Humph!

There comes a time when your city doesn’t seem your own any more.

The redevelopment of the centre of the city of Cardiff is making it at the moment look uncannily like all those depressing pictures of Beirut looking war torn and picturesquely destroyed. Office walls open to the sky; multi-storey car park floors slanting at crazy angles and jutting out into nowhere; piles of rubble; clouds of dust and Christo-like installations of polythene clad buildings wrapped in the way that he would approve.

All the lively, bright and colourful edifices knocked into a sort of subfusc rubble. Just like multi coloured plasticine which when you played with it as a child transformed itself from a bright rainbow of pigments to a muddy brown. That’s what the centre of Cardiff is at the moment: a place reduced to the unremarkable waiting to emerge from its chrysalis of clay into a . . . well, let’s face it, modern civic architecture which is prompted by easy gain is not going to astonish by its ground breaking, innovative and exciting modernity. It’s far more likely to be the sort of thing which subsumes Cardiff into the mind numbing anonymity of stripped down utility building with the odd cheap flourish. Rather like the Capitol Centre which is an ordinary shopping mall with certain Cardiffian features added to the façade like a piece of cheap scenery.

I don’t hold out many hopes for the look of the New Cardiff. I remember and experience of trying to show some friends a piece of furniture that I thought would go well in my home in a little shop in Leicester shopping centre. The only trouble was I couldn’t find the shop! I was reduced to wandering around the area where the shop was last sighted and plaintively bleating that it was there the previous week! It seemed at first like one of those films where someone’s life has been erased by the government and they have moved someone else in to take the place of the original inhabitant. Just before my mind gave in to a complete belief in the Conspiracy Theory of Everything, I realised that the shop that I was looking for was actually in a shopping centre in Northampton. The centres were so nearly identical that my confusion was just about understandable. The identikit approach to shopping in the centre of cities had taken a very firm hold, and that was during my first year of teaching – some years ago.

Now it’s just the order of the shops which interest the jaded shopper not their range. Standing in the centre of any British city it is possible to recite the shops that you can be certain of finding within a ten minute walk of your position with a 90% degree of accuracy. Cardiff’s last bastion of individuality is found in the arcades (which I always assumed every city had) and the small shops which still seem to make some sort of living. Good luck to them. I only hope that the new development will piggy back on the lucrative establishment of John Lewis and the obligatory money making residential development and encourage the establishment of small stores rather than allowing the bland the national chains to anchor another forgettable shopping experience in the centre of a once distinctive city.

Walking through the strangely restricted centre of Cardiff today I also sensed that the demographic of Cardiff has changed and that my age group are not the commanding presence that I thought it would be. Youth is taking over (and I thought that we late baby boomers were the dominant force in the land) comprising pretty (if over made up for my taste) girls and boys who seem to have brought dressing down to new depths as all of them seem to affect drably scruffy imitations of American grunge as their dress of choice!

All the foregoing are a way of limbering up for my participation in ‘Something Else’ tomorrow: the Grumpy Old Man approach is the only one which works on the programme, which is just as well, as it’s the only approach that I’ve got.

I’ll have to learn to be wide eyed and accepting, I’m sure it will make me a much better person.

And it’ll frighten the horses!

Ah, youth!

You know you have family staying with you when not only do you have to use the ‘value’ set of cutlery that you bought as a stop gap measure, but also, you don’t care!

And the plates! You get into a routine of using plates steadily so that eventually the dishwasher is filled up ready to go, but you are still left with as many plates as you need for normal meals. The sequence of washing, stacking and using is soothing in its timeless rhythm. But, suddenly, there are people; all of whom need plates and they use them and there you are (sooner than eventually) with frantic dish washing as the food is being served out!

And it goes on. Spoons, cups, mugs – all being used and things that you vowed that you looked forward to throwing out are all pressed into service in a logistical nightmare that, apart from certain times in the night, never seems to be containable.

And the children. Well, the child.

I remember reading Stephen Hawking’s ‘Brief History of Time’ – to be absolutely truthful, I know that my eye passed over all the words in the book, even if my brain did not always manage to fit the words together into coherent sentences – and wondering about the concept of the black holes. Having been in the presence of a small child for the past three and a bit days, I now fully understand the thinking behind the postulation. How an inchoate human being, weak, inarticulate and totally vulnerable can suck into himself the energy of six adults with seemingly effortless ease day after day is wonderful (if enervating) to behold. I think the fact that he has dimples has something to do with it. Cute always cuts the deepest!

As I am no expert of children under two, he is a constant revelation. Although his vocabulary is confined to a few (and I mean a few, like three) basic words, he seems to be able to understand complex instructions and will suddenly do just as you tell him; if you speak Catalan!

His mood swings are the stuff of casebooks. His appetite is eclectic and bewildering. His manner imperious. His confidence overwhelming. His mannerisms captivating. His capriciousness bewitching. His morality, non existent!

All of this is, of course, old hat to those who have dealt with very young children before, but this is all new to me and drainingly fascinating.

You can see experience begin to dictate responses. He already almost knows what is captivating and will nearly consciously behave in a way which will elicit positive responses. This, you might say, can be said for all of us. But we are more knowing; his knowing is almost entirely instinct with just a flavour of intent!

I now know that parents of young children live for The Depletion. That magic moment when full face manic behaviour gives way in an instant to the comatose. And then the period of quietude when, for the first time that day, a breath may be drawn without the worry of what may happen by the time the exhalation has begun.

My childhood was, of course, exemplary. I remember one time after I had committed some juvenile indiscretion my father saying to himself, although my mother was in the room at the time, “Well, we have to remember that he had to be woken for his feeds.” It turned out that for my first three weeks of existence I did nothing else of note but cry: day and night. At the end of that time after my father had “thrown” (his word to me many years later) me at my mother with words to the effect that I was her child and she would have to do something about me. I then shut up and, as far as I can make out, my parents had a (relatively) easy run as far as being woken up at unreasonable hours was concerned. I will have to authenticate this reminiscence by reference to Aunt Bet: the repository of all family history, dates, lineage and true anecdotes.

I certainly played on that early (and misleading) behaviour throughout my life, leading to my father’s equally revealing observation, “Stephen, I have been waiting for you to say to me, ‘Dad, you’ve worked for me all your life; go out and work for yourself,’ – I’m retired now!” What I say is that he got off lightly!

One thing I do remember was my inclination as a child to be ‘off into the blue beyond’ as soon as the parental hand loosened. I do not remember trying to escape as a point of principle, it was just as soon as restraint, however loose, dropped – I ‘wandered’. My mother was a great believer in reins and adopted them as the only means she ever found to keep me roughly in the vicinity of her, admittedly manic, observation. The time that my mother’s attention drifted for “a few seconds” (her words) from her very young son, I was well on my way to England, periodically being swamped by passing waves, as I left the coast of Wales and the resort of Pendine far behind.

I will not dwell on the aftermath of my cheery (if somewhat spluttering) greeting, “Hi Dad!” as my father broke several Welsh, British and World records in getting out to me, urged on by my mother’s helpful hysteria! I would merely point out that if Childline had been in existence at that time I would have been more than justified in phoning them. Parents can be so unreasonable. I maintain that I was not drowning; I was merely being submerged on an increasingly regular basis. It’s all (as I didn’t get the chance to tell Dad at the time) semantics.

