The Listener Crossword

Well, I never. I'm 4 letters away from finishing the Listener crossword. I might have got as many as three clues before but don't usually even understand the guidance.

Completing the grid, though, is only a part of it. This week, there's an extra letter in each clue and you need to make the refrain from a song and the names of its authors from them and then 'solvers must highlight the five characters who come around'.

Well, I can almost make Stock, Aitken and Waterman from the letters I have and then I'm left with ERSFLROOWOSISD and half a dozen ?s.

But I'm thrilled with that performance even if I don't succeed with the remainder.

There might never be another such day. 

--

PS. I've just found an online forum where everybody's saying that was the easiest Listener crossword ever. Not to worry.

Poets re-assessed

 I have only admiration for anybody who has written a book. Obviously all the more if it turned out to be worth reading. Although for a few years, many years ago, I had the dedication for the long haul and gladly prepared for and successfully delivered more or less respectable performances in the 12 Hour cycling discipline, that was probably on account of an obession and the collateral adrenalin rush. It had to be done, for reasons that have since become less obvious, but it's not clear that the same imperatives apply to me writing a book.

I don't particularly care what the book would be about. I might even write one on dry stone walls or the history of Stenhousemuir FC if I thought I could. I hope the idea of a novel has finally been banished for good.

C20th is my version of poetry in English from 1898-1999 and it might just be possible because there are various bits I did earlier that can be dragged in, I've had almost 50 years reading the raw material and by now I feel as if I know what I think.

However, with the distractions of reading good books rather than writing a bad one, chess, horse racing, music and gazing at unripening tomatoes, it's not easy to apply oneself to the office hours required to achieve anything book length in less than 'far too long'. I'm far too ready to allow myself to think that adding 500 words here or there constitutes a shift and it's not even 15000 words yet, which was an undergraduate dissertation in 1980. I try to excuse it all on a capacity for concise summing up and a laudable aversion to long-windedness that I bring to book writing but not to this website.

However, sticking at it gives me the alibi of making believe I'm doing something but, as each chapter tries to find a shape for itself, there's precious little reason to pretend to be objective, space can be filled by recycling as many of the generalisations and even prejudices I've become so comfortable with and, so, in with the workmanlike analysis goes a hearty dose of opinion.

I've ever increasingly not understood why Ted Hughes was made such a fuss of, notwithstanding the impact his first poems made; Elizabeth Bishop's gradual ascendency to the very peak of critical acclaim is entirely justified, though. Where Eliot's status seemed almost god-like in the 70's, it no longer does and, I found today, that it's mostly about Prufrock. Auden accompanies Ms. Bishop when doing his best work; Thom Gunn, to who I devoted so much of my hero worship for several decades, certainly doesn't get anything like a chapter to himself, and I'm not yet sure which bits of Larkin writing to drag back into service but he's central, very, very central to the agenda, such as there has to be one.

It's not a waste of time doing it. I should spend more time on it and do it properly, perhaps. Not for anybody else's sake but for mine. It's like playing at home with the crowd on your side, telling yourself what you think and then congratulating yourself for having got it right.  

Spot the Odd One Out

It's touch and go with my tomato harvest.

I took the most forward half dozen to Swindon a couple of weeks ago and one went red while I was there and so they've now had most of them. I've brought the next dozen inside in the hope of salvaging a few more while the weather lasts and, look, something is happening.

There's lots of fruit on the plants outside but much of it won't come in time. Like Lester Piggott when a disgruntled owner said he didn't come in time who replied that he couldn't come without the horse. So I think next door, who masterminded this whole project, might be getting a bag of green tomatoes in the hope of some chutney or pickle.

Quite honestly, the long wait has been an investment that makes me wonder how tomatoes can be so cheap in the supermarket but maybe the industry has some secrets about how to hurry them along. They have given me something to check on but, alongside two cucumbers, I can't say I'm sold on the produce game.

Collateral Detritus

Those readers that return here week by week to keep up with the Rabelaisian roller-coaster story of me and my books might be wondering about the collateral detritus that accumulates as books keep becoming a higher priority than the last. At present that process is reminding me of the production of Patrick Marber's Closer I saw many years ago in which the furniture from previous scenes was simply pushed to the bag of the stage. I sagely commented to the lady sitting next to me that it seemed to symbolize the increasing emotional baggage that the characters were building up. She must have been grateful for the insight.

