houston attempting the role today.

This was a flawed production which seemed to be overawed by the social, political and historical possibilities that the play presented. Elements of ideas were tantalizingly offered and then not developed.

The explosive start of the production with a sudden lighting effect with a loud musical chord and citizens running through the audience to the stage was not sustained. There were some interesting moments but no satisfying dramatic sequence. One visual construction was provided by soldiers hoisting Coriolanus to the height of their shoulders with two large spears on either side. Coriolanus was framed by these two spears and made an athletic leap to the floor – drama and incident; but there were too few moments to remember.

The costumes were a take on Shakespearean classical and were colour coded to differentiate the plebs, the pats and the conspirators. Rather autumnal colours.

The set was the most positive element in the production. Six blocks on either side of the stage with a large painted marble flat with corniced doorways, behind this flat a second level of doorways: this gave a sort of Renaissance false perspective effect to the back of the stage. The scenery was mobile with large sections doubling for doors and the outer walls of a city. It was used effectively and was visually compelling.

Timothy West was, unusually in my experience, unsure of his lines and entrances and made many fluffs; indeed so many were his mistakes that each time he ventured on a speech he provoked tension as you waited for him to get safely through.

Some of the smaller parts were played with all the panache of an amateur dramatic society and they detracted from the central performances.

In short the central character failed to elicit sympathy because of his amazingly mannered vocal delivery: he sounded as though he had taken a few master classes with Ian Mckellen, but had only managed to assimilate the more outré aspects of Mckellen’s delivery. His performance is best exemplified by his solo bow at the end of the play: a convulsion which almost knocked his head against his knees – form without content (like much of his performance.)

If I have to wait another thirty years to see another production, I only hope that my eighty six year old eyes and ears will be treated to something more satisfying that this Stratford production.

The most unexpected aspect of the trip to Stratford was the finding of a Singaporean restaurant a few hundred yards from the theatre. This was the Georgetown which boasted Colonial Malaysian Cuisine and, for £7-50 we had a more than acceptable two course meal, tasty and satisfying – which was more than could be said for the production we saw!

Toni was volubly confident about the quality of his house showing abilities after taking potential buyers around the house while I was chatting my way down the M50 in a bus filled with Year 11 and 12 Drama students from Llanishen High School.

It was an oddly disconcerting experience going back to the school though as one of my erstwhile colleagues said, “Just back to gloat are you?”

Let’s face it; I was!

The Play's The Thing!

The epic marathonic odyssey of cleaning preparatory to the viewing of the house is complete.

I’m sure that there are some glaring examples of “what not to show” waiting for the eagle eye of the buyer to discover, but, ‘I am exhausted, therefore it is clean’ is, and always will be one of the great axioms of housework.

I await with interest to see if there is any interest.

Meanwhile there is still time for me to refresh my memory about ‘Coriolanus’ I can still see in my mind’s eye Alan Howard disdainfully displaying his wounds for the hoi polloi to wonder at. I was never entirely sympathetic with Howard’s style of acting; even sotto voce he gave you the impression that he was a bellower whispering.

For me he lacked subtlety and his mannered delivery always limited my emotional identification with his portrayal of character. As I remember it (from thirty years ago!) the setting was rather stripped down with the emphasis on the words – not bad in itself, but I can see nothing wrong with an elaborate appropriate set.

The set for the Markopoulos Case in WNO’s Maria Bronstrom (?) was almost Heath Robinson like in its detail, but effective certainly.

I am looking forward to this production and you will have to excuse this slip shod piece of jotting as I have to settle down and get Coriolanus read!

Again.

. . . and these are my books!

“It’s all done by mirrors!” is the time honoured cry of knowing spectators when a stage magician has created an illusion so stupendous that it threatens the universe of the audience. They cannot envisage how such a denial of the everyday can occur in front of their eyes, so they have to find the simplest most ordinary explanation for the inexplicable: mirrors.

A similar reaction takes place in domestic libraries when the serried ranks of books confront the sort of person who thinks that a room looks untidy if there are tomes lying about. As a person who has amassed a few books in his time I can list the questions and comments of such people, I will also add what they really mean.

1 “Gosh, what a lot of books you have!” This actually means, “God, you sad bastard, can’t you think of anything more useful to spend your money on?”
2 “Have you read all these books?” This actually means, “He’s only doing this for show, well, he doesn’t impress me.”
3 “How long has it taken you to get all these books?” This actually means, “You’ve been a sad bastard for a long time haven’t you?”
4 “Who is your favourite author?” This actually means, “I can’t really think of anything to say.”
5 “What is your favourite book?” This actually means, “I really can’t think of anything to say.”
6 “Oh, I’ve read this one as well!” This actually means, “Thank God I recognize one of these bloody books.”
7 “Do you have any really valuable and rare books?” This actually means, “I want to go home now, but if you’ve got a first folio I’ll pinch it to make up for looking at all these sodding books.”

Actually, it is exceedingly rare for someone to get in seven questions when a proud owner is standing in front of his pride and joy.

Some people never realise that book owning and book reading are not necessarily the same thing. You can enjoy reading helped by a decent local library and willing friends. You can buy books and immediately pass them on, give them to Oxfam or use the wonderful system devised by http://www.bookcrossing.com/ (really, if you don’t know about this system, look at the web site, it is such a good idea!)

But there are others who join with Ruskin’s sentiments expressed in my favourite quotation of that writer, “If a book is worth reading it is worth buying.” Like the Jesuits, that quotation found me young and claimed me for life!

There is something about the feel and look and smell of a book – any book – which is completely different from the experience of reading words on a screen. I have read complete books on my handheld up to and including C19th brick novels and found it relatively easy and congenial, but nothing like an actual book. But this is sounding like antiquarian ramblings so I will get back to my point.

Book lovers and avid readers always (as far as finance will allow) have unread books lying around and on their shelves.

A recent teletext survey http://www.teletext.co.uk/AboutUs/news.aspx?id=306 has discovered the most unread novels: those novels bought or acquired, started but not finished.

The lists they produced gave these five as the most unread fiction:
Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
Ulysses - James Joyce
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

And these as the top five non-fiction titles as the most unread:
The Blunkett Tapes - David Blunkett
My Life - Bill Clinton
My Side - David Beckham
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation - Lynne Truss
Wild Swans - Jung Chang

I don’t know whether I should feel encouraged or depressed by the fact that I have only read three of these ten titles – but I did read the all the way through, and I don’t have any of the other titles languishing on my shelves either here at home, or a little further off in the storage facility of Pickfords.

Wait a minute, that’s not true – I do have one volume unread, even though I did read part of it in a country where it was banned: on the steps of the Alcazar in Toledo. It was only when I was halfway through the guided tour of the Alcazar that I suddenly realised that I was standing in a monument to fascism! At least I had a corrupting book with me which, as it turns out, neither I nor Franco had read. From that it should be clear which book I am talking about, still lying unfinished in storage in deepest Pickford’s.