Who knows what excesses will be effortlessly committed before the end of tomorrow?

But, on the positive side, tomorrow is the traditional day of Carmen’s paella.

[Sighs happily!]

It's what's inside that counts!

We are all in denial about something.

Best exemplified by the memorable detail of a half remembered story (or was it fact?) when some wag wrote a note saying, “Your secret is discovered, flee!” to a whole group of people and watched as they all duly panicked.

It sounds like a story by Saki about his elegantly sinister, yet likable anti-hero Clovis. This is the sort of occasion when John Lord would have been able to supply title, author, year and publisher! I do miss his vade macum of a brain – and the series of little books in which he recorded his reading.

Or to take another instance, the time a policeman come to our house when I was about 12 or 13 and to my horror as I opened the door asked for me! I was immediately convulsed with guilt and staggered back to my parents croaking that the police had come for me. The fact that the policeman had singled me out by name because my name and address were printed clearly (by my father) in my glasses case, which he was returning, did not calm my shattered nerves. I was ready to confess. To paraphrase King Lear, I assumed I’d done such things –What they were yet I knew not – but they were obviously the terrors of the earth, and had policemen calling!

From that moment I never questioned the basic reality of stories about false confessions made under duress because I was certainly prepared to admit to having started the Suez conflict if the policeman had suggested it!

Mary Mallon was born in Ireland in 1869 and then later moved, like so many others, to the United States. She made her living as a cook which, as it turned out, was a very bad career choice. Not, you understand, because she was a bad cook, but rather because of something contained inside herself; something fatal. She was no mass murderer: she was not the American version of Sweeny Todd; the thing inside her was typhoid.

Mary was a carrier and became known as Typhoid Mary. She refused to admit that she had anything to do with the trail of case which followed her trade. She was a healthy carrier and she saw not reason to stop working as a cook. It puts one in mind of the old duffer in the television comedy show who refused to believe that the war was over and constantly rejected the more and more pointed explanations of its ending to humorous effect. When you’re dealing with real life and, at that time, a killer disease, it’s not so funny. People died because of her inability to accept reality and she herself eventually died in enforced quarantine.

It’s at this point that I should make a light hearted comment and reveal that the motivation for this writing is some gossamer thread of thought which caught my attention for a nano second before its diaphanous lightness was lost on the chilly breeze of a signing-on day. But Typhoid Mary’s death tally has rather pushed the more serious aspects of my thoughts and the fugitive sparkle of the inconsequential now seems strangely out of place.

Never let it be said that the thought will be wasted, most of us live out our own versions of ‘Groundhog Day’ – even if the ‘day,’ is spread over a rather longer time span. We constantly retread thoughts, so the one that I’ve lost (or suppressed) for this piece of writing will pop up in another alluring guise some time soon, dressing itself in the vulgarity of originality.

And I will, I assure you, be taken in by the display!

Just for Old Times!

For those of you of a younger generation, the name Enoch Powell will conjure up a whole series of memories, thoughts and emotions. Forget his previous career of thoughtful politics; we just remember the notorious “rivers of blood” speech and the ‘right’ thinking (sic) reactions of those impressionable young men as they marched against the tide of immigrants, sorry ‘blacks’, as they threatened to swamp the traditions and the way of life of fascist bigots who disgraced themselves and their country by dressing up their prejudice by actually and literally using the flag!

I am in too relaxed a state to get myself agitated by reliving the furious frustration of those times, I prefer to remember a memorable episode from Private Eye which had a Steadman (of course) cartoon of Enoch as some sort of a spiv feline and under this caricature, a page full of letters purporting to come from concerned citizens all of which started with, “Dear Sir, I am no racialist but . . .” and effectively ridiculed a whole series of bigots from the genteel vicar through to the rough worker and exposed their ‘reasoning’ for what it was. The page has been reprinted in a ‘Best of Private Eye’ and is well worth looking out and reading.

I shall now take the leap of imagination from dear old dead Enoch to Easter.

If you read the whole of Enoch’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech (as I have) then it is possible to see that old Enoch was quoted selectively and the presentation of the extracts, the sound bites, from his speech emphasised one emotive phrase, whereas the whole speech was much more reasoned.

It is, as I say, possible to read the speech and the situation in that way, but that is to ignore the fact that Enoch was a consummate politician and he knew exactly what he was doing and what would be taken from his speech: it was a nasty, mendacious, conniving and vicious piece of rabble rousing – premeditated and calculated.

So how do we get from Powell to Easter? Well, it’s through selectivity.

Easter is the paramount festival, the resurrection of Jesus proving that he was the Christ and therefore the person from whom all Christians take their name. But what do Christians chose to take as the most important aspect of this time of paramount importance in the sacred year? Easter eggs!

Easter named, of course, after a pre Christian goddess Eastre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. A festival was held in her honour every year at the vernal equinox. The eggs are pre Christian as well and were appropriated by the ever resourceful Christians by the usual method of metaphor (egg, seed of life, resurrection, et voila! Christian already!)

So Easter is downgraded by ever reliable Capitalism from some sort of dangerous numinosity to practical, saleable and indeed edible tangibility. Select what is popular and it will take over from what is real and important.

Eggs are important. You only have to walk up and down aisle after aisle in any supermarket and see the serried rows of elegantly and seductively packaged temptations to see where the real centre of Easter lies.

And there is a sense of pain and guilt and injustice in the whole experience – all of which is provided by the manufacturer by the cunning way in which the customer is outrageously fleeced by the whole experience of the egg and its purchase.

I made the mistake of looking at the prices of these eggs. Tesco helpfully provide the cost per 100 gms so that you can make comparisons and see which is “best value.” Bearing in mind that 100 gms of chocolate in bar form varies from 27p to 55p but with the magic of a little cardboard and silver paper this is increased in one amazing case to £4-71 for 100 gms! And that wasn’t even for best quality Belgian chocolate that was for common or garden Nestle! You’ve got to admire manufacturers who actually get away with this daylight robbery!

I’m not sure about what it says about the punters who actually buy this rubbish. Celebration of the unlikely ‘resurrection’ of the founder of a major religion by paying over the odds to already bloated capitalists for a bit of gaudily wrapped chocolate.

It’s a funny old world, ain’t it?

O Brave New World!

I feel like writing to The Times.

It’s one of those occasions when a hastily penned missive to The Thunderer (in the Old Days before it was bought by the Dirty Digger) seems appropriate.

I’ve long missed the first cuckoo of spring – even if I could actually identify the bird, let alone the song; outraged howls of rage about the increase in council charges would have been lost in the chorus of aged persons demanding preferential treatment; and as a life long European (in spite of an occasion in university when I was prevailed upon by an importunate friend to help distribute anti-Europeans leaflets – on the strict understanding that I was allowed to distance myself from the information if I actually met anyone while posting the leaflets through letter boxes) I spurn to inveigh against the latest piece of Eurocratic nonsense for any one of the floating centres of disinformation in Europe.

