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.)

Medical Matters

Jean Paul Sartre is, as everyone knows, eminently quotable – and his quote is, “Hell is other people.” There may be others, but I’m buggered if I know them.

[In the interests of research I have just been to a web site: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jeanpaul_sartre.html which lists 27 {Is that a Sartre-like number} quotes and, yes, I only knew the one above.]

Anyway.

I was thinking of Jean Paul Sartre (as you do) when I accompanied Paul Squared to his hospital appointment. I have been to hospitals reasonably frequently over the past year and have become something of a connoisseur of those ante rooms of Hell: The Hospital Waiting Room!

Whatever the style or period of the building there is a similarity in the appearance of the rooms.

They are always just that bit too small for the number of people waiting in them. They are all (apart from children’s waiting rooms) painted in ‘restful, pastel colours’ which are difficult to give a name to.

They all have magazines which are irritatingly out of date and are not what you’d choose to read. This is of course an improvement on what they used to be when they were woefully out of date and from another parallel universe (or The Tatler together with Horse and Hound.)

They have chairs made by the same people who manufacture seating objects (to call them chairs is an insult to comfort) in airports – you know, those devices which seem to be constructed to ensure that no traveller falls asleep, or indeed, ever feels comfortable.

There is, also, the Colourful Image: the picture or poster designed to Brighten Up The Whole Room. I have tried to link the image to the subject of the room, but have signally failed: large shark and neurosurgery? A cute creature merry go round and dentistry? Medicine has reasons that only medicine knows!

But it’s the people; it’s always the people that tell you that you are in a Hospital Waiting Room. I have never been alone in a waiting room and that usually allows the full range of types that are essential to the waiting experience.

There is always one person who does not look as though they should be there. Indeed so incongruous do they look that they disturb all the other people waiting who did not realise that they were quite as ill as that, if such a medical disaster is waiting for the same people that you are waiting for.

There is the monologue chatterer. This is the sort of person who can speak on the in-breath and keeps up a sotto voce one sided conversation of stultifying inconsequentiality.

There are the lost: who? why? what? how? The ones who don’t really understand what’s going on.

My favourite is the Past-timer, the person way into his or her pension but clearly indicating what they used to be like in their youth; with men it is evidenced by a tendency towards Brylcreem and inappropriate jumpers and a vague look of wondering if all the fuss is actually worth it.

Well, people watching always passes the time.

What next?

Sometimes displacement activity is the only action in town; the only thing that keeps you sane. Marking used to drive me to hoover; to brush my teeth; to clean my shoes; too play the keyboard badly and, in extreme cases, in an example of reversal psychology – marking!

Writing is both a chore and a release; for it to be coherent it demands, of necessity, structure in the form of grammar; the rules; full stops and capital letters; agreement of cases, person and sense. On the other hand it offers release in the form of the universe that the very language creates, and you create by your input and your imagination.

So where now? What imaginative leap will this writing allow me, where will it go?Disappointment invariably follows. Let it go where it will!

During the snatch of the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Beyond Belief’ that I listened to while driving to fetch Toni from work, it transpired that a selection of representatives from a selection of world religions were talking about the importance of music in their respective faiths.

In was while listening to this programme that it struck me how like communism was Islam. I do not mean that they are exactly synonymous; that would be a ridiculous statement, though I’m sure that it would be possible to talk about authoritarianism and faith and hierarchy and a number of other aspects and link them with some degree of convincingness. As I listened to the truly disturbing reasonableness of the Scottish Muslim and his description of his faith, I was struck by the difference between what he was saying and what you can see in the world of the Middle East. Appearance and reality. And that is what reminds me of the ideology of Communism in relation to Islam.

Having read the Koran (in English) there are many aspects which are easy to identify with from a Christian perspective as well as others which are much more problematical. But, in essence it seems to me that Islam is a very ‘reasonable’ religion which seems to be ‘reasonably’ egalitarian and encourages the development of male and female with a degree of equality.

