Politics Explained, 2

Having had so much to say about some recent governments, with specific reference to Boris Johnson, the least I could do was accept in advance responsibility for the Labour government so inevitably put in place this year, them being the first time- at the age of 64- that I'd ever voted on the winning side in a General Election or other national vote.

It's not been immediately brilliant. The world, or only the country, didn't turn into paradise overnight as it had shimmeringly been thought to have when Blair got in. It couldn't have been expected to. Blair inherited an economy in workable shape, made it look a bit glam by having Oasis round for a glass of posh booze, was okay for as long as a couple of years but ended up having to resort to saying that God would be his judge, apparently omitting to recall that his Chief Svengali, Alastair Campbell, had said they 'didn't do' God.

It should have been Gordon in the first place but that's a different essay.

Labour MPs will, with some justification, argue that we've had the vote and they've been given five years. It's been said they need to do all the hardest bits first, like closing the loophole that Jeremy Clarkson pointed out to them that he then goes on a protest march to complain about.

It's been said that Keir Starmer lacks charisma but while charisma can get you elected, it doesn't solve problems. Clement Attlee was one of the best Prime Ministers there's been, so uncharitably characterised by Churchill, whereas Johnson was demonstrably the very worst until the Conservative party dug deep enough to find one arguably yet more disastrous.

Labour and Starmer may or may not have seen disillusion with them setting in quite so soon so, like a big club finding themselves on the verge of relegation, they must think it is a long season that gives them time to recover. However, that vast Commons majority is a fragile thing based on the gimcrack electoral system in place. Labour under Starmer got less votes than the unelectable Corbyn and yet were awarded a landslide victory rather than complete humiliation.

Portsmouth North won't be Labour next time even if Amanda Martin proves to be beatifiable.

I'll vote for her but the electorate as an entity is a fickle thing, even a tacky thing, they put you down, they say I'm wrong. Dissatisfied by not having been delivered from perceived hardship by miracles, they will rebel, rebel to the extent that, not having been given enough time to forget what the Conservative party were like last time, they will have to look elsewhere.

Populism is not to be underestimated. It does what it says on the tin. It cares as little about analysis of what it says as the Bay City Rollers cared about what jazz purists thought about their gloriously mindless songs as they were thoroughly exploited when continually making no. 1 in the hit parade. 

Other countries have seen candidates come from the outskirts of what had been seen as the political landscape and 'take power'. We've been brought up in the UK to think that no such thing could happen here but we're not a 'big club' any more. We might not even be Manchester United.

We might think next time that a Lib-Lab pact might be something to save us when that illusory Labour majority evaporates like an early morning mist but the Liberals are at their giddy limit of seats, holding all they naturally do and as many unhappy naturally Conservative seats as they can expect to.

There are three reasons why we might vote. One is because we vote for what we think makes things better for ourselves, another is that we'd like to make the world better for everyone and the third is that we vote against that which we seriously object to. I'd like to think I was in the second category but sometimes I'm in the third. But, gladly if not sometimes almost perversely, I'm not like most people.

Labour's flimsy majority is blown apart already. Much of what there was of it, such as it was, won't be departing to Liberal candidates. Those are votes that come from the first and third categories, possibly from places like Rotherham or Workington where Waitrose does less business, where the Proms, the Booker Prize and the show jumping are not the main concern and where people feel 'left behind' while Stephen Fry offers them one last book explaining the importance of the Greek myths.

Would that it were, Mr. Fry, would that it were. 

Top 6 - Fiction Writers

 The Hardy Project proceeds at some pace. He is such a pleasure to read. A Pair of Blue Eyes is so far at least as much as any other but both that and the Thomas Hardy Novels Ranked, which thus involves a TOP 6, will come later. I don't think I've done Novelists as a category before and although this is prompted by reading the remainder of him it is not so that he can be included because he always would have been since circa 1975.

While I'm very clear about my Top 6 Poets, I'm much less so about prose fiction which is what we must call it here because the paragon example's best work is not a novel. 

It's been proclaimed more than once in this place that Dubliners is the finest prose fiction in the language - for its idiom, for its themes and tones and understatement. James Joyce must be first on the teamsheet on account of that, and the Portrait, his devotion to his art and for being so impossibly himself rather than on account of where his outlandish invention took him later. I wish it hadn't, in one way, but he put the novel out of reach once and for all with the Wake and maybe allowed others to grope their way back from it to sanity. I've been informed in recent years that Dubliners, or maybe just The Dead, is 'sentimental'. Well, if so, so be it.