Still on the floor by the settee is the highly detailed and academic Rembrandt study that was stood down when something more pressing and easy-going arrived. Stored up on the top shelf are the two remaining Kundera novels that I read years ago but acquired for completeness but weren't quite got around to when the next priority showed up. They are piled below Vasari's Lives of the Artists which is great but now held over after finishing the life of Brunelleschi and the remarkable story of the dome of Florence Cathedral and that now has Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper and Me, Again, which was otherwise 'uncollected' stories and other pieces which would be awaiting me finishing the biography by Frances Spalding were that not now being read, to great contrasting effect, alongside Katya Hoyer's Beyond the Wall, a history of the German Democratic Republic. The library made that available sooner than I'd expected and with them expecting to get it back and it being 423 pages, I'd better press on. The deadline won't be a problem, it is brilliant. Come back soon for a report on that and, I dare say, some thoughts on Stevie.

None of those books are by any means abandoned and will be returned to, even hopefully the Rembrandt. At the very bottom of that pile, though, is a biography of Delmore Schwartz that's been there for years and that might be there for as long as there is such a pile of items in waiting.

--

On a rich and varied Autumn programme, in among the local concert-going, there is now poetry, an actual poetry reading, here,

Hammersmith 13/10 

as well as the welcome return to turf action at Fontwell and maybe Sandown in the hope that horse racing will get back to being interesting, and profitable, with obstacles from them to negotiate. The obstacles for me to negotiate are all those destined not to win listed among those to choose between. It will be back to that there London, the exquisite Wigmore Hall, for Errollyn Wallen and I'll hope to get to Petersfield early on a Sunday to join the Edward Thomas Fellowship walk.

So, not being a commercial station, like DGBooks Radio and Wireless necessarily are, we don't have adverts here but, like Radio 3, we do have trailers in the hope you'll be encouraged to come back for one item or another.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm 'bewildered', as one of our recent Prime Ministers once said he was, to find that GB News have suspended two presenters for inappropriate things they've said on air.

I thought everything that was ever said on GB News was designed to be inappropriate and that was their point. But that's only what they allow to be broadcast and a couple of things that they can't help themselves with.

What is it that they really think, one dreads to ask.

Career Opportunities

Career Opportunities

At school the careers master 

Could see I was a disaster, 

The sort of maelstrom 

Employers run miles from. 

He said, ‘you’ll not make an ostler

Anywhere near Gloucester, 

They’ll not take you as a sommelier 

Even in Montpellier 

And you won’t be a barista

From here to Chichester. 

Perhaps you’ll be a farmer 

If you go to the Bahamas 

Or maybe a sailor 

In the navy of Venezuela

But you’ll never be a banker, 

Either here or in Sri Lanka.’ 

He was right, I didn’t argue 

And so now what I do 

Is write couplets and stanzas 

And then take my chances.

 

 

Record Review - Yuja Wang, Errollyn Wallen, Daniel Barenboim

Presto proved to be all their name implies with the prompt deivery of these discs and might yet become the natural place to look when sourcing further necessities. Yuja Wang's new release wouldn't have been quite so long awaited if I'd gone to them first.

Yuja Wang, Rachmaninoff, Los Angeles Philharmonic/Dudamel (Deutsche Gramophon)

The unsightly gap on the shelves where the Rachmaninov concertos should be will now be filled in with this when it is time for it to be put there. I am glad to go as far as Rachmaninov extravagance, and to Liszt, while really being one for pristine Bach. It is passionate, lyrical and big but always inventive and not indulgence for indulgence's sake.

For programming reasons, disc 1 has Concertos no. 1 and 4 with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and 2 and 3 are on disc 2 so we effectively begin with the lesser known pieces, no. 1 announcing itself boldly before embarking on its cross currents and tides in the flow of Yuja's expansive command. 

More than most concertos, perhaps, these and for piano and orchestra whose role is above and beyond that of the soloist's wallpaper which in more classical concertos they might be. One is soon struck by the spaciousness they create in these live recordings from February this year.