Just as a matter of interest: did you actually manage to follow that last sentence all the way through to the end? I’ve just counted up and there are about 120 words in it. And lots of punctuation. There is a reason why we don’t have sentences like this any more; or at least we shouldn’t have sentences like this any more! I put it down to reading Vladimir Nabokov. He is one writer who really does deserve the adjective ‘lapidary’ when applied to his writing!

Anyway: writing to The Times - why? It is to mark one of those changes in the year when you can say ‘This is a significant moment.’ And like the (for me unidentifiable) sound of the first cuckoo or the shy thrusting of a crocus towards the weak smudge of misty light, it is something which indicates to we light starved northerners that hope, in the guise of greater luminescence is becoming more than a rapidly fading folk memory.

As a gadget sort of person the garden did not furnish many opportunities (in the bad old days) for wonton expenditure on conspicuous electronic excess. When I was young the most exciting thing that a garden held (in my young experience) was a bird bath. Gardens were for growing things. Things that took a long time to appear and then died. The gadgets of those days were mundane things like shovels, trowels, dibbers and lawn mowers and unspellable things like secateurs. Electronics were there none.

But the birdbath of yesteryear has been gloriously superseded by something which used to be the preserve only of the very rich. The working water feature. When I was young the only fountains that I knew of were municipal and sherbet. Private individuals who owned fountains also owned swathes of countryside and/or Mayfair. Now the garden without a working water feature is obviously trying to make a post modernist counter culture statement. Now it is almost a way of asserting a sort of inverted snobbery of ostentatious individuality. And that’s not just because I have four!

Nowadays a garden can be a seamless extension of the house with numerous pieces of furniture, cooking facilities, piped music, central heating, sporting facilities, water on tap, different ‘rooms’, aroma therapy and pretty flowers. With all these attractions the garden is sometimes preferable to the house!

But one of the first ways in which a small urban garden could partake of some of the élan of the good and the great was in terms of lighting. One reads of the parties in the past when servants would have been charged with hanging the trees with Chinese lanterns with real candles inside them, or placing torches of real fire at regular intervals, or lanterns. All labour intensive and only the prerogative of the rich and idle. But, with the advent of low cost low voltage lighting every small scrap of semi-detached verdure was suddenly transformed into a wonderland of dim light!

Obviously the practicalities of actually getting the low voltage to the lights from the high voltage mains supply of the house was a tickly problem which often results not in a gleam of light but the glow of conflagration or, alternatively, the complete darkness which comes with the lighting system of the house being shorted by the lack of professionalism of the person who had relied on a comforting memory of confident, competent, friendly Barry Bucknell! The same Barry Bucknell who in his ‘Do-It-Yourself’ series on BBC in the 50’s had talked a generation of house owners to destroy their period features in a bland landscape of hardboard.

So ‘lighting’ was the new black’ for gardening. Then, when the plucky pioneers had achieved the almost unbelievable by getting their garden lit (well, ‘gloomed’) with their low voltage mains connected lighting, suddenly a ‘Tomorrow’s World’ bombshell: solar lighting!

Lighting (of, it must be admitted even less power than the original low voltage type) was available to everyone with no need to court death by tampering with the mains.

And this is where; finally, I get back to my starting point. Almost. Throughout the year during the long dark evenings and nights there is sometimes a strange occurrence. You are sitting in your living room, the windows blank and dark, then suddenly an intermittent gleam of light as if you had a peeping tom crouching in the garden and sending you an incoherent Morse message. This is, of course, your solar light which, having had an unexpected hour or so of unseasonable light has charged enough of the battery to blink and splutter before it sinks back into its dark sleep until the climate in this god forsaken country attempts to get its act together again.

So, I officially announce that something like Convincing Spring has arrived because my solar lights have come on for three nights in succession for longer than two hours!

Can summer be far behind?

[Rhetorical.]

Follow the money!

Another visit to Beirut or Cardiff City Centre.

The destruction continues with machines crawling and digging and evacuating. A mass of action all seemingly disconnected. For an outsider to the building trade there is little sense of order. All the different machines seem to be doing their own thing, but doing it with some degree of intensity. The holes in the ground seem random; no connection between them. Some round, some square, some with metal sides, others just looking like trenches.

In a similar way the trenches in World War One took on a life of their own as they stretched from Belgium to Switzerland. Maps of the time show an amazingly intricate system of interlocking, parallel trenches. The soldiers at the time made up their own domestic names for their surroundings; they even produced newspapers for the trenches. They made what was, to any rational mind, organizational lunacy into something ordinary and (apart from the rats and casual death) cosy.

Of all the bloody conflicts in the twentieth century – and God knows there were enough of them, the First World War has become a symbol of bloody futility. Penguin published a black covered disturbing paperback called “The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.” This uncomfortable read pointed out that at the point that it was published (and there were some twenty odd years left of that bloody century) over 100 million people had been violently killed in conflict.

World War Two made World War One look like a picnic in terms of human death, but it is the first ‘great’ war which remains the most powerful symbol of man’s stupid inhumanity to man. The men who fought in the battles of World War One often displayed the most amazingly phlegmatic heroism in spite of the battle plans devised by their superior officers which defy belief. In one of Brecht’s plays one of the characters says that he doesn’t like generals who want their men to be heroes because that means that the General’s plans are going to be risky; whereas generals who expect their men to be cowardly are going to devise plans which by their very nature are going to have to be able to be followed by anyone, including the fearful. These plans are more likely to result in fewer fatalities for the PBI.

And what of Cardiff? All the frantic activity centred on the most expensive real estate in the city. Our only ice skating rink demolished; the Central Library demolished; a multi storey car park demolished; a parade of shops demolished; an open air market demolished; a toy superstore demolished; another parade of shops demolished – all so more shops can be built.

To any reasonable observer the destruction and rebuilding seems to bear all the hallmarks of the worse excesses of rampant capitalism and to have none of the conservation intelligence of normal development.

The Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia, whose drawings of futuristic cities now seem amazingly prescient, opined that all buildings should be pulled down on a regular basis so that each new generation could present their ideas through architecture and not be held back by the dead hand of tradition! Although I don’t agree with the idea I can see where he is coming from and there is an ideology behind it.

The rebuilding of the centre of Cardiff has no ideology to underpin its actions except for the making of money. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the advent of John Lewis Partnership is a Good Thing, but it’s not an artistic philosophy. And, while a new quality store in Cardiff is attractive, the fact that a six storey replacement for the Central Library is to be built on a Hotel car park by the redevelopers makes one pause and consider the amounts of money that must be sloshing around this project.

It’s at this point that one begins to think about the description of the Generals and the soldiers in World War One: lions led by donkeys. Certain battles, like the various battles of the Somme, seemed to indicate (to observers with ordinary eyesight and reasonable intelligence) that the heroic actions of the soldiers were futile. But, of course the ordinary soldier did not have the perspective to see the Wider Picture. The real tragedy of the First World War was that there was no wider picture. The strategy of the Generals was as brainless and vicious as it seemed to be to the people who died, senselessly on a daily basis. I share, with my Aunt Bet, a hopeless prejudice against Earl (sic.) Douglas Haig – mainly because his battle plans tried to kill her father and my grandfather – and for us he remains the outstanding example of a General who saw his men as ammunition rather than as sentient human beings.