But where do we see the religion operating according to the Book? How many democracies are Islamic? Where are women given true equality in the Middle East? Where are the human rights of citizens protected in Islamic states? How many Islamic states allow the promotion of Christianity? The so called halcyon days of the Caliphate of Spain where the faiths coexisted seems far in history. The great advances of Islamic scholarship are far in the past and we are more likely to hear of oppression and repression from those fundamentalist Islamic states which vaunt their orthodox allegiance.

The faith is in favour of equality and freedom of worship and all the other positive aspects of a liberal faith; it’s just that there isn’t an actual country in the world in which an Islamic faith is practiced in this way. Just like Communism: all the positive aspects, but, unfortunately, no actual, real country in the world, ever.

The Islamic contributor in the programme was explaining the Islamic approach to music: he rejected the use of music which might be inclined to deprave and corrupt; that the use of music which encouraged the worship of god was fine, but music which, in the worship of god tended towards entertainment and a sort of self indulgent pleasure was wrong. Although he seemed reasonable, there was a steely sort of Puritanism in what he said which, I thought, was self defeating and self contradictory.

Ii think that music underpins the whole of our existence. Janacek used to listen to the speech of his fellow countrymen and in the notebook which he carried around, he would sometimes write down the ‘music’ of their voices in musical notation. We do not speak in monotones, so when we communicate we communicate in music. We cannot and surely would not want to escape it. And all the mealy mouthed apologies for an emotional response to music in terms of twisted religion are truly repulsive.

Why did music raise itself into my consciousness? Roads.

Roads. And more particularly the noise a car makes when it travels over roads. And why the music is different.

When I went to New York on my one and only visit to escape the grovelling television coverage of the Prince of Wales and his first wife, I ‘enjoyed’ the rampant success of capitalism but I was astonished at the state of the roads. It was during a time when New York was described as ‘dying from the roots up’ as the sewers, roads and essential services were neglected. There were potholes and noxious wisps of steam oozing from ill fitting and noxious manhole covers.

The roads of Cardiff are a metaphor for the world. (Oh god, I’m beginning to sound like a vicar!) Driving a normal journey through the streets of Cardiff you pass through a range of ‘countries’ from the affluent first world smoothness of a certain part of the Newport Road, where the sound you make is a whisper of the normal noise that surface noise makes to the third world experience of Widdecombe Drive in Rumney where every service seems to have cut the surface and left an uneven patchwork of bumps which makes driving an eventful experience and the music of the tyres more experimental. Even on a seemingly smooth road there are always undulations which create their own series of asymmetrical rhythms.

The rhythms of the road and a constant music to confound narrow ideologies.

The allure of gardens!

The spiritual presence of my father was vividly present today. Given that we are trying to sell the house, presentation is all important, so the winter denuded pots in the entrance have had to be rejuvenated. Rejuvenated suggests that what I have done is, in some way, to have encouraged the existing plants to flower suddenly and out of season, to bring them on so to speak.

I have not.

I am my father’s son and if he taught me nothing else (and I assure you he taught me lots, he was, after all, a teacher) he taught me that the only gardening is instant gardening. If you need colour in a garden, buy it in. Let it thrive. Take the credit.

He took his inspiration from Capability Brown who was well known for giving nature a helping hand. If Nature had not placed a lake and mountain in the requisite position then Brown would rectify God’s mistake and provide them exactly where the client would have wanted them if they had had the sensibility of Brown himself.

I feel it incumbent upon myself to continue this grand tradition and go to the garden centre and buy established growing plants and use my aesthetic sense to place them in intriguing juxtapositions causing the eye to rejoice in the exciting collage of shape and colour that is a well planned garden.

Or, to be more truthful, working erratically through trays of potted plants and putting them wherever a blank piece of earth presented itself.

It is amazing how much colourful vegetation is swallowed up in quite a small space in a garden. I am almost convinced that I need to purchase a small greenhouse to start some of these plants from seed or bulb. If following the Rees Family is so ruinously expensive, then god knows how denizens of country houses ever managed to fill their gardens!