No. 4 broods and wanders rather more in its Largo before its Allegro Vivace makes a case for having been included in Fantasia, especially since this was recorded in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It's difficult to believe that Rachmaninov didn't write film music or with films in mind whereas Korngold hardly ever stopped.

The Rhapsody in this performance is impish and quicksilver but at 23.39 not overly quick which suggests that it lingers when necessary.

Concerto no. 2 is where the orchestra most obviously carries the main theme with the familiar broad sweep. Live performances are immensely preferable to studio recordings -much less so for me in pop music when the euphoria can seem compulsory- and the quality of recordings like this by now make them also the preferred option because they are what happened and not, as can be the case, something that never did with different parts laid down in different studios, sometimes on either side of the Atlantic Ocean on different days.

It has long been a standard joke to say 'the production on this album is amazing'. I did actually hear somebody say that before it was taken up by Rowan Atkinson playing a sophisticated, tame gorilla on Not the Nine O'Clock News. However, this is remarkable even on my cheap back room portable machine as the strings stretch out their longing and regret in the Adagio.

It is noticeable at concerts that the flashy, bravado pieces generate the most generous and spontaneous ovations from enervated audiences and Gustavo Dudamel got famous for those that he brought forth with his Venezuelan Youth Orchestra but while that is stirring stuff and understandable, it would be a mistake to think that is all Rachmaninov does or even what he was best at. The entirely choral Vespers go to deep, dark places and the mysterious opening of Concerto no. 3 is all introspection. 

It doesn't remain that for long as its sumptuous twists and turns, in the whole 16 minutes of the first movement, set out Rachmaninov's shadows and light to best effect in this superlative account, probably more so than no. 2 and so the programme does build from its grandstand beginnings to its highlight. All in one go, it is a high octane experience but that is what I've been doing, possibly for the first and last time.

It wouldn't be fair on the other discs, or me, to play them immediately following that. I'll do them another day. I don't know whose records of these pieces are regarded as the best, beyond those of the composer himself, but Yuja Wang must surely have put herself in among them and it's a fine thing when waiting for something you think might be special turns out to be so. 

Maconchy, Lutyens & Wallen, Works for Piano & Orchestra, Martin Jones, Rebecca Omordia, BBC Concert Orchestra/Andrews (Resonus)

There are as many Errollyn Wallens as there are pieces written by her, one might think, her breaking down of musical barriers making her a less identifiable brand than Haydn, say, or obviously Vivaldi.

It is to this album's great credit that it is not billed as 'music by women composers', as if it hadn't noticed, and that is how it should be. Elizabeth Maconchy is ostensibly the least 'modern', sometimes recalling the likes of Rachmaninov in a demonstrative but also lyrical Dialogue for Piano and Orchestra. But 'modern' is an old-fashioned term by now, being more than a hundred years old and referring to a particular revolution in the 'arts' and so it is Elizabeth Lutyens that sounds more out-dated in her two pieces with their crash, bang, wallop that became such a 'lingua franca' in C20th music but which lost much of its shock value when its bursts of sound became as commonplace as gunfire in films about cowboys.

We are back into more recognisably 'musical' territory with Errollyn's Piano Concerto,  sizeable in its conception and rarely doing what Western music was always expected to do, which was develop by repeating itself. Languid blues is in part Gershwin but doesn't remain so for very long. It is music outside of any comfort zone that existed pre-C20th but shifting, engaging and with a purity and originality over and above genres that won't ever replace Bach and Handel but does as much as anybody has recently done to find its own language after so much has by now been said.

Daniel Barenboim, The Early Recordings (Guild)

Recorded in 1955, when Daniel Barenboim was 12, one wonders at the talent born to Jewish parents in Buenos Aires all those years ago that also produced Martha Argerich.

On very first hearing, the sound sounds like an old recording but either it improves or the re-mastering improves it. I don't know, I'm in it for the music and not the technicalities of hi-fidelity.

The Shostakovich made into the headline items on the cover are somewhat angular but not as Shostakovich as he can be because he could be almost as Errollyn and various as the various Errollyns are.