I feel that the redevelopment of Cardiff is being produced with expensive money. I mean that we, as citizens, will benefit from a revivified city centre; extensive new shopping areas; a new state-of-the-art library and lots of other civil goodies.

But, I continue to ask myself, “At what cost?”

I don’t for a moment, compare the planning of the First World War with the planning of the New Cardiff, but I do wonder about the ethos behind the reconstruction of my city.

Who, as is always the question, is paying?

Another dream gone!

Government is ineffective. It’s official. Today gave me proof.

It is a chastening thing to find out that the people who constantly remind us that they are entirely dependent on our good behaviour and who only live to serve have failed us, or rather have given us too many opportunities to fail.

Perhaps it’s our fault. It must be. Our Government strives to bring us perfection from their standpoint of omniscience; and we fail them. We wilfully ignore their thoughtful rules and live our sordid little lives in defiance of their precepts.

On the trip to and from work (luckily not my work, but that’s not important) I counted seventeen people using their mobile phones. Of those eight of them were driving Little White Vans or larger, in one case very much larger. The count of seventeen people does not include two lorry drivers who, in suspiciously quick succession passed me, both of them with heads back drinking the last drops from hefty mugs.

Quite apart from the danger of their activities, I think it is the brazen couldn’t-care-less attitude which they demonstrate that is so infuriating.

Let’s be honest here: who, owning a mobile phone has not used it in a car while driving. I certainly cannot plead total innocence, but in mitigation I would point out that the first time I did it was when I was taking books to Oxfam in St Mary Street and as parking is limited with militant traffic wardens lurking thickly I phoned ahead when I was at the traffic lights by the Castle to let them know I was imminent so they could whisk out and take the books.

The second time was in the notorious traffic jam on my return from Gloucester when just outside Newport all movement stopped. In my defence here I have to say that although I was on a motorway I was stationary with the engine switched off and at my last gasp of patience and just needed to talk to someone to talk to or my boredom would have relieve my boredom!

You see, an admitted transgressor, but more saint like than sinner! And I don’t use my mobile phone in the car. I am therefore pure and have a total right to castigate those people who wilfully defy the law and live lives of total depravity!

All drivers break the law. The driver who maintains that he has never broken the speed limit is a liar – or someone who, by his tedious driving, has forced someone else to break the law by overtaking to get him out of the way!

It’s easy to be hard on those people who do things that don’t attract you. Smoking.

The days are running out for the smokers as they face exclusion from their favourite watering holes and eating places when the new laws come into force. For someone like myself who has never smoked (with any conviction) and hates the smell of cigarette smoke and also hates the health risks that come with passive smoking, it is like a dream come true.

My father, a life long smoker, always told me that, if laws were introduced to ban smoking in public places he would abide by them, but, as there were no laws forbidding him to smoke, he would continue to smoke in public places. I never really understood this attitude. Any more than I understood my mother’s ability to give up smoking for Lent and then start again on Easter Sunday. It took me years to get my mother to give up smoking and I never succeeded with my father. I have no love of cigarettes.

My sense of fulfilled triumph at the banning of cigarettes in public places is tempered by a sympathy for all those addicts who are going to find themselves more and more marginalised in normal society. The government has spent more on information about what is going to happen on the second of April rather than spending a vast sum of money on subsidised help to rid the addicts of their habit. There is nothing worse than walking around town and seeing what looks like groups of spivs smoking at the entrances to their various places of work. Banning smoking in firms and offices and shops is only the start of the long struggle to get rid of smoking for good.

I do look forward to smoke free pubs and public places. I just wonder about the action of the resentful minority and the enthusiasm of enforcement.

I wonder if you can make a citizen’s arrest!

So far and yet so near

There is, they say, no place like home; or near home. I once drove to Amsterdam (the boat helped), drove around Holland and drove back to Cardiff. During the course of the hundreds of miles that I drove I was only held up once in all the hours that I was on the road – and that was near Newport. The ugly sister ‘city’ that lurks close to Cardiff but always gets blotted out on weather maps by the little square that contains the temperature reading for the premier city in Wales.

I was reminded of this delay when returning from Exmouth today. A clear (if foggy) run down and a clear (if busy) run back right up until, you’ve guessed it: Newport! When it also started to rain! Talk about the pathetic fallacy!

God knows I am not that interested in football. I have had, for personal reasons, to show an interest in a certain Catalan football team beginning with ‘B’; an interest which has grown with time into something approaching mild appreciation. But I have been surprised by the absolute unreasoning fury which has consumed me watching an apparently professional team of full time footballers fail to score against a semi professional part timer team in the Nou Camp stadium in Barcelona in the first half.

I really do think that it is time for fully developed envy and righteous indignation to take over and fuel the baying for blood which seems to accompany any game by England now. If the coach had a scrap of decency in him he would now, at half time, with the score Andorra O – England O, resign. One is tempted to remind him of Antony after the fiasco of his last battle, and offer him a sword. And as for the players! That over paid bunch of talentless poseurs! I think that each player should be taken to a scrap yard and watch as his favourite car (with wallet, watch, ipod and mobile in the dash) is reduced to a tightly packed cube of metal. The player should then be told to go on a pilgrimage of penitence to the stadium in Israel and in Barcelona dragging his car block behind him while being whipped by WAGs with wet copies of the Sunday Observer.

Who would ever have thought that I could get worked up about a game of kick ball? Anything is possible! At this rate I should try one of the viciously unreadable novels of William Faulkner; perhaps I’ve been wrong all along. And what about Rap music; should I give it another chance? Margaret Thatch . . . no, that’s one reassessment too far. Hell would have to freeze over and I’d have to be passionately involved in the intricacies of mind numbingly tedious American Football for That Woman ever to rank above a retarded amoebae in my pantheon of the interestingly human. If hell, as Sartre wrote, is other people, I wonder who would be on the other two sofas if Thatcher was established on one. My own suggestion to His Infernal Majesty would be Arthur Sargill and the Reverend (?) Doctor (?) Ian Paisley. What a charming trio!

On the positive side today has been marked by a more than acceptable meal with Ingrid in the Devoncourt Hotel in Exmouth. A table by the window with a view of the well tended grounds of the hotel and a clear view of the sparkling sea as well as a tasty meal made for a very pleasant time. I returned to Cardiff with, of course, my soupçon of Geman cooking courtesy if Ingrid. She once made me a poppy seed cake which I ate with wonder and a certain amount of rapidity, and it rapidly become a tradition of my devouring at least two a year supplied by her fair hand. As Ingrid is not particularly well, I have, ever the considerate gentleman, given her due warning that I expect one for my birthday in some months time. She therefore can plan my treat in a more leisurely way. I pointed out to her the possibility of her not making one for me, was not to be entertained. Some traditions must be sustained whatever the struggle there might be.