Thomas Hardy is being discussed in ongoing fashion here for the time being but I have recently credited my full conversion to literature as a way of life to being introduced to his work at school which only goes to show that education serves some purpose and isn't only something that one has to spend the rest of one's life recovering from. The stories are rich in detail and 'poetry', conceived on an immense scale and usually but not always doomed to tragedy which is what life is like and literature is worth so much less if it doesn't reflect back on life.

After which two incontrovertible selections, the six begins to become more of a scramble for places.

Albert Camus didn't apparently consider novelist as his primary activity given his politics, philosophy and role as Humphrey Bogart look-a-like but, heaven knows, L'Etranger, La Peste and La Chute are almost brutally brilliant examples of spare, uncompromised writing. At the time it might have seemed as if it was Camus who broke ranks with the Existentialist doctrine and somehow gave way but it was Sartre, wasn't it, who failed to denounce the Soviet Union and so, even if he was the more complete philosopher, he was not the better man and certainly not the better novelist. If sainthoods were awarded by an institution that was not the Catholic church, he'd be a candidate.

A work like Middlemarch was essential to the Victorian Literature course at university but probably wasted on 19 year olds which is a good reason for anybody who has a good reason to do an Eng Lit degree to get a job first and appreciate the B.A. (Hons) work later when they have more capacity to do so. My year of George Eliot was some years ago now, although belated, but I was profoundly impressed. If Dickens is more readily adapted to film, in writing he is in comparison a cartoonist. The theme in Eliot, it always seemed to me, was great potential having to compromise with what the world is like and ain't that the truth.

There are a few things that France has generally done better than England. Revolution maybe, football sometimes, philosophy one might think, wine definitely and films. Perhaps not usually poetry but probably the novel. Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Gide, maybe Stendhal, Maupassant. I've abandoned the rule in TOP 6's that one can't mention anything outside the six. It's Proust I'm putting in, though, after being so thoroughly impressed with him as the lockdown project - all-encompassing and such a compellingly complete picture of social and emotional interaction and shortcomings. It seemed to me at the time that nobody else did it quite like him.

But there remains America, Russia, Germany, Japan and the Rest of the World, not to mention contemporary Brits. Julian Barnes is the business ahead of Graham Swift and Ian MacEwan. Katherine Mansfield, dear Virginia, George Moore, Salinger, Turgenev, Chekhov, Murakami, The Glass Bead Game and Narziss and Goldmund by Hesse, Donna Tartt, I'd better say Tolstoy. Fitzgerald, Daphne du Maurier.

On another day it might different but today it's Virginia Woolf.

All Things Must Pass and other stories

 Sometimes things are integral parts of our lives and then suddenly gone. I think it was when we scored 59/60 in a pub quiz that was the last time we did that, having in various combinations of players been doing them for several years. I don't think it was that there didn't seem any point anymore on account of the almost perfect game but there soon didn't seem any point anymore.

Radio 3 has gone the same way in recent months, once at least the day-time wireless of choice if not always the evening concert but they switched it all about, gave it Friday Night is Music Night, aimed themselves at some other demographic and then Record Review, This Week's Composer and The Early Music Show were on at different, less convenient times. Maybe I'm not one for change but change rarely seems to be for the better.

It is subtly life-changing when such things happen. Radio that I had assumed would always be there was taken away, most dramatically when the BBC sacked Danny Baker for the final time and Saturday mornings were drastically altered and Radio 5 disappeared from my schedule. Much further back, Sunday teatime and the Top 40, falling asleep to Brian Redhead and A Word in Edgeways or listening out for the most outlandish music I could find on the late night Sounds of the 70's fell away, I'm no longer as devoted to Bells on Sunday as I once was and Clue, despite Jack Dee's fine efforts, is back-filled with 'comedians' unworthy of the tradition.

Sic transit gloria mundi, one might say, as Time - our unconquerable enemy- wins again but Times Radio has been some sort of godsend, its appalling sports reports implying a contempt for the po-faced seriousness that 5Live apply to sport. After 5 years, though, the welcome losses of Michael Portillo, Amber Rudd and the Giles Coren show have not made up for those of Mariella Frostrup, Matt Chorley and the forthcoming onward progression of Aasmah Mia. It is only to be hoped that Stig Abell, John Pienaar and the Jane Garvey-Fi Glover double act stay now, stay another day.