It is a shame to have only seven of opus 34 but fitting to finish with the C20th's best answer to the C17th genius that the programme opens with, a formal Bach Sonata. It is also great to have two Pergolesi sonatas, 'rare' indeed, before Mozart's variations on Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star that are charming enough but, having heard both the Diabelli and Goldberg in the flesh this year, only really child's play in comparison. 

Bought only to offset Presto's p&p charge at a bargain price, this was effectively for nothing and if it takes a long time before Yuja Wang at her finest to be finally filed onto a shelf, the boy Barenboim, whose Mozart concertos were among the limited collection of cassettes I had to hand as a teenager and thus made an immense impression, might not arrive there much sooner.

So many discs, no obvious shortage of time to complain about but so much to take in.

 

Yesterday morning, a recommendation on the proper Record Review highlighted the slow movement from Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 2. No. 2 !!!! I'd hardly been aware there were any before no. 19. And, it turns out, I can have Murray Perahia playing the whole shebang on 12 discs for about £15. It's an offer one can't refuse. It is to be hoped I can either take them with me or that the heaven I'll surely go to has a comprehensively library. It won't be heaven if it doesn't have. Churchill said he would spend his first thousand years painting and will thus hardly have started. I'll be catching up with all the music I missed while stuck down here on earth.

Racetrack Wiseguy

 This weekend's racing offers plenty of opportunities but precious few arractive ones. At first I was more than happy to wait just a little bit longer before it's genuinely autumnal and we can get more properly involved.

However, one can still have a look and find oneself persuaded. I'd hate to let a 35/1 double slip by unannounced here. 

I couldn't help but notice Pretty Crystal, Ayr 3.00, significantly shorter than anticipated at 7/2 with the favourite on the drift.

And, fourth in the St. Leger last week and now put over a proper marathon distance in the Irish Cesarewitch, Tower of London, the Curragh, Sunday, 4.10, is backed into early favouritism at 7/1 from 9's with mainly the recent run to worry about, notwithstanding all the other horses. However, done separately and together for money you wouldn't miss, it's a harmless if slightly 'old-fashioned' punt and not without sensible reasons to justify it.

It's more likely to get more serious on Fri 13 October at Chepstow, though, when, increasingly, that seems to be when the jump season properly gets under way.  

It's a pleasure

 The report, somewhere below, that Yuja Wang's Rachmaninov had arrived proved to be premature. The envelope contained some Elgar. It is not always a good idea to guess. In fact, that order for the much anticipated Yuja discs is not going to be fulfilled and Amazon, for why I don't know, can't promise to get it here before mid-October, from America.

However, Presto are all their name suggests they are and, augmenting the order with Errollyn's Piano Concerto and then the first recordings by Daniel Barenboim to treat oneself to some Shostakovich rather than pay postage, I can't see why I won't be putting more business their way.

My favourite literary website, Anecdotal Evidence, brought Stevie Smith back to notice today which, to my surprise, led to the ordering of her best-known novel, that on yellow paper, a biography and some stories and essays in Me, Again. I hadn't regarded her as much beyond a kindly eccentric but, as a reading crisis emerges on the horizon, she is going to get her chance.

The Rembrandt book stays firmly on the front room floor, being more than I really need to know, and Vasari is lively in the translation by the Bondanella's who make him sound suspiciously contemporary but already the lives are beginning to sound similar and I might, possibly wrongly, edit them down to the famous names.

However, that Uccello sacrificed so much of his talent in pursuit of perspective and didn't know the difference between a camel and a chameleon is worth reading about, as is the opening paragraph on Duccio (c.1255- c.1316), that,

No doubt those who are the inventors of anything notable attract the greatest attention from historians, and this occurs because new inventions are more closely observed and held in greater amazement, due to the pleasure to be found in the newness of things,

 

in which I think he's endorsing incremental progress, in such things as perspective and technique, rather than anything superficially radical. Brought forward to now, rather than his own time - died 1574, he surely must mean how Beethoven developed from Mozart, James Joyce from George Moore or Shakespeare from Marlowe rather than any idea that anybody turned up and successfully started doing anything in an entirely new way. He's good and I'm glad to see how he makes 'pleasure' such a priority in art appreciation. I might miss much worth having by skipping a couple of hundred of the 500 pages that end with Titian but it will always be there to go back to which is the perennial beauty of one's own library. Not only are books, and records, immensely good value to read or listen to once, but they will always be there for as long as one wants them. Unless one temporarily loses all reason and lets one's pop vinyl go for a mere £120.