I was most interested by the inclusion of Rowling and Joyce in the lists. I am sure that the two ‘great’ novels by Joyce remain the undisputed champions of bought but unread classic literature in English in the Twentieth Century.

The Rowling is a more interesting case. I was loaned the volume for one (1) day by Gwen. That was a concession because she calls me ‘uncle’; otherwise I would not have got my hands on her book! I duly read the volume and returned it to an expectant Gwen. A Hard Night’s Read.

If the volume is unread it must be by adults; kids plough through the verbiage and come back for more. It is good to see a genuine popular novelist with the length, if not the gravitas of Dickens being devoured by a mass audience. As I have always said, “Any reading is better than no reading” and reading at length of a connected narrative is all the better.

It is nice (in the right sense of that word) to report that there are to be two more viewings of the house which might make the title of this blog a little more apropos. On Thursday to Stratford to see a production of ‘Coriolanus’ in the Memorial Theatre: such larks! Depressingly I have just worked out that the last time I saw 'Coriolanus' in Stratford was thrity years ago with Alan Howart in the title role.





Sigh!

Meanwhile, house cleaning.

Sigh!

It all depends what you mean by harmful!

The one interesting part about buying shoes when I was a child was The Machine.

Norvic Kiltie (?) was a firm I seem to remember which made kids shoes. The reason I (half) remember the firm is because they used to send me a birthday card: I thought that was very cool. I didn’t actually use a word like that, though, at that time in the 50s it was being used by long haired weed smokers with real sincerity.

Norvic Kiltie (?) were good with the cards but they didn’t have The Machine.

Let me explain. When you bought new shoes, or your mother forced you to buy something as boring as new shoes, it was a considerable investment. They had to be right. To convince worried mothers that their little darlings were being shod in the right way The Machine could give ocular proof that the little feet were correctly aligned in the new shoes. To achieve this the child put his feet in what looked like a giant letter box opening while the assistant and or mother looked down a viewing porthole above the feet. What they saw was a ghostly outline of the shoe with the second ghostly outline of the bones of the little foot, almost as if The Machine was using x-rays!

This was the fifties, and The Machine was using x-rays! Unprotected! In a shoe shop!

It’s the sort of thing that leaves you breathless with horror, but at that time atomic power was seen as the ultimate type of friendly power, a source of cheap unlimited electricity, so cheap that the metering of the electricity in your house would not be worth it! We all live and learn!

Though not apparently the Labour Party.

They are seriously discussing the advisability of renewing the Trident system of nuclear weapons. One feels that this is yet another betrayal. Yet one only has to read a very helpful site devised by completely neutral newspaper, The Telegraph, to wonder about the commitment of the Labour party to an issue which is close to my heart. The site gives questions and answers about the Trident nuclear missile debate at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/04/uqanda104.xml from which I have extracted the following:

“Hasn't Labour always been the anti-nuclear party?

No. It was Labour's post-war leader Clem Attlee who first set up a committee to look into the possibility of Britain acquiring nuclear weapons.

Aneurin Bevan told anti-nuclear activists in 1957 that giving up the bomb would mean Britain's Foreign Secretary "going naked into the conference chamber" in international negotiations.

Harold Wilson conducted the first tests of the UK's Polaris system.

Apart from a brief flirtation with unilateralism in the early 1960s, it was only under the leadership of CND founder member Michael Foot that opposing nuclear weapons became official party policy from 1980, until the position was dumped by Neil Kinnock in 1989.

Labour's 2005 manifesto committed the party to retaining the independent nuclear deterrent, but many left-wing MPs will most likely rebel against Trident's replacement.”

I’m not sure what this illustrates, but I certainly feel lonely still clutching my anti-apartheid CND ethos in an age of football players aspiring to ‘earn’ £100,000 a week or sports shoes costing over £150 a pair.

Watching ‘The Departed’ with another, excellent performance by DiCaprio I began to wonder why a perfectly acceptable, but unremarkable action film had so many competent and recognisable actors in it. At the end the director’s name made it all clear: Martin Scorsese.

That man’s name must be a sort of Royal Command when the possibility of acting in one of his films is mooted.

The basic premise of the film: the infiltration of a loner failed cop into the gang of the leading Boston criminal fraternity in an attempt to gain enough evidence to get the head of the organization incarcerated is complicated by the existence of an informant in the very organization trying to get him imprisoned. This narrative outline is, to put it mildly, hackneyed.

The filming is competent and there are some very effective scenes of violence which are almost balletic in their choreography, but there is little to distinguish this film from many others.

DiCaprio’s performance, in my opinion, is head and shoulders above everyone else. His portrayal is detailed and convincing and what ever he does, says or even when he says nothing, he commands attention.

Jack Nicholson does what Jack Nicholson does on film: looks manic and demented and does that thing with his eyes so you can see the whites; presumably that’s why he was employed – to play the disreputable and slightly disgusting character, but with charisma enough to make us mildly concerned about what happens to him.

The end of the film is like the end of a Shakespearean tragedy: bodies everywhere. There’s a nice little coda and an obvious symbol which anyone other than Scorsese would have hesitated to try and get away with.

A competent little film, but compared with the second film we chose, ‘The Guardian’ directed by Andrew Davis, it is an unparalleled masterpiece on a par with ‘Citizen Kane’.

‘The Guardian’ is an unscrupulous piece of filmic collage, mindlessly stitching together bits from better films and actually expecting the audience to be surprised by the narrative direction.

One to miss.

Though one has to say that two elements of idiocy remain in the mind: the gung-ho shout of “OohhArgh!” as a sort of clan cry of the coastguards which fits just about everywhere in a normal conversation with militaristic devotees. The other interesting phrase was “pop tall” which seemed to mean something like, “Do please rise from that uncomfortable recumbent position and feel free to extend your frame in a vertical direction, and, if you could do it quite expeditiously I would be enormously grateful.”

It does seem to me to indicate a film of some vacuity if that is the level of memorability!

I want my money back

Stepping Out In Style

Every day and in every way, Life sets out to get me. It is hard not to be cynical when the little vicissitudes of everyday existence prove so troublesome.

Take the simple act of buying a new pair of trainers. Now, I know if I were to be true to my upbringing I should refer to them as ‘daps’ a word which was common in my youth and now, at least in Cardiff, seems like a word as archaic as the phrase ‘considerate bank.’ I suppose that, even in my youth, there would have been a differentiation made between ‘sports shoes’ and ‘daps.’ Sports shoes would have been white and probably Dunlop Red Flash – I cannot really remember other sports shoes; that was the choice available! While ‘daps’ would have been black with particularly cheap moulded hard plastic soles.

Any parent reading the above must sigh with bitter nostalgia at the halcyon days when children would have been satisfied with a no-choice, inexpensive pair of sports shoes. Now their brand-savvy, finger-snapping, instant-gratification demanding offspring expect ‘trainers’ with correct logos, coloured laces, fluorescent insoles, built-in mp3 players, micro-chip-air-adjusted features and platinum eyelets which cost the same as a small terraced house in the Rhondda.