For all the expense though, it is amazing how a blank space leaps into life with the addition of flowers, especially as they all now look as though they have grown there naturally and not been located there less than five hours ago!

I even remembered to scatter mini slug pellets on the freshly turned earth (all of which is in pots and baskets) though I’m not sure that this is the season for slugs. Do they hibernate or lurk elsewhere; this is after all is winter and the pickings for slugs in the form of luscious greenery should be limited. Global warming makes me less confident that the slimy devourers of my delicate plants are disinclined to obey the past definition of the seasons and stay away from the garden – so I erred on the safe side and spread snail death with reckless abandon.

Tomorrow a reassessment of what is to be done to compensate for the lack of colour in the rest of the garden. I discovered in my enthusiastic ploughing up of old pots that I was actually destroying growing plants – but growing plant bulbs beneath the surface of the earth! No good for me; but for the sake of honest decency I re-covered the nakedly exposed bulbs and hoped that I replaced them the right way up!

Ah, the wonders of informed horticulture!

Fickle fortunes of Art

How fortunes change.

When I was growing up in the fifties there was really only one Welsh artist who lived the artistic bohemian life and had a reputation which reached well beyond the borders of Wales. He had painted the imperious cellist and iconic portraits of Dylan Thomas: he was the Grand Old Man of painting and revered as a Master. Augustus John.

The Indie has been issuing a series of posters of Art Treasures in Britain. The painters they included were: Manet, Van Gogh, Raeburn, Millais, Palmer, Gainsborough, Blake, Turner, Gauguin, Constable, Poussin and the Welsh artist. And the choice of Welsh artist ticks a lot of boxes for the Independent!

Poor old Augustus is confined to his past reputation, but the rising star and much more interesting painter is, of course, his sister, Gwen John: a member of an ethnic minority; a woman; a ‘used’ woman; a better painter – all the things that the Indie respects!

It’s too easy to make cheap comments about the list; after all any list is an open invitation to Outraged of Pseudsville to decry the omission of an essential art work, though, personally, I have nothing but praise for a list which includes Samuel Palmer, together with another great eccentric (euphemism) Blake. If they had included Fuseli, Dadd, Danby and Martin they could have had a bit of a theme of eccentricity going there; as well as some more than decent paintings. I am available as a consultant at any time.

The Indie seems to have taken over the education role of the newspapers that provided my grandparents with the collected editions of Dickens. I rather enjoy the educationally paternal stance of the Indie in bringing educated selections to its readers. Great Art having been ‘done’ it is now the turn of literature with a series of ‘banned’ books which have commenced with ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ I like the concept which drives this collection which allows for an astonishing selection of works, most of which, I realise I have read – but read in ageing paperback editions where the perfect binding is gradually exploding in a cloud of dry glue dust. You might have guessed that those last few phrases are my justification for buying all the succeeding novels; at less than four quid for a hardback, how can I resist?

Except. There is always an ‘except.’ I have made two abortive attempts to find a newsagent who will deliver my copy of the Indie. And I have failed to find one. I do not think that my area is actually served by a newsagent! I refuse to believe that this is true and I will continue, diligently to search for a deliverer.

We watched the film version of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ directed by David Frankel and I thought that the telling changes from the novel were not an improvement. This film is basically a vehicle for Meryl Streep, and she obviously had fun making the film, but I don’t think that the fun is commensurate for the viewer. I found the moments when Streep broke down mawkish and too much the great actress giving gravitas to the role. Having said all that, I enjoyed the film for what it was; a fairly harmless little fairy tale.

We also watched ‘Right at your door’ directed by Chris Gorak. I was astonished that a film with such a relevant and exciting premise of a dirty biological bomb being exploded in Los Angeles was so tedious to watch. It lacked pace and interest: a boring waste of a fascinating idea.