That was madness and I regret it more every time I think about it. 

A Cycling Record for the Ages

 Midlands VTTA (incorporating VTTA National Champs)

Sport, for some of its devotees, can amount to no more than statistics like the number of goals or runs scored and whether the opposition scored more, the number of Manchester United players currently out of favour due to alleged misdemeanours or the fact that one would have won £3 had one staked £1 on the St. Leger winner. The batting and bowling averages, the league tables and the record books make for quite dreary reading for anybody who falls short of the obsession required to find them enjoyable. It is the stories behind the numbers or the moments of inspiration that make sport worthwhile. So what if some schoolkid scored 36 goals in the 1970/71 season, it would be much more interesting to have seen some of them.

At present the only news I can find on the internet regarding last Sunday's Midland Veteran's Time Trial Association 10 mile championship is the bare result, above, but there is a story hidden away near the bottom of it.

Ron Hallam's 35.44 is nearly two minutes ahead of the standard time for a rider of his age, which is how results in veteran races are calculated, and that doesn't make him anywhere near champion for 2023 or put him among the prizes but, at the age of 93, it adds to his extensive collection of age records for the fastest 10 mile ride by anyone of his age. With his birthday coming towards the end of the season, he would have had more opportunities to set new figures for a 93 year old if his birthday came a few months earlier but it's equally lucky that it comes just in time to catch the back end of this year and not have to wait until next. They are especially 'new figures' in that there hasn't previously been a record for a 93 year old because nobody of that age has ever ridden, or at least completed, a '10'. As long as he finished it was always going to be a record notwithstanding that being able to get on a bike at all is a considerable achievement, it seems to me, not having been on one since my early 50's and having ostensibly decided that enough was enough of preparing for and riding in competitive events at the age of 36.

Without any further details yet, it is possible to ascertain that Ron caught the tricycle rider who started a minute in front of him which might not be something that happens so often these days but would have been routine when sweeping up any number of victims from in front of him in something approaching 80 years of time trialling. While most of his palmares by now consists of age-related records, his collection of trophies and club titles is extensive, the highlight being when he was part of the 1959 National Championship Team with Nottingham Wheelers who, the book shows, were seen off in 1960 by a team including Woodburn and Engers representing Barnet CC, assuming that they returned to defend the title.

Like the test cricket records of Stuart Broad, Jimmy Anderson and those top run-scorers and wicket-takers, Ron's records have every chance of remaining unbroken. There isn't going to be enough test cricket for future generations to have the opportunity of emulating those who played in 183 matches, like Anderson so far has, and despite a bit of a boom in participation during the British cycling renaissance of recent years, time trials on ever increasingly busy roads have returned to their long trajectory of decline so that the window of opportunity where longevity, equipment and suitable courses to ride on - not to mention talent and dedication- might not present itself again. 

It is to be hoped that this time next year there is a new record for a 94 year old to go in the book.

Sean O'Brien, Otherwise

 Sean O'Brien, Otherwise (Dare-Gale Press)

Consolation is not easily come by but it is usually available if looked for. Philip Larkin was cast as 'miserabilist' more than once and one critic ventured to suggest he had 'sat down in despair' but it was never quite thus. Even in the last, great complaint, Aubade, the postmen turned up, like doctors, to deliver some sort of news and it might not have all been bad.

Sean O'Brien has been beset by similar 'black dogs' (Siberian Birch, here, p. 15, l. 15) and the later O'Brien line that,

    art is all there is and might not be enough

has been quoted at DGBooks often enough to demonstrate that it made a deep impression.

I've spent more time than is usual before dashing down some first impressions about this batch of new Sean poems, not only because he is one of the diminishing number of poets whose work I care about but also because I'd like to gauge, or perhaps even calibrate, to what extent some consolation has been made available even if when the word occurs (again on p.15 but at l. 24), it is by no means a given thing.