Alas my sarcasm is so slow footed that, since I ended that last sentence and ventured out into the wide world, a poster in my own dear Rumney is advertising a more advanced sports shoe which now automatically adjusts itself with each step that the wearer takes incorporating with what looks like a volume control built into the side of the sole. I have not had the audacity to find the shoe on the internet as I would probably become inarticulate with rage at the grossly inflated and that would never do when writing a blog! How quickly fantast is outstripped by what passes for reality nowadays!

I excoriate the cynical exploitative commercial approach of trainer manufacturers who produce over priced fashion articles with gimmicky extras.

However. Yesterday on a trip to McArthur and Glen as Toni will have it and an unwholesome rush through the shops (remember Toni was there as well) produced little that was buyable. I was not, as usual, allowed to linger but we did make a resentful visit to the Nike shop. This is usually a fruitless expedition but yesterday, as I needed sports socks which did not act as tourniquets around the ankles, it was a worthwhile diversion. It was then that Toni saw them: things from the outer reaches of fantasy, fabulous, unobtainable.

Nike Air 360! Retailing for £130! Sports shoes for the professional, or the rich, or the insistent! Playthings for chavs and those with more money than sense.

But at £30 a pop, up or grabs, I think!

So grab we did, luxuriating in the idiocy of the really rich and stupid who had stopped buying these masterpieces of air technology (hollow soles and heels) because in small embroidered print along the line of the eyelets on the shoes was the crucifyingly embarrassing information ‘2 0 0 6’; last year’s model by three months and therefore something in which the discerningly mindless dresser would not be seen dead. Undiscerning fashion necrophiliacs like Toni and my good self rejoice in the leavings of the pretentious and spendthrift poseurs who bring the unobtainable to the levels of reasonableness that tempt even an old skinflint like myself. It’s not that I’m mean, but memories of what one used to pay for these shoes (which seemed at the time to be more than adequate) indicate that even £30 is grossly overpriced.

Toni was much pleased with his purchase and paraded in a frankly insulting manner in front of me, asking with affected concern how my shoes were feeling. The reason for this unreasonable behaviour was that the shop assistant had neglected to remove the security tag from the tongue (?) off one of the shoes.

I have a morbid middle class fear of the security tag. This is partly base on wearing a new pair of trousers on holiday and virtually having to strip before I managed to get through the security machine at the airport going out. A later trip, during the same holiday, to El Corte Ingles in Barcelona was less fortunate when I set off the exit security system and had to be taken to a ‘little room’ for security checking. It eventually turned out that my trousers still had a small raised self-adhesive plastic strip which activated the alarm. A very understanding security guard explained in Catalan to a Toni transfixed with embarrassment that it was quite common and have a good day and all that.

There’s also the fear (urban myth) of the exploding security tag. I understood that not only did security tags have some sort of radio transmitter secreted somewhere in their plastic construction but that they also had a ampoule of indelible ink inside which would break if unauthorized tampering occurred and stain garment and unhallowed hand.

I think that I had visions of some sci-fi scenario acting itself out with the liquid spraying itself towards the miscreant who had absconded with a tagged garment and where the liquid landed the skin and flesh would dissolve, bony fingers clutching at flesh denuded face and everything stained a fluorescent purple. Or something.

Anyway, I don’t mess with tags so I was prepared to accept a 33% reduction if I brought it back for removal. Not one of my best negotiations which I later had criticised in detail by Toni – the Great Complainer (ha!)

Tomorrow an interesting interview.

We shall see.

What weather?

This is a country which celebrates its failures almost as much, if not more than, its successes: think of the Battle of Hastings; Corunna and The Charge of the Light Brigade to name but a few. It wouldn’t take much effort to think of plenty of other instances of breathtaking incompetence or mind numbing human waste which are commemorated in British song and poem. Given this negative artistic background it is hardly surprising that we grow up with a fatalistic and essentially downbeat approach to life.

No one and I mean no one, expected to win (odd word!) the venue for the 2012 Olympics. We were quite comfortable in making a lackadaisical effort to gain them with a lack lustre campaign supported in a desultory fashion with only sports fanatics sounding desperately sincere.

We would, in the normal course of events, then lose to the Bloody French, as we always do in the period since we won back their country for them. And, in the traditional manner we could then retire, hurt and bloody, to sulk about the unfairness of life; how nobody loves us; the Bloody French being the cause, yet again, of national humiliation.

When we won the games, we had to put Plan B into immediate operation: produce a silly estimate for the total cost of the games which would, within two or three months, be lost in a blizzard enhanced avalanche of wildly escalating costs so we could get back to where we are comfortable: moaning about a world class event which will show that we can still stage a spectacular disaster as befits a country with a lost empire.

I will never forget one British world sporting event which was televised around the globe where part of the opening ceremony included a cavalcade of Mini Minors. Forget ‘Doctor Who’ a Smugness of Mini Minors really is something which deserves to be experienced from behind the sofa!

I truly believe that this country has not put on a World Class Show since the Festival of Britain in 1951 – that is over half a century ago.

Like the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain was staged at another tipping point in the history of our country. The Great Exhibition was supposed to demonstrate our supremacy in the developed world, and was, indeed an assertion of economic might, but it could also be described as illustrating the modern resources that would soon spread throughout the world and the monopoly of economic opportunity was to be snatched away from Britain. The Great Exhibition celebrated achievement and pointed the way forwards that other countries were swift to follow and then surpass.

The Festival of Britain was a fantastic exhibition of invention and design and was, as it was intended to be, a glimpse of a Bright new World waiting at the other side of The Age of Austerity in the immediate post war world. But what was the most potent symbol of the Festival? Skylon: a hollow structure filled with light, tethered to the ground, yet seemingly not firmly, looking like some sort of ambiguous exclamation mark. It could be seen as a metaphor for the whole enterprise, as if to say here we are, but God knows where we are going next and how we are going to get there! And, of course, as one of the most popular and vibrant aspects of the Festival, it was destroyed at the end of the exhibition. How like us!

So where is all this unrelenting pessimism leading?

To a barbecue. Toni has expressed his determination to bale out the barbecue and in spite of inclement weather cook outside. As is usual at the time of the year, mornings are quite encouraging, but they lack the staying power of real climates and by the time elevenses has arrived the wintry aspect of the day is impossible to ignore.

As someone who has sunbathed in the rain (on a particularly expensive holiday in Gran Canaria when every day had to contribute to the inexorable increase in the tan) I am more than prepared to revert to national type and ‘plough on regardless’; rain, after all, will only serve to regulate the fiery intensity of rogue charcoal. Toni, however, has not been born into the same degree of national fatalism and acceptance of the unpropitious. We will see if his character has been markedly changed by his sojourn in this Cold Climate.

Grey Britain claims another soul!

That is the question?