My green credentials have taken a knock, as the panacea for the multiplicity of electronic gadgets that I acquire – the solar recharger – does not work! I have had to take it back and start all over again in testing its capabilities. God knows what that does to my carbon footprint: futile charging and waste of power; driving to shop to exchange; having to wait for replacement; driving back to collect; old charger sent back to be scrapped; much printing of vouchers, till receipts etc., etc. My attempts to be green have probably destroyed a whole copse of unsustained trees.

My only response is to remember Queen Victoria and say with her, “I will be good!”

The future is a wonderful place, and always out of reach!

A little light is needed!

How satisfying it is to use words as weapons! With the obscenity of a director in banking receiving an annual bonus of £22m it is easy to feel short changed when a misbehaving bank offers you compensation of a tenner.

I wonder what a bank would offer a customer for the sum of £10. I suspect that no ‘service’ from a modern, thrusting, relentless bank would actually have so low a charge. But this sum is deemed sufficient to throw to a mewling customer who has the temerity to request information to explain the seemingly inept actions of its employees.

You can tell that the paragraph above is based on personal experience, can’t you? It’s the barely suppressed rage, expressing itself in vituperative verbosity. With my usual style that is a nice judgement to make! So, I have sent off my missives of . . . – add your own word which alliterates with ‘missives’ and is nasty. The clock is ticking. Having sent off three letters to a Chief Clerk, a Manager and an Area Director, I will be interested to see who, if anyone, responds. And how quickly. And how much. Especially how much!

I would have thought that a brief five lines by a bank as a response to four questions asked by customer shows contempt. If that customer has shown a certain tenacity in demanding a well reasoned and full explanation for apparent mistakes, it would be foolish to dismiss the concerns with meaningless weasel words. But Banks are not bound by the normal concerns of your average Joe. We don’t have bonuses of £22m – which just goes to show how little our concerns should be regarded. One could see a wonderfully circular argument develop here which would delight Joseph Heller!

Enough. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I will await the replies of my correspondents before dipping my pen in the vitriol of justified outrage.

If your house has an open plan living room which is ‘L’ shaped and lighted by three modern style chandeliers which each have five candle-like light bulbs in them; what is the likelihood, if they are all inserted at the same time and they are all new, of them all stopping at the same time?

Don’t hold your breath. That was not one of those questions like, “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” Answer? “Bicycle.”

The makers of light bulbs can do what they want to, when you think about it. Who actually times how long their bulbs last? There are sad people in the world; but that sad? And another thing, when do you replace light bulbs? No, no, forget the “bicycle” thing. I mean in real life.

There are some people who replace at once, because they know that they have a supply of the correct wattage bulbs in a location that they are sure of. The rest of the population has a suspicion that they might have some bulbs somewhere, but God alone knows where they might be.

My musings are occasioned by the fact that one of the bulbs in one of the chandeliers has blown and it has not been replaced for two days. Even as I sit here underneath its lack of light, I prefer to write about it rather than replace it. Such a small action, so little inclination to do anything about it.

Perhaps something for tomorrow so that I can complete a task and get the work element of the day over and done with!

It’s a hard life.

Contemplate the smaller things

It is a sad statement of my present predicament that I can get genuinely excited the marketing of a new toilet cleanser by Harpic. I felt a real surge of enthusiasm as I plodded my weary way towards the fresh bread section of Tesco after I had dropped off Toni at work. This ended a spirited ‘conversation’ about the relative badness of our respective countries in their colonial days which had lasted from the bottom of Wentloog Road to the drop off point. I’m not sure what such ill defined discussions do to Toni, but I find myself in need of a mind numbing swim to rid my head of slavers, conquistadores, armies of occupation, defunct treaties, and mind numbing injustices!

You can see why the vision of a newly designed bottle of toilet fluid can have an ameliorating affect. I have always found shopping to be a wonderfully fulfilling experience. Obviously I’m not putting shopping on the same level as that memorable performance of Beethoven’s seventh symphony played in the Colston Hall in Bristol by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart, but it’s well in the frame of satisfying experiences.

I wonder how you would define a ‘satisfying experience’. How does it differ from a good experience or a fun experience or a profound experience?

Just consider, as I often do, the various types of shopping.

1. Shopping Direct: a very slovenly form of shopping where a person has already decided what is needed and goes out and gets just the item.
2. Shopping Educational: otherwise known as the ‘informed meander’ where the shopper visually grazes the commodities which are not part of the shopper’s usual repertoire.
3. Shopping Serendipitous where an unexpected purchase leaps unbidden into your hands
4. Shopping Arid: trapped in an environment where there are what MP’sFC described as ‘itemries’ none of which are of any possible interest to you e.g. car parts. There is a very distinct limit to how far I can look at gasket thingies and pretend that they are symmetrical op art found objects!

And, the making of lists is a lazy form of blog writing, though it does appeal to the dilettante in all of us.

I suppose that ‘satisfying’ would, really, have to be defined in terms of sex and family and friends – this would be the first level of ‘satisfying’ and a little too profound for my flippant take on life today.

I have eaten a square of 85% cocoa by Lindt and I feel very much more serious than I did a few seconds ago, but not serious enough to write more.

So many words; so little inclination to use them.

Tomorrow!

How are the mighty fallen!

Seduction. An interesting word, concept and soundscape. It starts with the sibilance of the snake, meanders through long vowels and ends with a modified sibilance and the finality of a smoother consonant after the harshness of the middle ‘k’ sound: an eventful sonic journey.

I am watching a similar journey of seduction exhausting a frail human being sitting opposite me. He struggles to resist but the sensual pull of those insinuating syllables has him in thrall. Resistance, as the Darleks keep informing us, is useless.

So he sits there, his morale depleted, his reserves exhausted, an empty shell of lust, lost in his gargantuan appetite, ever unsatisfied until he be sated with his object of desire.

Which, I might add, isn’t me. No. He has lost his heart to the blandishments of the slim attractiveness of svelte, sleek sophisticated and versatile good looks. How can I complete with the juggernaut-like appeal of the Argos catalogue? Who can resist the Ministry of Sound version of a hi-fi system which has two tower speakers and a four CD player mounted vertically in a third tower? I am sure that the reality will disappoint, but the catalogue picture makes them seem like true objects of desire!

How fatuous to be seduced by mere objects! I spurn such things and stand tall (on a mound composed of digital cameras, ipods, PDA’s, laptops, memory sticks, mobile phones, computers, printers, DS lites, CD players, mp3 players, mini disc players, tape recorders, radios, televisions, DVD players, digital watches, mobile DVD players, remotes, portable telephones, blood pressure monitors, televisions, and other electrical impedimenta!)

It is actually a delight to watch the writings of others as they wrestle with the electronic serpent which is electrical desire. In my mind the statue group, Laocoön and His Sons, for me represents a family (unaccountably nude) struggling against the ensnaring coils of the sinuous lead of the latest must-have electronic device. It goes without saying that they did not escape and succumbed as all (right thinking weak people) do.

Now say that classical art does not have a didactic role in twenty-first century Britain!