The Listener magazine ceased long ago, the TLS isn't what it was, the Times on Saturday every so often loses something good that it had. There are no poetry magazines I've subscribed to for years now, perhaps because there's so little poetry worth having in them compared to the fin de C20th Poetry Review. It's a right old media misery memoir, isn't it except there must have been a reason for me collecting quite so many books and records. Perhaps it was so that I could read and listen to them. They are an archive, from the past which is a place where things were done differently. I'm not necessarily saying 'better' in every respect but one preserves those bits of it one liked to return to and so now one does and it's often at least as good if not better than how it was in the first place.

--

Wow, we saw some horses in the post-Christmas bonanza of racing, writes Racetrack Wiseguy. This week in the middle of the National Hunt season is like a symphony rising to a first climax before slowing again to build towards Cheltenham in March and its coda.

It's best if one knows in advance and is on, as I was with The New Lion today defying market moves but even if one's missed the boat, as I did with Sir Gino, one is left deeply impressed - perhaps even moved- by performances like those, brilliant in themselves and promising who knows how much more. 

I don't think Harry Skelton was too concerned about the betting market on The New Lion as he had good horses in behind, their jockeys flailing away, while he did little more than shake the reins on the horse he clearly had the utmost confidence in. While one has to watch a certain number of races in which one's selection starts to tread water and that sinking feeling of money going bookmaker-wards sets in, it is compensated for in races like that when confidence coming out of horse and jockey are like a blood transfusion and for those gorgeous moments everything feels wonderful.

The money's not the point, it's just a way of keeping score and making it matter, perhaps even 'proving oneself' if one is so querulous that one needs to do so. But even if 2024 didn't go entirely to plan, it showed the necessary plus and there's the required carry over to begin 2025 in good order.

The Complete Hardy: 3 The Well-Beloved

It is entirely to be expected that the lesser-known Hardy novels are somehow not as good as the best-known or else they would be just as famous. The Well-Beloved, though, is very likeable and pertinent while being highly unlikely even beyond the considerations of the plot twists and turns that usually accumulate in his stories.

It was the later version I read rather than The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved but that earlier title hints at something thematic. In their turn, three generations of girls called Avice represent the beloved of Jocelyn Pierston, from Portland Bill but a successful sculptor in London. At the ages of 20, 40 and 60 he fancies himself devoted to first one then her daughter and then her grand-daughter, the resemblance recreated in each in a way that echoes the recently read Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach and how Jane Scott is the very image of the deceased wife of Hugues Viane. That book was published in 1892, the same year as The Pursuit. 

What it seems to me to 'mean' is that 'love' is a naturally occuring condition that seeks an outlet, a target for its energy to be spent on. It might seem to the beholder that the beloved is some heaven-sent, incomparable 'must-have' but if it wasn't them it would be somebody else. Where the illusion of Jane Scott suddenly becomes disillusion, Pierston also ends his days with Marcia, an apparently Horatio-type character who'd been there all along while he was distracted on more delusional projects.

Pierston explains to his artist friend, Somers, that,

The beloved of this one man, then, has had many incarnations- to many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in a while, and made her exit from,

then, not much later,

he was the wandering Jew of the love-world, how restlessly ideal his fancies were.

By our standards today, Pierston might appear as much of a stalker as Sting does in I'll Be Watching You. Quite how, in this late novel, the theme can be related to Hardy's taking for granted of two wives while accommodating a succession of young female writers who approach him for professional advice, is hard to say precisely but there is something to be made of it.

Above and beyond all that, in the end he relinquishes his art,

The artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past.

It is as if he has woken from the unreal existence he inhabited and that the realistic marriage to Marcia would have been a better idea all along. That Hardy foregoes fiction after this and Jude and writes poems for his remaining thirty years, much of it remembering his first wife, Emma, is a profound renunciation by a great writer if not for the most part a great man. The Well-Beloved is full of significance both as philosophy and biography and is evidence of the worth of reading beyond the big titles into what is to be found elsewhere.

Racetrack Wiseguy at Christmas

It's not been an easy year. One doesn't expect it to be easy as things worth having usually have to be worked for but that's betting without William Hill effectively confiscating the balance of my winning account and refusing to discuss the matter, the Autumn campaign setting off on the wrong foot a few weeks too early and the general realisation that it can be harder than one thought. It turns out to be true that the bookies and the whole industry would prefer me to be their cash cow and not them mine.