If you had just a single question to put to a person in order to discover the person’s essential and real character, what would it be?

I know that Toni’s question would be, “What football team do you support?” Any answer other than “Barca” would in Toni’s view tell him everything that he needed to know and he would rest secure in the knowledge that support for any team other than the Catalans (of various nationalities that make up More Than A Club) would condemn you to one of the less salubrious circles of hell.

For some the question would be, “Do you believe in God?” for others, “What political party do you support?” for one or two who I could name, “Where do you shop?”

You could phrase it in terms of ‘either/or’, e.g. “Of the two painters Dali and Miro, which do you prefer?” [The answer to that one is, of course, Miro, because Dali was a shallow, self-publicising fraud. For Toni though the answer could be either, because both are Catalan.]

But I can’t be there to guide you to the narrow snake free enclosure of the saved when The Essential Question rears cobra-like in your face and threatens to strike with mortal force if the answer you give trumpets forth the fact that you are contemptible and vile, without form and void and read ‘The Daily Mail.’

What would my question be? I have given this much thought and rejected such simplistic questions such as “How would you end ‘Edwin Drood’? Or, perhaps, such trick questions as, “If you could save either a run-of-the-mill Giotto or a damn fine Vermeer, which would it be?” I prefer a question to which everyone can relate and reveals far more than literary invention or artistic judgement can ever display.

My question is: “How do you eat chocolate mousse?”

No doubt you can see the multi layered and sophisticated potentiality of this seemingly innocuous enquiry.

Here too Professor Joad’s perennial qualification is of essential importance, “It all depends,” he would have asked, “what you mean by chocolate mousse.” How very true.

Some chocolate mousse seems to be made with more than 100% fat; almost as if the confection has transcended the normal boundaries of time/space and created a universe where a sort of chocolate dark matter has been barely contained in a force field in your pudding receptacle. It also creates an instant addiction and like all addictions, the addicts savagely protect their fix. You try getting ‘a taste’ from a person with a super-fat concoction.

So, what can we tell from the answers to this question?

The speed with which people eat; the wary looks they give other eaters; the way they lick their spoon; how much they put on the spoon; the expression on the face; the way they scrape the dish; whether they lick the container – all of these are significant, but change the question slightly and it becomes even more revealing.

If you ask a person, “How do you eat your Aero chocolate mousse?” there are more factors to consider.

The manufacturers of Aero mousse are remarkable. I know that a mousse, at its best, is light and that lightness is because much of the confection is actually air. If you stir an Aero chocolate mousse you will find that the actual material in the dessert seems to reduce to something more like a smear of chocolate at the bottom of the tub rather then a substantial container filled with chocolate!

If you are the sort of person who is prepared to sacrifice bulk for the intensity of taste which is found in the air denuded solid flavour of the stirred mess then you speak volumes to those who can interpret human behaviour.

Listen carefully to answers to the question and the whole of a human soul will be revealed.

This concentration on mousse is, of course, displacement activity as I have spent part of the day accumulating evidence to confront the evil bankers of HSBC and their cheque losing proclivities to illustrate that they don’t know what they are doing when they are, or not, doing it. The only thing which is troubling me is what I should ask the bank to do; after all an apology cost them nothing and they couldn’t care less if they are not out of pocket.

I shall give it some thought. I am determined to think bad thoughts to produce the appropriate imagination to form the condign punishment which will be the only satisfaction for their duplicitous mendacity.

Blood will have blood!

Hating is Good Clean Fun!

Twenty two billion. That’s 22, 000, 000, 000, 000. Change those numbers into dollars and that’s how much HSBC made last year. What do they spend the money on?

Do they build hospitals and schools so that the people who make them all that money can live better lives, become more productive and make them even more? Or do they pack in into briquettes and burn it in the furnaces that keep their shiny headquarters nice and warm? Who knows?

One thing they do not spend their money on is helping the customer and making sure that the customer feels that he is an essential partner in the enterprise.

You can always tell ‘disgruntled’; the irritation, the picky moaning tone, the whine in the self pitying tirade. It’s second rate anger and it lacks that touch of personal passion which characterises the justified fury of the wronged customer with a grievance.

When you have a telephone banking service you still have to pay in cheques to an actual bank: in my case, banking with First Direct, that is my local branch of HSBC. You would have thought that personally posting a cheque with paying in slip through the door of the bank would have ensured that the bank, though whose door the cheque was posted, would be in a pretty good position to pick the cheque out of their post box and process it.

Not so.

The cheque had inexplicably disappeared. What had happened to it? How could it have flown from the security protected post box into nothingness? A problem. The solution? Up to the customer.

You phone the organisation which issued the cheque; explain the circumstances; get the original cheque cancelled; ask them to raise a new cheque; check the telephone bank and the actual branch to see if the cheque has been found; transfer money from another account to replace lost money; wait; then take new cheque to bank; deposit money; wait the three to four working days for the instant electronic transaction to be made real.

Then you get home from paying into the bank the new cheque and find, waiting for you on the telephone machine, a message. The message is from the telephone banking service asking you to phone them as they have a message for you.

The message is that a cheque which has been credited to your account has been cancelled by the issuer. The red mist descends. You mind, fuelled by adrenaline, realises that the branch has found the cheque, credited the cheque and not bothered to inform you.

Now the real fun starts. You try and contact your branch. I did it, and it only took me 33 minutes. The number in the phone book for the Rumney branch of HSBC does not get you to the branch but to a call centre; asking for the branch manager from the call centre eventually gets you to someone you think is the branch manager but is actually a liaison officer; getting from the liaison officer to the branch when a phone apparently rings to indifferent ears is virtually impossible, but, as I said I did it.

My questions about the cheque fell on ignorant ears which knew nothing of the cheque. Presumably losing cheques for thousands of pounds is an everyday occurrence at the Rumney Branch of HSBC and finding them is all part of the ordinary round of incompetent banking. Who cares, it’s only a customer!

When did they find the cheque? When did they pay it in? Why did they tell me to cancel the cheque? Why didn’t they have the common courtesy to phone me to let me know that the ‘lost’ cheque had been miraculously found? Why list a number for a branch when it doesn’t relate to the number? What exactly do they do for their money?

God knows most people have a banking story to tell, and with the revelations of the (can one say illegal?) amounts of money that they charged for overdrafts and other ‘banking’ expenses all of us can be dissatisfied with the service that they chose to give us, but the wandering cheque has infuriated me out.

I await the letters of explanation for their actions with interest, a word which has clinking connotations for the bloated plutocrats who behave with a callous indifference to the plight of their customers that suggests that if someone like Ivan the Terrible applied for a job he would be rejected as being too customer friendly.

Having said all of that, I can’t really quarrel with the people in First Direct who generally have been very helpful, but they have to take their responsibility as it is easier for a person to be, well, personable, when they are at phones length from the human customers and when actual physical presence is only obtained when First Direct punters use the HSBC outlets.