Once again listening to the relentlessly depressing news makes one reach for the hemlock. One can tell that films like ‘Casino Royale’ have a definite and measurably dangerous influence on the population of the more, uh, how shall I say, unpredictable states in this rackety old world of ours. They seem to believe that the elegant scenes of psychological personal conflict in the Salle Privée of some exclusive gambling joint can be transferred to the everyday life of dictatorial folk!

And we do have a wonderful assortment of vile leaders who seem to relish gambling for high stakes with human lives.

There is the ever religious homophobic monomaniac Mugabe who seems to be fine with 2,000% inflation, but I suppose his foreign bank accounts make live a little easier for him.

Saddam Hussein had the major disadvantage in vile dictator terms in looking like the embarrassing uncle who did inappropriate things when invited to Christmas dinner and had an absurd moustache.

But President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is the real McCoy. He looks like the deeply sinister solitary drinker who has lurked in his murky corner of the pub sipping a single half of stout and speaking to no one. He as such deep set eyes that half his face seems in perpetual shadow and his thin lipped smile is not one to promote confidence. This is the ‘obviously guilty’ character that is playing high stakes solitaire with the lives of British sailors and potentially with great chunks of the world.

I think that these petty dictators of the third world have been learning from the antics of the big boys of the West!

“The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

Too little, too late and way too cheap!

After telephone calls too numerous to calculate; the expenditure of amounts of nervous energy too vast to quantify; and fury whose bounds cannot be set, I have finally received the letter from the Rumney branch of HSBC which purports to answer my questions about the inexplicable inability of that bank to open an envelope take out a cheque with a paying in slip and start the process of paying it into their banking system. Having lost my cheque; found it; processed it; not told me; not written; not contacted me; ignored requests for information – in fact, the usual way in which banks treat those lesser sub species known as customers!

After much phoning of First Direct and their trying to contact the Rumney branch of HSBC (and signally failing) and enthusiastically agreeing with me that the level of service in the Rumney branch of HSBC was somewhat beneath contempt I awaited their response with some degree of excited anticipation.

But the Rumney branch of HSBC has responded with a masterpiece of content-less succinctness. I asked them to respond to four questions; they answered in five lines!

The one real piece of information or explanation is contained in the phrase “internal systems.” The mistakes, the delay, the impertinence, the lack of communication: presumably all of these are a direct result of “internal systems.” I wonder what that phrase means? Oh, of course, nothing, nothing at all. I shall treasure that phrase as one of the choicest euphemisms that I have come across for some time. I shall certainly try and use it at the first opportunity.

The Rumney branch of the HSBC had the temerity to inform me tht they had paid £10 into my account as “compensation” however, I think that I will inform them that my “internal systems” do not operate at maximum efficiency with a compensatory amount of anything less than £200! It’s worth a try!

The second stage of the Flowering of the Garden is in progress. An unfortunate side effect of planting, well, plants is that while they do undoubtedly flower they also die. And, instead of dying in colourful and interesting putrescence they die by withering untidily, necessitating deadheading and pruning.

But for the really dedicated Instant Gardener, dying flowers means “buy more live ones.” So we did just that. Venturing down to the Lambies and the garden centre which just happens to have a tank and an armoured vehicle casually situated in the car park. Toni has asked me why these military vehicles might be there, and I did once consider asking the man at the till for some sort of explanation, but then I thought that he might actually tell me some mundane story to justify them and a whole realm of fascinating speculation would be gone for ever. Better speculative ignorance than boring reality.

Every time!

“Children of Men” directed by Alfonso Cuaron has been described by one reviwer as “Un brillante relato cinematográfico ejecutado con maestría, pero sobre todo una sombría visión del futuro que es en realidad una inquietante metáfora del mundo de hoy.” And, frankly, who are you to disagree?

Based on a work by PD James which I haven’t read it was a chilling vision of a world in which fertility in women had ceased some nineteen years previously and the UK being the only state to survive some widespread plague and breakdown of law and order, though at the price of a totalitarian regime reminiscent of wartime Germany or Stalinist Russia.

The length of some of the takes in the film were extraordinary and the action sequences were choreographed with extraordinary precision. The sense of a depressingly anti utopian close future was oppressive and convincing, though close inspection of the plot was not possible, as some important aspects of the narrative thrust of the film were stated rather than explained.

The central concept of the film: that of a uniquely pregnant woman being taken to the ‘safety’ of the ship called appropriately ‘Tomorrow’ is powerful enough to work as a metaphor for the audience without the scaffolding of an exhaustive explanation for some aspects of the story line.

I do not for a moment believe that this film is presented as a realistic prophecy for the near future, but I do think that it raises some provocative questions about nascent attitudes towards immigration in Britain and also it questions the fragility of the systems that we think protect us.

As a minor aspect of the film I was particularly interested in the concept of the Ark for the arts that Britain had in what appeared to be Battersea Power Station. Here the salvaged remnants of Mankind’s artistic heritage were lodged. These included Michaelangelo's 'David' with part of his leg missing (thus giving us our second sculpture counting the RA rondo!) and Picasso's 'Guernica' which graced one wall as the characters had lunch. We were told by the 'curator' that he'd only been able to salvage a few Velasquez from Madrid! An elegant exercise in futility considering the whole of the population of the world was condemned to death, but the curator's modus vivendi was "not thinking about it" - as good a philosophy as any other in the last days.

This film had a positive ending, though the end of PD James' story did not; a similar circumstance to the filming of 'The Birds'. In Du Maurier's story the cataclysm was world wide and unresolved, whereas in the flim the attack of the birds was localised and parochial.

Mankind, as the poet said, cannot stand very much reality.

Bond is born (again)

Sometimes one’s value system takes a considerable shock. One has to rally one’s reserves of moral experience to withstand the assault to one’s standing. It takes a certain sort of person to be able to withstand the buffets. It takes character to be able to take on board a new concept and still be able to carry on as if there was nothing wrong, as if the world was the same place as before.

A film that lives up to its hype! You see what I mean! Pretty difficult to comprehend, eh?

After signally failing to see the film in the spacious surround sound of the cinema, we have been waiting impatiently to be disappointed with an overrated piece of junk which certainly wouldn’t be worth the cost of hiring.

But it was! ‘Casino Royale’ directed by Martin Campbell, but rather more importantly screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis proved to be a film worth its hire. The action of the film was competently delivered with some excellent set pieces, especially the chase near the start of the film after the black and white prologue as James Bond earns his double O status. But like The Simpsons, the real pleasure is in the moments of the script which show that someone is actually thinking about an audience who might appreciate irony.

This is a darker film than most of the Bond genre while paying considerable lip service to expected hit-them-hard and blow-them-up scenarios. It makes its own rules (to a certain extent,) and certainly wouldn’t have a place for a gently comical duffer like Q who, in retrospect seems like an extraneous character from another series of films entirely. There is humour throughout this film, but also a concern to develop a reasonably convincing character for what has become little more than a two dimensional comic book character in the other films.

For me the intelligence (sic) of the film was summed up in two instances. The first was when James had won a baddy’s sports car at a card game and as he scooped up the keys with the chips he turned to the unfortunate loser and said something like, “And the valet ticket too!” A nice detail.