Siberian Birch, the poem on page 15, is already ostensibly a candidate for the status of 'stand-out' poem among these and maybe that ongoing litany of memorable events that began in Ghost Train if not before and continued through The Beautiful Librarians. The consolation is love, not only within the shared experience of time as it is,

still in the kitchen, still watching the clock

but 'archived in this way'.

Time is the main character in Otherwise. The past is always present and the present is for the most part a 'nowhere' suspended between then and passages that lead elsewhere, not always promisingly. 

Time is awake, the great insomniac,

and we are time, eaten and eating

as time eats,

where 'we' and 'time' could be mistaken for Mike Yarwood doing an impersonation of Crow but where a previous Sean's version of that might have made us 'guilty of being ourselves' and taken it on as a political issue in attritional or rebarbative, combative bad humour, the idea might have transferred into a neighbouring but different key that is neither resigned or accepting but more resonant and truer. 

 

These poems begin in light, and with water, in the rare music of Blue Window in which, even though 'about to edit Ugolino's table-talk', one of the damned souls in the Inferno,

     the breaking wave's a blessing

nothing warrants, breaking none the less.

 

Sleepers refers us back to 1930's Spain via a quote from George Orwell, the long-standing political imperatives that England has had a track record of preferring to sleep through, whether it was Boris, football or climate change. Bodies is a metaphysical meditation on a mirror that has itself forgotten what it saw but that doesn't allow those that it saw forget quite so completely.

 

Like those old compilers of LP's always knew, you start and finish with your best stuff and begin side two with a good one, too. Otherwise is the title track and finale, its snowfall unmistakeably bringing to mind The Dead at the end of Dubliners in which the past casts such a shadow over its present and which is, officially, the greatest prose fiction in the language.

Sean is replete with knowledge of Eng Lit and it would come as some surprise if the echo isn't intentional. Some of us are as much drenched in other writing as we are in our own lives and it never stops re-echoing. Sean is empirical in liking to quote some authority for what he says, whether as in when he takes things on trust, as what 'wise man say' or 'as formerly supposed' but literature is to be depended on, too. To Cythera is an in memoriam that might remind some readers of Don Paterson's Rain in its beginning and possibly Paul Muldoon's Incantata by the end. 

While laboriously, but not unwillingly, going through the motions of compiling C20th, the working title of a nonchalant survey of that period's poetry in English, it has dawned on me that the generation of poets born in the early 1950's are a sensible suggestion to put up against any received wisdom that those writing in 1917, 1938 or maybe 1955 were any greater. A tough but talented midfield of Donaghy, Muldoon and O'Brien wouldn't be easy to break down,

       still snow as someone in the other life

might seek to represent it, a creation

 

waiting for a god and neither

ending nor beginning, only falling.

              

Fyodor and Albert

 My initial inklings that Crime and Punishment had a bit in common with L'Etranger are, I find, supported by much on the subject on the internet. It is suggested into the bargain that La Chute owes a debt to Notes from the Underground. 

But it's as much of a contrast as a comparison. Raskolnikov has many reasons all mixed up together for his murdering whereas Mersault, the whole point is, has absolutely none. Dostoevsky was a Christian where Camus was an atheist and one of his many points seems to be that when people are no longer god-fearing but entirely egotistical, they and their theories go unchecked.

That certainly appears to be prescient in the Age of Trump, Boris, Putin et al but, as it was very reasonably sold to me this afternoon, it's not as if we didn't have tyrants during those church-dominated times, too.

The 'punishment' part hardly justifies its half of the title in Crime and Punishment, being no more than a dozen pages of Epilogue so perhaps the punishment is more than the ostensible prison sentence and perhaps being the complex human being, torn between Nietzschean ego and a hankering after moral righteousness, that Raskolnikov is is more than enough punishment in itself.

I don't know. Please don't say that in your undergraduate essays unless you find it corroborated by a more reliable source. I'm not going to be a Dostoevesky scholar. I only wanted to know what it was all about and be able to say I've, finally, read him. I'd take Saint Albert Camus ahead of him any day on the understanding that the sainthood is ironic, like all such honours look like after any sort of scrutiny.