The negativity of the afternoon has totally eclipsed the pleasure of the morning when Ceri phoned me to come to his aid as Gwen’s camera was broken. The paintings are building up with some extraordinary examples of his art including a painting of a low level landscape with only a church steeple rising from the level horizon with the majority of the picture space taken up by a depiction of clouds which would not have been out of place in a Dutch landscape of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.

Once again the few pen and wash studies that I saw show great facility and I’m sure would be great little sellers in an exhibition.

I will have to spend more time on my photography as that is the only way in which I am going to produce interesting images!

Click on

Hope restored!

Winter is a time when, with the death of Nature, faith looks, at best, a little sickly. It is difficult to be positive when all around you damp desolation is your inspirational landscape. Gaunt empty branches, dark ruffled water in the pond, only the hardiest weeds growing in the shallow detritus in the gravel. What hope?

The element which retains my weakest faith is the belief that the fish population of my pond will be sustained through the cruel winter months and having hidden in the murky depths that they will rise in all their finny multitudinousness to frolic on the surface blowing bubbles of mirth at my lack of belief.

I know about fish, and I know that they all do come to the surface at some time or other. So, if you stare at the opaque surface of a seemingly inert pond, sooner or later you will observe ripples or tiny bubbles of air which indicate that sub aquatic life forms are moving about a bit. Nothing! Nothing at all!

Global warming (or ‘coincidence’ if you happen to be a serial Global Warming Denier like Bush Jnr.) has confused the seasons and the internal clocks of the fish and they have started to rise, defiantly to the surface, together with large tadpole like creatures which, I have to believe are children of the reclusive denizens of the deep. No wonder they didn’t show themselves on the surface: a sense of moral decency and modesty at the public exhibition of their piscatorial passions.

I have, therefore, to celebrate the appearances, taken some photos, together with various shots of the developing spawn.

It is at times like this that I regret taking biology at school for only one short year. I thoroughly enjoyed studying biology because, as far as I could see, it was a science which didn’t need maths and allowed lots of description and illustrative drawings: my depiction of a bird’s wing was a thing of beauty and my detailed exposé of the internal workings of spirogyra was a wonder to behold. Alas, in our school, the choice of biology would have been at the expense of something boringly essential which meant that I had to do chemistry. This was not a good plan, because, in those days, you had to balance equations for chemical reactions and I invariably ended up with three figure quantities of elements and it still was a bit wonky.

The only thing that I was confident about describing (with illustrations) was the Frasch Method of extracting sulphur. This, together with a detailed description of how people died by carbon monoxide poisoning was almost the sum total of my chemical knowledge. I was asked about neither in my O Level Examination which I regard as a crime against academic knowledge. It was a bitter moment when a chemist college vouchsafed to me that the Frasch Method had not been used in the real world of sulphur extraction for years. I dismissed his view with contempt: educationalists teaching outmoded concepts? Unthinkable!

Meanwhile the spawn. As promised I have taken a photograph which shows the growing specks. If the quantity of spawn actually produced wriggling tadpoles then the resident fish will be able to start their evolutionary journey by climbing over the writhing bodies of the young frogs and join them in their amphibious journey towards world domination. Or they will all be eaten.

Lunch in Swansea in an Italian restaurant in Mumbles. The restaurant’s location is the site of the old coastguard or lifeboat station and is perched on top of a cliff overlooking the rocky bay complete with promontory with lighthouse as scenery from the table! The set menu was more than reasonable; I had creamed spinach soup, followed by fish of the day with a prawn sauce and vegetables. The cream confection which was my pudding was an extravagant construction in calories which necessitated an astringent macchiato to compensate for the sugary indulgence.

On the drive back from Swansea along the M4 we passed a smouldering load of hay bales. There were three or four fire engines and the police directing traffic. Clouds of smoke were obscuring both sides of the motorway and I suppose we were lucky that the police had not closed both east and west traffic. I thought because of the short queue that the fire had just started, but the presence of the engines seemed to indicate some time had passed. The solution to this conundrum was clear after some minutes of driving when a police car was visible blocking the motorway and holding back a horrendous queue of traffic; further down the motorway the three lanes had been coned off and traffic directed off the slip road leaving an even more massive queue of traffic building up.

It is difficult to know what expression to have when passing a queue of traffic which leads to another queue of traffic which leads to another queue of traffic. Shadenfreude in this instance should be experienced in the mind and not expressed on the face: it’s just too cruel.

As a footnote, and not trying to be too much of a pedant, I received a letter from Cardiff City Council writen by Christine Salter, Chief Financial Services Officer, telling me that the council has delayed “setting it’s budget for next year.” I assume that the city is wealthy enough to afford some sort of suite of word processing programs which indicate to the chief officers when an apostrophe has gone rogue. Pity this one escaped.

I am aware that, in spite of my use of the vilified Gates’ software which does its [please note use Ms Salter] best to help me spell and punctuate; erratic neologisms, quirky grammar and inventive punctuation still escapes my rigorous scrutiny and litters my otherwise immaculate prose.

Call it individuality!

Where have all the icons gone?

You know you are getting older when even the photographers of pop stars, long dead, are dead themselves.

Noel Brodsky the photographer, who took the iconic shots of Jim Morrison bare-chested and Christ-like, died on Saint David’s Day in Stamford, Connecticut.

It was this shot more than any other that prompted an editor of a book of pop song lyrics I read to comment something to the effect that Jim Morrison, “looked like a street urchin who had died, gone to heaven and had been reincarnated as a choirboy.” Brodsky himself commented that, “You know, Morrison never really looked that way again . . . I think I got him at his peak.”

Thinking about the way he went on his sad decline leading the way to Père Lachaise Cemetery, you look at that gaunt hair framed face with a little more intensity. His truncated body seems pictorially brutal, a savage mutilation, which makes his broodingly neutral stare at the viewer unsettling to say the least. There is a vulnerability which is emphasised by the (implied) nakedness. His look is ambivalent: staring at or through the spectator. Brodsky’s description of the shoot when he took the picture describes Morrison as “so drunk he was tumbling into the lights” while “his equilibrium wasn’t too terrific” which could explain the feeling of instability in the attention of those dark eyes: the shadow of the left side of Morrison’s face looks as though it could develop like an eclipse and shroud the whole of his head in darkness.

The hairs on his chest look as though they are corralled by the thin loop of the necklace and leave the nipples isolated on the rib defining stretched skin. The look is one of tension in the face of some obscure torture: a brooding stoicism; a sexual invitation with no admission.

When you see the actual photograph as opposed to the cropped image used on the cover of The Best Of The Doors album, the waif like appearance of Morrison is emphasised by the hollow arch of the ribs and the sense of authority in the pouting stare is lessened: this is a man lost in that square of cutting definition rather than someone commanding it - for however short a time.

It’s a long time since I have seen this image, but it still has the ability to unsettle and it certainly defines a whole aesthetic that a host of lesser musical personalities have copied but never bettered. Power in vulnerability is a difficult balancing act to achieve: in a static image it is a possible stance; but in an actual real-time life a via dolorosa to destruction.