The second touch which raises a wry smile is right at the end of the film. What seemed like a failure is turned around by a victorious Bond who then identifies himself, with a cheeky half smile, using the famous line which includes his name, while the background music is the traditional Bond theme. By this point in the film Daniel Craig has more than justified his use of the name and is a worthy successor.

The film is self referential, frequently using using audience knowledge of previous films to make a point. Bond emerging from the sea is a clear reference to 'Dr No' - but with a more feminist, or at least less sexist or inverted sexist take! Bond doesn't order his signature drink but creates an impromtu cocktail. There are numerous in-jokes which stay just this side of irritation.

The film has its longueurs which are more as a result of its determination to fill in some of the character back story than because of poor filming. It is trying to do something which has a little more integrity than the lazier, more spectacular films in the history of Bond. Having said that, the psychological insight we get into this Bond’s character is little more than multiple references to his ego and a little game of i-spy analysis between 007 and the Treasury girl.

The poker game is an extended episode which eschews special effects for real character tension – though the genre does provide some nail biting tension as long distance, high tec. medical help gets James back to the table after he has been poisoned and had his heart stopped: an everyday story of poker folk!

As an exciting Bond film, this is one of the best.

Pity about the song!

Another day another agency and another indication of private enterprise making a fortune off the backs of public institutions. This teacher supply supplier seems to be thriving as I caught a glimpse of scores of people staffing phones and marshalling the army of dyke stoppers to vacant situations! I’m sure that every teacher who enters the portals of this thriving business must kick themselves mentally and wonder why they entered one of the ‘caring’ professions when easier money was to be made by sending in the poor bloody infantry while comfortably ensconced behind the redoubtable fortifications of a telephone!

As my CRB check is being processed and I await my certificate of health I have time to muse over what these agencies might provide for me. I don’t, of course, mean in educational terms, but rather in what extra gadgets I will need to become a modern stop gap. I envisage producing a card based on ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Capote where the iconic character describes herself on her mailbox as “Miss Holiday Golightly, Travelling." She explains this by saying, "Home is where you feel at home, and I'm still looking."

On the same principle I suppose I will have to change the “travelling” to “educating.”

Oh, and the name too!

The wonder of waste!

“We nursery nurses have been put in the same band as the dustbin men.” Listening to the radio and a report about low pay and the equalization of women’s and men’s pay rates, one nursery nurse made this comparison to illustrate her appreciation of the effective demotion she felt she had endured.

The concept of equal pay for equal work is so obvious that it doesn’t merit discussion. The process by which equality is achieved and the perception of workers during the process is much more interesting and problematical.

The nursery nurse had a qualification which she felt was being totally ignored and I’m sure that there is a case to be answered, but I am much more interested in her use of bin men to show the extent of her sense of injustice. It was more revealing when she made the customary denial that she was denigrating bin men in her comparison and also admitted that in the wage band in which she had been put included other ‘professionals’ than bin men.

The nursery nurse seems to share a common view that no job is lower than a refuse collector: by a simple process of association, if you deal with rubbish then you must be rubbish yourself. Surely a false connection which would be angrily dismissed by the police, judges and the rest of the criminal justice system; school teachers; doctors and all the rest of the respected professionals who deal with things that are faulty or downright wrong!

‘Education’, we have been told from its etymological roots, is a ‘drawing out’; a process which seeks to find the knowledge inside a person and let them experience an ownership of the potentiality which already exists within an individual. Although I am not sure about that as a concept, I do like to think that this process is true in some areas. In my first year of teaching in Kettering Boys’ School I vividly remember in the good old days of CSE during one of the talks that had to be given on a pupil chosen subject, one of the boys deciding to give a talk on his father’s chosen field of professional interest: sewerage. He gave a fluent, informed and totally enthralling talk during which I heard more about nematode worms than I had previously heard in my life up to that point. He brought out the fascination of one area of human endeavour which is essential to life and yet ignored by the vast majority of people whose health and wellbeing is totally dependent on the efficient working of the system they choose to ignore.

That was a valuable lesson which has (sometimes) made me ponder on those areas of normal civilized existence that can easily pass you by.

Today, a Thursday is one of those days which encourage such thoughts. It’s a day which contains a little bit of magic for me. It’s bin day.

I have never really got over the simple pleasure of unpleasant, smelly rubbish being put out and, wonder of wonders, it simply disappearing!

Before you start to worry too much; I am perfectly well aware that the rubbish is not magically transformed into roses by the garbage goblins and that its removal is an ordinary human activity with men (usually but not exclusively) and trucks. Everyday, taking Toni to work I pass the entrance to the Lamby Way refuse and recycling depot, and sometimes get stuck behind those stunted electric, left hand drive sweeping machines that issue from the depot like shrunken, conceited milk floats on a preset robotic course ignoring with contempt all other road users.

But I still find it wonderful (in the true sense of the word) that rubbish is picked up and disposed of with the (variable) efficiency of our local collectors on a (at the moment) weekly basis.

Simple pleasures! Don’t ask about the cost!

Some people find hoovering comforting; some people delight in ironing; others are only happy when they are filing. All of these people are, of course, irremediably mad and should be treated with contempt whenever encountered.

Take filing for example; everyone has to do some at some time or other, bringing out the old shoe box or totally unsuitable container packed higgledy-piggledy with documents which would be difficult or impossible to replace. These documents will be packed in a way which, you will be informed, is according to a logical system known only to the box owner and looking completely random to everyone else.

For most people however, there is not such thing as filing; there are merely accumulations of relevant papers in various locations of spectacular inappropriateness. In most houses important documents are found rather like erratic stones left behind after a glacier has melted: surprising outcrops of papers in unlikely places.

I have known people to have their insurance documents, MOT certificate and passports in the kitchen drawer – you know, THAT kitchen drawer which always contains the things like the zest peelers which doesn’t fit anywhere else, so it lurks under the menus for the Chinese and Indian restaurants and is never found until after you wanted to use it, THAT kitchen drawer. Well, I suppose they always knew where to find them.

There are, of course, people who actually possess filing cabinets in their own homes! How can they justify such a confusion of Office and Home: unhealthy and unnatural! Unless, of course, like me, you can justify their use. Of course!

In my present denuded state with all the things that make for civilized living cwtched in Pickford’s I am reduced to one plastic expanding wallet; a rather tasteful ‘Snopake’ document carrier and a few coloured slip cases. More than enough, you might think, for a person who has most of his stuff in store and is no longer engaged in education.

I was amazed at how much paper I had acquired and how much sorting I had to do. It was at this point that a useful confusion of Office and Home came to the fore.

At one time having a stapler in the home was an innovation. Then the computer: I remember when I was teaching in Kettering the advent of the first computer in the school which was a BBC B and regarded with wonder and awe. Now computers have been domesticated and, with their link with home domestic media made them an essential part of the home scene. Computer printers often have the facility to double as photocopiers, so another aspect of Office life finds its way into the home.

But, the most startling item of almost exclusive office use a few years ago which has migrated into the everyday home is the shredder.