I much preferred the animated cartoon feature “Hoodwinked” an American take on the Little Red Riding Hood story. Although the animation was not what one has come to expect from films like ‘Finding Nemo’ it was more than rescued by the script which was full of self indulgent detail. At the end of the film I was not clear for whom this film was made: there were many phrases in the script which could only have been appreciated by an informed adult, but it also had twee little songs for kids. What the hell I always like films with clearly understood morals; it’s such a relief from real life.

Watch on!

Floating worlds!

As a symbol of frustration of futility, a small black toad riding hopefully but statically on the rear end of a floating wooden frog caught in the reeds of a garden pond, has to be fairly potent.

The inscrutable but visible (I love these Taoist enigmas) life of the pond continues in its diurnal cycle only impinging on my consciousness when the cold of winter finally clears the green floating algae and allows a deeper (literally) perspective of the hidden waters.

As far as I can see and know, none of the gardens in the immediate vicinity has a pond. Mine is alone. Isolated. A tiny speck of aquatic life in a patchwork of pondless gardens. So where do the frogs come from? Have they come from the reens (local name for drainage ditches) which are relatively near but only accessible via a forbidding (to a hopping toad) barrier of houses and pavements and streets?

The temptation is to type something into Google and pass off the information as my own, but I’m not sure that I want to know the prosaic reason for the repeated annual return of frogs (or toads) to my small pond.

I like to think of my toad (or frog) behaving rather like Landseer’s animal in ‘Stag at bay’: noble, silhouetted against the skyline, turning its noble head and sensing the sweet tang of escape and new pond water! Then the heroic struggle to surmount the almost impossible obstacles of hard unyielding surfaces; thundering mechanised monsters; high fences; hostile householders and domestic scavengers. Then slipping into the calm, fish filled and sometimes illuminated waters of my pond!

A Shangri-La of deeps and shallows; of rain refreshed waters with a kinky frogalike floating serenely and impassively on the surface to whet the appetite of the most jaded toad.

The goldfish, the permanent denizens, have already had their Saturnalia, evidenced by shoals of new citizens waiting to have their innocence shattered by the graphic cycles of life of which they are now part.

I have to say that the frustrated frog (or tortured toad) which has been humping the floating wooden reptile is a most repulsive creature and has been probably shunned by the rest of his kind, which explains his retreat to the inanimate to satisfy his amphibious lusts.

I only hope that the water being graced with frog spawn, the fish do not regard it as an extra source of food and devour it all before it has had a chance to mature. Going on past experience the spawn does actually produce tiny black creatures which look exactly the right size for a casual snack for the goldfish. Those are not fed so regularly that they can afford to ignore any passing food source with impunity.

I used to feed the fish on a daily basis until I was informed by the fountain of all wisdom (the man in the water section of Blooms) that they did not need this type of sustenance and that I would be better in not feeding them at all during the winter. You can see my problem: with global warming, the definition of winter (especially in the mild climate of Cardiff) is becoming more and more difficult to define, so the exact date on which I should start feeding the fish on a more regular basis becomes more and more problematical. I had the unnerving experience a few days ago of venturing out into the back garden and, standing on the top step and looking down towards the pool, I was struck by a row of fish seemingly looking up at me!

I then, fully, realised my status as divine to the fish. Imagine: every so often a shadowy figure appears and hovers and stays at the side of the pond universe; there is a movement and suddenly, the cornucopia is opened and foison is scattered along the upper limit of the watery world; the shadowy figure then retreats into the mystical distances above the world as the fish know it.

The row of fish was obviously waiting for the Umpteenth Coming! Goodness knows what strange piscatorial ceremonies they enact beneath the surface to ensure the reappearance of the Hand of Plenty, and much must be the finny worry during the hard winter months when the shadowy figure comes no more.

I wonder what part the frog (or toad) plays in their religion.

The temptation to write some sort of ironic pastiche of the theological basis for the Religion of the Pond and make snide parallels with the truly appalling religions with which we surround ourselves in our fragile lives is almost irresistible.

Almost, but not quite. Perhaps I am learning to ignore the more obvious and vulnerable targets.

Such consideration!