How pretentious (portentous?) that sounds! But given the self destruction that became a key note of Morrison’s life and using the wonderful advantage of hindsight, it’s very tempting to see the seeds of darkness where previously one only saw vibrant life!

Vibrant life, well, rather sluggish life at the moment, is the governing principle of my SSSI Pond at the moment. The exhausted frog (see a few days ago) who according to Paul is, in fact, now deceased has obviously done his/her/its job in his/her/its amphibious, androgynous, ambisexual way and the end of the pond now looks as if someone has emptied a sachet of wallpaper paste into the water to produce a gelatinous, bumpy, slimy mess with tiny black specks of nascent tadpoles.

The fish are coming to the surface more and showing their increased friskiness which probably means that they are licking their bloodless lips and sharpening their non-existent teeth in preparation for the massacre of the innocents – because we never see many frogs at the end of the season!

If we have decent weather tomorrow morning, before I take Louise to Swansea, I shall take a photo of the pullulating mass and tract its progress to free swimming life – perhaps I ought to weigh the goldfish now resident and lazily swimming in the waiting room of what is going to be one vast restaurant. I shall merely record nature red in tooth and fin and make fatuous metaphorical comparisons with the torrid life of Rumney.

My visit to the Job Centre was enlivened by the person I saw being a cheerful man who was married to an American from Baltimore who regaled me with sympathetic stories of the insularity of Americans. Most refreshing!

I am coming to the end of my Jobseekers period which has been characterised by the complete dearth of jobs that I would like to take up. I hope that the promised insert about Archie Rhys Griffiths comes to something. I will have to remind Steve. Hope springs eternal.

I have been given a letter which invites me to another interview with the staff at the Jobcentre. The last time I was threatened with a two day course teaching me how to write a letter of application and how to construct a CV. I look forward to that experience. I wonder who teaches these courses and I also wonder what sort of class there will be. I would have thought that the class will be a very interesting selection of individuals spanning the whole age range: a challenging class for a single teacher.

Such delights to be anticipated!

The Power Of The Press

"The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic – just one of those unfortunate things."

What a wonderful quotation! It does hint at a particular attitude towards newspapers. It is difficult not to share its cynicism when reading many of the newspapers that we are offered today. I will never forget the reaction of delegates to the NUT Conference when it was held in Jersey when one speaker made a reference to the contemptible ‘reporting’ of the Daily Express. The applause for his sentiments went on and on and became almost like organic glue which joined all the people in the hall in their united contempt for that disgusting little rag.

Talking of disgusting, I should add that the quotation is by G Gordon Liddy. I leave you to your own cogitations!

If all newspapers had the morality of The Daily Express then no one with my blood pressure and world view would be able to read them. Luckily for us (for me) there is something which is called (optimistically) the quality press. Much though I would like to think that this appellation is apt and appropriate, even a convinced Guardian and Indie reader like myself has lapses in his faith when he reads some of the reporting, but, on balance I still have some respect for what these two papers are trying to do and their populism consequence on their desire for readers appeals to the sensationalist in me!

But, as Mrs Beeton said in another context, “First take your newspaper.”

I have spent today looking for a newsagent which is prepared to deliver the Indie to my house. No luck. A few times I asked if they delivered newspapers and the shop assistants looked at me as if I had asked for flambéed duck billed platypus in a toasted baguette. As far as I can tell the area in which I live is not served by any newsagent. No house in my area can have a daily newspaper delivered. I find that extraordinary.

An insight into the reasons why this might be happening was vouchsafed to me by an assistant in Llanrumney who told me that “kids nowadays just don’t want to do the rounds.” Which seems a reasonable take on modern youth life until you think about how much newsagents have traditionally paid their paperboys (of both sexes) a pitiful pittance. I am sure that the solution could be found in more money for the delivers, but this solution seems beyond the economic sense of modern newsagents.

Where is Adam Smith when you need him? Oh yes, I remember now, he’s dead.

I do despair!

Though not for the demise of Adam Smith.

Lazy Sunday

Ah! The usual soundtrack to a lazy Sunday in Cardiff: lashing rain. I haven’t been out of the house all day, unless you count stepping out to see the partial eclipse of the moon late last night!

It gives me a chance to consider Cardiff. To all intents and purposes, with only a few years in Swansea and Northamptonshire together with the forgotten years of my very early youth, I have spent all my life in the city.

In Rumney, the old County Cinema has been demolished and flats put in its place; the Eastern Leisure Centre has provided us with a swimming pool; Newport Road has been widened, but, apart from the roads in Pen-yr-heol gradually getting worse and worse, not much has changed in the area. The inappropriate trees which used to produce a literal blizzard of petals in the springtime have been uprooted and the wooden window frames have been replaced by upvc double glazing, but apart from those relatively minor changes what is different? Cosmetic differences to the front of houses, extensions without number: all the usual confections of bourgeois suburbia.

But to go to the centre of town is to feel that you are a stranger in a familiar city. The economics of insanity seems to have taken over in the centre. The new ice skating rink; the newish parade of shops in the Hayes; the brand new office development opposite The King’s Cross; a new city library; multi-storey car parks and a substantial chunk of a new shopping centre all seem destined to be demolished to make way for John Lewis Partnership et al. It seems extraordinary that this ravaging of a city centre can be planned and allowed, but who are we in the face of rampaging capitalism. I had always thought that Cardiff had been sold to Debenham’s who acquired their prime site in the Saint David Centre for a peppercorn rate just to get it there! I do hope I’m wrong, or has Cardiff found a new capitalist sweetheart?

The devastation of the centre will I’m sure result in a stunning new collection of yet more shops which can be found in any reasonably sized city anywhere in the country. And the dynamic of the city is constantly changing.

I wonder more and more about Rapports with its car park. This is a prime piece of the city and Rapports certainly doesn’t need to be there. I wonder what overtures have been made to the owners. The CIA would like to get its hands on the land immediately adjacent and the new development can only bump up the value of the land. Just like the prison which hold a key site in the city and I’m sure that developers are slavering over the opportunities that the ground would offer; but who knows what machinations are centred on real estate in the city centre?

I wonder what Cardiff will be like in the next few years. And I wonder how the inhabitants of Cardiff will like their new city.

‘Saw III’ is one of those films which makes you feel slightly indecent because it is such an unashamed rip-off from the previous films in the series. This is not the time to list those series of films which have baulked the artistic curse of trying to extend a series beyond its sell by date. They do exist I know, but ‘Saw III’ is not one of that illustrious number. It is a cynical reworking of existing material (quite literally in the sense that it uses extensive flash back) which confuses itself with a multiplicity of ostensible story lines.

Some of the horror is quite graphic; but arguably the most effective sequence is of a chained man trying to escape from his situation and as that happens close to the beginning of the film the rest of the action is something of an anticlimax.