Well, that's not going to happen. I play my game and if it doesn't fit with theirs we need not play at all. Several months ago 'No More Mr. Wiseguy' was announced here and I've stuck with that but it ain't over til it's over, there's a profit going into the book for 2024, a bit carried over to begin 2025 with and they don't get shot of me that easily.

Kempton on Boxing Day, though. Like Dennis Brown, I'll have money in my pocket but I can't get no love for betting on the big races. And, as with Johnny Nash, there are more questions than answers.

Constitution Hill is at best a 2/5 shot on ratings but not even favourite with most bookies showing prices for the Christmas Hurdle. If anybody can bring him back to the wonder horse he was, it's Mr. Henderson but how do we know until push comes to shove. Lossiemouth is also immaculate, in receipt of 7lb, except possibly not the horse of a lifetime that the Henderson horse had promised to be. Don't let anybody tell you they know the answer to this one. Nobody can. I'd be on Lossiemouth if I had to have a bet but I'd prefer to see Constitution Hill see her off, giving away the weight, still not out of second gear. Only a fruitcake could lay into that race without the sort of faith that carries religious types through the day.

The King George is hardly any better. Much as I love Grey Dawning, that was a crucifyingly hard race he had at Haydock and I was there at Ascot when Altior and Cyrname all but finished each other's careers for them in heavy ground. Il Est Francais was readily pencilled in for this with his win in the Novice race this time last year but then was pulled up lamely, whether actually lame or not, in France last time and so, again, it's anybody's guess. And anybody concerned to make money rather than lark about with it is best advised not to guess because it's a hard enough game when one takes it carefully and seriously.

No, I'll be in front of the telly to see what happens but relaxed about my plus or minus situation. Hyland's been impressive, exceeded expectations perhaps, and so could be a bet in the Novice Chase and there must surely be chances to be taken round the gaff tracks on what remains a proper bank holiday of racing. But, as Ding Liren found out in the chess, it's better to be happy with what you got and stick rather than do something pre-emptive that turns out to be ill-advised.

2024 was another profit year even if it doesn't feel like it. Let's say it paid for a new suit, the printing of the book of poems and the expenses of going to Cheltenham in April.

That'll do. 

The Complete Hardy: 2 The Trumpet Major

If you're a great writer and wrote 14 novels, one of them has to be the least impressive. What I have difficulty with is comparing the lesser work to that of other, maybe lesser, writers. One might think more of The Trumpet Major if it were not by Hardy and it could be raised up by saying it could have been whereas since it is by him it comes off worse up against Tess, The Return of the Native and The Woodlanders.

It has the same ingredients as the likes of Far From the Madding Crowd with its three more, or less, suitors pressing their suits on the eligible Anne Garland with the Loveday brothers being good candidates and Festus Derriman clearly not. But if Festus is undesirable he is comically so, being pestering and duplicitous rather than dastardly like Alec d'Urberville.

George III makes a cameo appearance perhaps not unlike the then Prince Charles having a part in Coronation Street as he once did. It's perfectly good as a book and only suffers in the way that Don Paterson said of the lesser of Shakespeare's sonnets, that when he says they aren't very good he means 'for Shakespeare', which still means 'good' by ordinary standards. One would certainly not, though, want to read it ahead of the more justly better-known titles.

--

Breaking up the sequence before moving on to The Well-Beloved, I was grateful for a recommendation that came out of reaction to Romanticism.

Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach is gorgeously short with the Dedalus edition's pages flying by, illustrated as it is by unpeopled photographs of the place. It's also morbid, both haunting and haunted as Hugues, after the death of his beloved wife, goes to live in the atmospheric other-world of Bruges which we might care to compare with Amsterdam in La Chute by Camus, Venice in Don't Look Now or even Hamlet's Elsinore.

Hugues finds a doppelganger of his wife in Jane, an actress but, as we saw in The Trumpet Major with Matilda, 'actress' is shorthand for 'trouble'. It's a poem of a novel even given the ever-present caveat of it being in translation and maintains its sepulchral beauty until the shift up in gear of the denouement. Perhaps, so brief, it is long enough because the urge in the first half to immediately order everything else by Rodenbach had subsided a little bit by the end but it's way ahead of its time, psychologically or 'modernly' and more Rodenbach in due course is a definite possibility. 