--

There's only one thing worse than honours and that is coveting them but not being given them, as Not Lady Nadine Dorries of Nowhere would surely attest.

-- 

Coming soon, in a very early mid-season break in the Autumn music season,

Yuja Wang's Rachmaninov,

Sean O'Brien, Otherwise (Dare-Gale Press),

Katya Hoyer, Beyond the Wall  

and, booked in for late October, Errollyn Wallen at Wigmore Hall

in what is shaping up as best it can to be an Autumn worth having. 

 

Despite the fact that DGBooks Radio and Wireless are up and about, the BBC have not been in touch to offer me either Radio 2 or Radio 3 but large organizations move slowly and have the turning circle of an oil tanker rather than that of a Mini Metro. I know from having worked in one. They don't really like reform or improvement, they prefer to give the appearance of being in favour of it while remaining at best no better than they were ten years ago.

However, I'd still keep the BBC if all my other seven Desert Island items were washed away by a tidal wave, which is increasingly likely these days, even if Times Radio has signed up much of the best available talk talent and Michael Portillo, Amber Rudd and Giles Coren with his own show have been dispensed with.

They were rubbish.

DGBooks Wireless

 

 

It was inevitable, was it not, that DGBooks Radio would soon be followed up by its 'classical' counterpart and here it is, above in the list of things. 

The actual radio stations that I'll never have would have a bit more to them but when I say I have everything I want that doesn't include two radio stations. These Spotify playlists will keep me going well enough. For one so long addicted to pointless list-making and being the gatekeeper of at least my own taste, compiling these programmes has been a pleasure it would be hard to rival.

DGBooks Wireless would properly include a revival of Face the Music, the priceless parlour game quiz even if it couldn't be recreated in all its original glory with Joseph Cooper, Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell, Patrick Moore and Richard Baker. There's a few local Portsmouth faces who I reckon could make it work.

I'd have some spoken word, like a book review show and a poetry slot. While it would be great to feature new work by living poets, I'm not sure there's much of that worth having so it would be archive material mainly.

But, as it is, it's a Spotify playlist and although Spotify doesn't find everything you want, it isn't at all bad at 'classical' and, as with the pop version, once I start playing it I find it hard to switch off.

At first I wouldn't have any composer more than once to make it more 'radio' than '100 Best Tunes' in which the big names might grab all the attention. Anybody could click on all the Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven and could hardly miss but that's not the point.

As yet, and probably for the duration, there is no Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner or Korngold. Other less deliberate omissions are Debussy, Szymanowski, possibly Grieg, Britten and several of those Renaissance masters.

With apologies to those with a preference for brass or woodwind, I am a cello, piano, violin and choral man and, increasingly in recent years, more 'chamber' or solo than symphonic. But it would be great if you'd like to try it - you can skip forward or put it on shuffle, I'm just not entirely sure if you can listen to it without setting up a Spotify account but that's for nothing and no big deal. Given the lengths I went to to find O, What Very Charming Weather, it's the least you might do.   

There's 10 hours of it now, mostly parts of larger works but sometimes the whole shebang but I'm sure it will be added to. It's not a hit parade. I hope it's more interesting than that.

Once the free market right wingers who can't stand the BBC manage to close down Radio 3 it might be down to me to save the day.   

--

Having been so foolish, and elderly, to assume that The Beatles, with just under 30 million monthly listeners, would be top of Spotify's hit parade, I was taken aback to find they aren't in the Top 50 and the only pop artist on my playlist that makes it into that is no. 33 and is Beyonce.

So, which composers make it into their Top 10.

With 7.3 million listeners, Bach is no. 1. At least they got that right.

Then it's - 2. Beethoven, 3. Mozart, 4. Chopin, 5. Debussy, 6. Tchaikovsky, 7. Vivaldi, 8. Saint-Saens, 9. Schubert, 10. Brahms.

That's not a bad list but it's a good job we don't have expletives on this channel. We successfully negotiated the Boris Johnson years and Brexit without recourse to profanity. And so one calmly and dispassionately regrets, like Miss Otis, that Georg Freidrich is not Top 10. It's like one of those horse races one is confident about but the selection trails in dolefully after the shouting and excitement have abated.

But what can you do.