The moral basis for the central character’s bizarre ‘games’ is not convincing and the conflict between him and his ‘disciple’ gives a new meaning to the word contrived.

The ending of the film uses the same cynical trick as the ending of the last ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ film: there isn’t one. It merely points the lucrative way to ‘Saw IV’. Shameless!

Time for a long, lazy bath to soothe away all the stresses that I haven’t had today.

That’s the life!

The Queue is a State of Mind

Paranoia takes many forms, but I think that one can safely assume that the condition is not distant when one begins to formulate a Tao of Queuing.

The sequence I remember best from ‘The Truman Show’ is the one where Truman tries to get somewhere in his car and is constantly blocked by queues of cars which magically appear to block his progress. Although Truman does not realise it, these motorised irritations are actually being orchestrated by the television company which has total control of his life.

It is hard not to believe that a similar controlling producer is placing Difficult Customers ahead of me in queues to provoke the characteristics of impotent fury that must make good television for some audience in another dimension which finds barely controlled aggression amusing.

Consider the last few occasions on which I have had to queue; these are the sorts of ‘puppets’ that invariably get in font of me in queues:

1. The Quick Check Out for “10 items or less.” (Every time I see that it riles me. “less” is wrong. It should be “fewer” on the “‘less’ for quantity and ‘fewer’ for number” rule. I think that designers of check outs do things like that to get us into the right state of mind for aggression so that later in the day the security camera operators can compile ‘best bits’ of infuriated customer reactions when things go wrong.
The woman in front of me had two items in her hand and therefore could be expected to move quickly though the till and not hinder my purchases. When she arrived at the till she leaned over and produced a whole range of further items, including a bottle of Champagne with a security tab on it. Needless to say the tag was impervious to any attempt to remove it and eventually the assistant had to resort to brute force. During this titanic struggle a substantial number of people waltzed through the other tills.
2 All people in front of me seem to find the demand for payment for the goods that they are purchasing a total shock and scrabble about in their bags or pockets as if this was the first time that they had ever had to do it. Time passes and gradually the red mist begins to colour my sight.

3 People who forget their PIN numbers and then joke about it should be shot. Shot slowly if they then decide to pay by cash and build up the total amount by seeing how much change they can get rid of from wallet, purse, bag, pockets, and vacuous smiles.
4 People who don’t really seem to have grasped the idea of the new money and who find the concept of using paper and metal as pounds and pence as an insurmountable mathematical problem on a par with Fermat’s Last Theorem.

5 People who buy clothes or small electrical equipment in Tesco’s or comparable stores. These items have security tags (sometimes cunningly hidden) composed of two plastic parts (one of which is supposed to explode in a fountain of indelible ink if tampered with) and which are supposed to be easily removable by the assistant by using a simple magnetic device. It always fails and time ticks on as I wait with fixed smile.

6 People who have accumulated obscure coupons from strange places all of which have to be checked individually to ensure that the 10p deduction is within the date limit and of course the bar codes do not read and all the numbers have to be typed in individually by hand.

7 Customers, who wait until they get to the till to ask how much an item is, then ask for a smaller or larger pack which needs the cashier to call for a supervisor who then goes off and . . . time passes.

8 Friendly customers who engage the cashier in mindless phatic conversation which is unedifying, platitudinous, vapid, anodyne and time eating!

9 Customers who think that cashiers are well connected executives with intimate friends on the Tesco Board of Directors who are able to explain wide ranging company policy and enter into a ‘fascinating’ debate about policy directions instead of getting out of my way.

10 People who can’t pack without examining each item to see how it could fit in the three dimensional puzzle which is the interior space of the plastic bag, or people who cannot get their cards or money before all items are securely tucked into bags.

It is hardly surprising that one is able to list people with ease when one spends so much of one’s time in supermarkets. I shudder to think just how much of our significant social contact is conducted under the fluorescent lights of Tesco or Sainsbury. More amazing 'mathematical' ideas about supermarket queues may be found at: http://www.nzmaths.co.nz/Statistics/Probability/MurphysLaw.aspx

On a more pleasantly retail note, we had lunch in Mimmas Restaurant on Churchill Way. Toni liked the ambience and I was left wondering when I last experienced that particular ambience. I decided that Mimmas is one of those restaurants that in my previously life I had only visited in the hours of darkness! In the light of the subterranean gloom in the small restaurant the a la carte was much more interesting than the ‘Lunch time special’ so we ended up paying £30 each for our meal rather than the £7-95 that we had set out expecting.

The whitebait to start was unexceptional, but a welcome reminder of what used to be one of my favourite starters.

Toni stuck to what he knew and opted for the mussels which were cooked in a slightly spicy sauce and which were delicious (he did allow me to sample one of them) whereas I went with the chef’s special which was fresh tuna stuffed with apricot and cheese. I ate it but would not order it again as the tastes were strong and confusing and they worked against the taste of the meaty fish steak.

The bottle of Faustino Rose was ludicrously overpriced at almost sixteen quid, but drinkable. I cannot remember the last time that I paid over a tenner for a bottle of wine in real life; we have to do something about the iniquitous mark up by shameless restaurants.

I shall calm my spendthrift nerves by watching Barca play Sevilla in the tranquil setting of my living room with the silent contemplation of Toni (ha!) and then, perhaps, 'Saw III', the everyday story of psychotic folk.

And so to bed.

To read, or not to read?

World Book Day has come and gone with barely a rustle of turned pages, but it has produced something which my rag bag mind loves: lists.

The lists are derived from the rather paltry figure of ‘over two thousand’ people who logged onto the World Book Day web site and produced their lists for 'the ten books the nation can’t live without.'

Before getting to what the people thought, here is my list (without, as the lawyers say, prejudice) – in alphabetical order of author:

1. Old Saint Paul’s – Ainsworth
2. The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov
3. Emma – Austen
4. Jane Eyre – Bronte
5. Heart of Darkness – Conrad
6. Great Expectations – Dickens
7. Catch 22 – Heller
8. Stalky and Co – Kipling
9. Winnie the Pooh – Milne
10. Lord of the Rings – Tolkien

This compares with the national list which was

1 Pride and Prejudice – Austen
2 Lord of the Rings – Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre – Bronte
4 Harry Potter – Rowling
5 To Kill A Mockingbird – Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Bronte
8 1984 – Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Dickens

I’m not quite sure of my reaction finding three of the national choices are mine exactly and another choice is my choice of author. Now say I lack the common touch!
You can access the web site and find lost of other lists which are broken down by sex, age and region at: http://www.worldbookday.com/documents/10%20books%20wbd%20news%20story.pdf

One has to wonder about the sort of people who access these ‘minority’ cultural websites and (if you check the lists) actually choose some fairly unreadable books as their absolute favourites.

I always distinguish between Books Which Should Be Read and Books You Actually Read.