I find shredder use invigorating and wonderfully liberating. That sounds somewhat overstated, but it’s true! There is a finality about the shredding of documents that eliminates them from your consciousness. That uneasy feeling that to throw away some bits of paper might turn out to be counter productive and therefore they need to be kept, can be shredded together with the document in a couple of seconds: doubt gone, document gone, mind cleared! Shredders should be available on the National Health!

It is surely only in what used to be East Germany that the cross shredded remains of documents are painstakingly pieced back together again in a doomed attempt to reconstruct the full extent of insane psychotic suspicion which fuelled the bureaucratic backed spying which characterised the old Communist regime. For the rest of humanity, a cross shredded document is, to all intents and purposes, gone.

The advent of the green composting bin in Cardiff encourages the use of a shredder as shredded paper is an acceptable product to add to the garden waste that is the basis for selective refuse collection. So, not only is shredding those stubborn pieces of paper that refuse to be thrown away therapeutic, but it is also an essential part of conservation and a way of reducing ones carbon footprint.

I’ve just been watching the Budget broadcast by Gordon Brown: a terrifying experience!

His ‘jolly face’ complete with ‘friendly smile’ is one of the most chilling things I’ve seen since the last rerun of ‘The Fog’ by Stephen King. Brown smiles as though there is someone off camera frantically grinning to him to indicate what he ought to be doing. And his breathing! He’s a mouth breather; to take a breath he seems to push his lower jaw downwards and slightly outwards and the sides of his mouth from the ends of his mouth convert his lower jaw into a an exact replica of a ventriloquist’s dummy! I feel there is significance in that observation, but I am still searching for it.

The saga of the bank continues and now First Direct has caught the contagion of incompetence which had hitherto been the exclusive property of HSBC Rumney.

The story continues.

Appearances can be deceptive

“Braggadocious!” was the word emblazoned across the crotch of P Diddy as, sunglasses reflecting the flash of a camera and clutching what looked depressingly like a glass of orange juice, he made his way towards the photographer. As the lead article in the Indie ‘Extra’ and sub titled “On the road with Diddy and Snoop” I looked forward to fuelling my detestation of his life style, morals, ideas and, above all, his so-called music. Here was another example of a topic which in actuality I loathed but about which I took a ghoulish delight in reading. Into this category you could include The Princess of Wales, The Dirty Digger, That Woman and Jade Goody. I well remember a Pluto Press (oh, the memory of a left wing publisher!) production about Dianna Princess of Self Publicity which showed her picture on a Heinz 57 varieties can, and which provided a few hours of cheerfully directed detestation towards a fitting target.

Imagine my disappointment at finding nothing in the article which could not have been applied to David Beckham or Elton John or the nasty one from Oasis: money fuelled excess without the absolute, unforgivable vulgarity which would allow a self indulgent wallow in assumed moral rectitude on the part of the patient reader! Snoop smoking hash, being arrested, and then (gosh!) smoking it again the next night doesn’t really cut it for me in the detestation stakes. This is all small beer while Robert Mugabe thrives and is able to demean himself by opening his mouth and articulating his obnoxious Jesuitical (I used the word advisedly) doublethink in the soft gleam from the rich sheen of his exclusive hand made suits.

It is always good to get learning and knowledge out of the way as soon as possible in a well ordered day. This approach characterised my mode of teaching when I adopted the indiscriminate scattering of unconsidered trifles of knowledge in lessons so that pupils could then rest easy in the confidence that they had been touched by a piece of arcane information which they would never use in the normal course of their lives. Given, however, the ubiquitous presence of the quiz show on television, radio and in pub, club, church hall and private gathering, there is always now an odds-on chance that some snippet of unconsciously stored knowledge will crackle its way from the synapses and actually prove itself to be the answer that differentiates.

This occurred for me when I diffidently and conversationally mentioned when someone was trying to describe an exotic island which “looked like a maimed hand” that they were probably referring to Celebes which was now known as Sulawesi.

The trick when saying things like this is to be as casual as possible and give the impression that this is the sort of general knowledge that really is general and known, therefore, by everyone. The way not to do it is to confess that you are an ardent reader of ‘The Nerdy Boy’s Big Bumper Book of Really Interesting Facts‘ and that you can tell them plenty more super things like that as long as they don’t instantly leave the room.

It’s also got something to do with the way that your mind works. Some people remember things like names, important dates, where they parked the car and significant others’ birthdays while others know the colours of the Basque flag; the name of the Muse of Dancing and the names to go with the numbers of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. These two types are not mutually exclusive, but in reality they do not go together.

There is also the difference in the delight with which information is garnered. For some it is the discovery of a little known Building Society with an interesting ISA for others, like me, it comes with listening to Radio Three in the morning.

I listen to Radio 3 because sometimes the relentlessness of the misery which can come with over indulgence on the ‘Today’ programme is just too much. How much more intellectually bracing is it to be condescended to by superior beings who decide your musical sustenance in the mornings and who introduce Mongolian yurt rattlers throat warbling a version of an early Hadyn quartet as if it were as prosaic as ‘Abide with me’ sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So obscure is some of the music broadcast by Radio 3 that, when they actually play something that you recognise and can hum, you instantly feel a pang of guilt, as though they are only playing it to make you feel wanted and guilt too because this piece of populist tunefulness has take the place of an exquisite rarity which will now not be played because of your vulgarity!

What Radio 3 played was not, on the face of it, obscure: music from ‘William Tell.’ Everyone knows the overture, or at least The Tune, if not the very long introduction. The length of ‘William Tell’ makes some of Wagner’s operas look like quick frivolities, and you don’t often get the opportunity to hear it in its entirety. The selection on Radio 3 was for the ballet music from the opera. The first few chords did not seem familiar, but the music had a sort of ‘rumpipumpiness’ to it which would ensure that a single listening would brand it onto the memory. I therefore settled back (as much as you can while driving) and prepared to be entertained. A theme emerged and I jolted into a deep memory. A television programme on some remote part of Russia showed a group of workers sitting around drinking vodka and singing words to the tune of “Those were the days, my friend” by Mary Hopkins. It turned out that the song was actually based on an old Russian tune! With the ballet music from ‘William Tell’ it was someone even further back in time that was brought to mind.

The singer was Andy Stewart, and the song was ‘The Scottish Soldier – The Green Hills of Tyrol’ – you can see how Rossini and ‘William Tell’ got into it! To be fair, when I looked up the words the melody was described as Midi Sequenced by Barry Taylor. I don’t know what that means, but at least the music is not being appropriated unscrupulously.

It was a shock, not only to have Andy Steward brought to mind after a quite comfortable number of years, but also to hear something recognisable in what was unknown. A little learning indeed!

My previous comparable shock was when I was downing a pint in The Carpenter’s Arms; that statement in itself shows how long ago that was, as that pub is now the sort of place that I would not enter for a nmber of free pints. There I was (in those days of yore) just about to put the glass to my lips when I stopped in mid potential gulp as the juke box played a top ten song which used the last movement of Sibelius’s fifth symphony as its melody!

It almost sounds like one of those games on “I’m sorry I haven’t a clue” where one contestant has to say something then the next contestant has to say something completely unconnected to it.

Like “bank” and “consideration.”

Bitter!