Poignant

I passed the Eastney Community Centre, named after someone called Frank Sorrell, just now.

It's where I saw Peter Doherty in a gorgeously small gathering in 2022. I think there were about 110 there which was great when he sells out tours of much bigger venues in an instant.

One might have thought they'd have put a preservation order and a blue plaque on it as the place where I saw Pete but, no, I expect it will be a block of flats there by next summer.

I've lifted these pictures from Facebook but will hope to replace them with a photo of my own so that it can continue the very occasional series of photos that brought to mind  poems, the poem in this case being Peter's great Far from the Madding Crowd from his lockdown album where he lamented the temporary closure of his performing spaces,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They closed down all the bars
...
Where am I 'posed to sing my song
Where the only place that I belong...

 

except they've knocked down that one for good now. 

It's probably very sentimental of me because I hardly knew the place was there before Pete's gig in it and I've not been in it again since but it does feel as if a tiny little piece of me and pop history went with it. Nowhere near as much as the devastating decision to let some dealers have all my pop vinyl for £120. That was idiotic. But gradually the past disappears behind you.

I'd better get myself to Nottingham as soon as I can before anything more I remember from the 1960's is removed or defaced but after sixty years maybe it's the difference I'm going back to see rather than the exact places and people as they were there in 1967. 

The Complete Hardy: 1. Desperate Remedies

Perhaps in the end all fiction is 'genre fiction'. Don Quixote was chivalric, albeit pastiche, The Woman in White is a detective story, The Turn of the Screw a ghost story and once one reads Desperate Remedies and finds it comes from the tradition of the lurid C19th 'sensation novel' then so are Tess, Jude and Casterbridge.

It's rarely difficult to differentiate the goodies from the baddies in Hardy and here, in the first published novel, Manston is a scoundrel in the same mould as Alec d'Urberville, lacking the capacity for self-awareness and regret that even Michael Henchard is later capable of and it's human motivations more than those of the fates that propel the drama although we are allowed a happy ending which we are to be denied in the big, mature masterpieces. 

Some Hardy set pieces are already in place with neither readers or characters always sure of their circumstances due to the absence of some characters not necessarily being due to them being dead. Hardy was not only an architect of buildings but also of storylines but the poet he first set out to be and eventually became, along with his deep knowledge of scripture and folklore all combine to make him compelling reading and if other, mostly later, prose fiction writers are more sophisticated in their art, he inevitably takes a high place among the best of them.

Owen Graye, devoted brother of the lovely Cytherea, reports to her what their father had told him,

'..don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all...Cultivate the art of renunciation.'

In his own commentary, Hardy observes that,

It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most;

Mr. Springrove, father of the 'good guy' suitor, Edward, tells Cytherea that Edward has,

seen too far into things- been discontented with makeshifts- thinken o' perfection in things, and then sickened that there's no such thing as perfection. 

All of those things are surely distilled, if downbeat, wisdom that form and equation with the outcome that,

'the difference between a common man and a recognised poet, is, that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues deluded all his days', which is Edward ahead of his time in the mid-C19th when 'poet' could still equate to 'dreamy idealist'.

Whether Hardy ever translated any of these philosophies into his own life is doubtful but as a writer he was aware of them whatever his shortcomings outside of his fiction.

 

It was much to do with Hardy that reading took up its central position in my life and he's lost nothing in the fifty years since. Next up is The Trumpet Major as I make my way towards some sort of completeness. He is the most solidly reliable of authors and from hereon in his books will only be punctuated by others so that I don't mix them up and begin to wonder what's happened to a character from the book I was reading the previous week.

World Chess - Gukesh

Maybe even I could have won it from there and it was certainly worth ploughing on with a pawn advantage when the computer analysis was showing the draw at 99% but I would never have got myself into that position at 6.5-6.5 in a best of 14.

Ding was at a big time disadvantage but offering the exchange of rooks was clearly a brainstorm and that's precisely what Gukesh was playing on in the hope of. So, 18 years old and World Champion. There's not really much else for him to do already but he's not the best player in the world so maybe he can aim at being that.

The big drama clashed with the 12.55  from Warwick where another odds-on favourite got badly turned over.

 

I am, though, at an all-time high in three of the four disciplines at Lichess, having reached 1807 at Bullet and so it might be Classical for a long time now to try to put that at a personal best, too.