Foremost among the former is the exquisite example of Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’; a classic, no doubt, but absolutely unreadable by normal human beings. The only other creature that I have met who said that he had read that foetid book all the way through (and I believed him) was a Mechanical Engineer. ‘Nuff said.

In the latter category you find books like one of my choices: ‘Old Saint Paul’s’ by William Harrison Ainsworth. I’m not sure that I could make a convincing case for this author to be regarded with the same veneration as his contemporary Dickens, but for Old Time’s Sake and the wonderful chapter headed, “What befell Chowles and Judith in the Vaults of Saint Faith’s” I am prepared to waive my full critical judgement and just enjoy!

Another of my choices, “Stalky and Co” by Kipling, is a book I have enjoyed since I was a child. My copy is falling apart through re-reading and, according to one of my more perceptive students who read it after I had told her it was one of my favourites, “explains a great deal about your character Mr Rees!”

In the national list, how the hell does “To Kill A Mocking Bird” get into the top ten? It’s a good book and full of ‘important’ themes, but I think it’s more a function of the book having been chosen for GCSE English Literature that it gets into the top ten, than for any real literary merit. In the same company as Charlotte Bronte? I don’t think so!

In my list, if I had to choose one to recommend to someone as ‘A Good Read’ then I would probably choose the one written by a Pole in his third (third!) language: Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ It’s a jewel of a book, beautifully crafted and, although ‘only’ a novella, it packs more of a punch than many novels of ten times its size.

Of the top 100 books (of the ten thousand suggested) I had not read twenty five of them. One quarter. I’m sure that some of the classics (especially the Russian classics) had been put down as image-boosting examples of the Books Which Should Be Read kind, rather than books which have actually been read and enjoyed. It was the same sort of cultural snobbery that a while ago managed to produce the unlikely finding that ‘Ulysses’ was the most valued, or popular book in Britain. I think that is an example of aspirational thinking rather than reflecting the reality of what is actually enjoyed asl the eye peruses all those pages which it takes to describe that single day!

The programme for ‘Discovering Music’ at the concert hall in Broadcasting House, Llandaff was a performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto Number 1 (which was actually his second, but, you know what these talented musicians are like!) with an encore of a Nocturne.

The programme was introduced by the same presenter who introduced the Nielsen flute concerto and, once again, I was more than impressed with his musical knowledge and his ability to answer and develop audience questions and comments with effortless intellectual rigor.

The performance was exceptional with the soloist’s fingers flashing up and down the keyboard: I know, I had the best seat in the house and was able to look at his hands directly from the front in line with the keyboard!

The orchestra was less than impressive. The acoustic seemed dead with the sound of the orchestra flat and lacking resonance. The exposed strings were weak and the ensemble was poor. Once again the principal horn was lacking in confidence and created tension every time there was an extended note.

It was just as well that Chopin's 1st Piano Concerto is the almost exclusive property of the soloist with the orchestra being very much the accompanist after they have had their moment of prominence with the extended prelude which introduces the pianist in the first movement.

I enjoy these informative, illustrated performances like "Discovering Music" - programmes after Sir John Reith's heart, I would have thought! This one provided an insight into the effect the type of piano that Chopin used had on the way the music was written. It turned out that the period pianos were less able to sustain high notes, which was one of the reasons that Chopin used octaves together with decoration to emphasise and extend the notes. The popularity of bel canto in opera also had an effect with the piano mirroring the human voice and providing a sort of decorated sung musical line.

I realise that what I’ve just written sounds like pretentious rubbish; you really have to be there for it all to make sense. Honestly!

Tomorrow, more planting. If the weather allows. Some hope!

Roll on Spain!

Just listen!

What a sad reflection on national identity it is that it was only after I had completed my self indulgent blog that I realised that I had done nothing to celebrate the Welsh National Day of Saint David's Day.

It was therefore with something approaching panic that I went to that every ready photographic repository, my garden. There, at least, were lurking the national flower.

You would think that flowers are particularly good subjects for photographs because, unlike birds and animals, they do not tend to move around very much. That of course is generally true, but in gusty wind, flowers can be quite frisky! However, I strapped them down and have produced a few pictures to salve my Cymric conscience!

What is it that makes jazz so irritating?

That opening sentence reminds me of the title of Richard Hamilton’s picture “Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?”

[You can find more information that you ever wanted to know about his collage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_What_Is_It_that_Makes_Today's_Homes_So_Different,_So_Appealing%3F]

And the picture sort of expresses my view of jazz too. I know that this is the iconic picture that uses ‘Pop’ (as on the lollypop) to reinforce the establishment of ‘Pop Art’ as a distinct genre, but I’m not really concerned about that. I’m much more interested in the unsettling effect that this work has had on me.

The image is engaging, but at the same time disconcerting. The clash of colour and black and white is dislocating and the collage technique shares that same sense of nearly professional: it lack the inhuman perfection of Mondrian, but doesn’t have the freedom of Rauschenberg, so it remains in an uneasy no-man’s-land of contrived spontaneity, and it’s that “contrived spontaneity” that I find so maddening in Jazz.

I know that my lack of appreciation of this musical form, and the way in which I am talking about it will be enough to convince any Jazz aficionado that I am a person of no note (ha!) and I know not of what I speak. I am using the term Jazz as if it defines a single style, whereas Jazz is as wide ranging a musical denomination as the loose term Classical. This I know. I also know that some Jazz performers are consummate musical professionals and great musicians – but they still irritate the hell out of me!

I writhe with impotent fury when Radio 3 includes Jazz as part of the morning programme as I feel it has no right to be juxtaposed with Mozart and Rachmaninov. Some friends who I’ve persuaded to listen to Radio 3 tell me that they listened with amazement to the (as they said) unbelievable, snobbish, arrogant exclusivity exuded from the lightly confiding presenters of music programmes. They felt as if they were eavesdropping on a select club to which they did not have membership. I feel the same when I hear Jazz; there’s something going on which I don’t really understand or appreciate, and I don’t like it!

Some might say that the key to my problem is contained in those words “understand and appreciate”; if I learned more, opened my mind and my ears, did a bit of homework then my increase knowledge and experience will, inevitably result in my increase understanding and appreciation: I’ll like it.

But I don’t want to spend any more time on Jazz. I don’t feel inclined to listen more. Life, as they say, is too short.

Returning from taking Toni to work, I listened, because it was on the radio, to a three or four instrument jazz combo playing an arrangement of The Beatles’ track ‘Blackbird.’ It was very professionally done, but I could feel my skin crawl as I listened.

I am used to variations on a theme from Mozart’s ‘Ah, vous direz-je Maman’ to Elgar’s ‘Enigma’, but they do not irritate me. I do question my own responses: is it the instrumentation; the loose sliding rhythms; the diffuse orchestration; the louche melodic line; the sheer self indulgence of it all? I don’t know.

But, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, I am willing to love all mankind, except a Jazzman."

And Rap. Obviously.

My loss, I know, but I am willing to live with it!

Bring on the Beethoven! (And not the ‘roll over’ kind.)