From Elvis to Cliff via Bach and Shakespeare

 I had no idea how Elvis Costello's career had taken him into the higher echelons of pop music aristocracy and being such good mates with Dylan, McCartney, Bacharach and how, in the end, he,

ended up making four times more albums for DG than...for Stiff Records 

(DG being Deutsche Grammophon, not me).

I'm not saying his talent shouldn't have put him there and he takes his art very seriously but those first albums are so deeply imprinted on me that it doesn't matter how good all that later work is, I'm not going to 'get it' in quite the same way.

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A section of upstairs ceiling fell in the other day. In the small room of jumbled archives and deep library stock. Twenty years ago when rainwater got into the same area it did more damage to books and manuscripts than this time. The novels from the second half of the alphabet got lucky. And I also got lucky in finding friendly roofers and a plasterer who will shore up the roof and ceiling against my ruin.

Whatever other anxieties there are jostling for my attention, visions of the house falling down around me, like Buster Keaton's did, are the price one pays for a vivid imagination. Maybe it won't come to that.

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Back with lower grade pangs of anxiety, R3's broadcast of Bach's Christmas Oratorio last night put into context the Top 6 Christmas Special, below. Of course it's not Sabrina Carpenter over and above Bach but mine was a 'pop' list although I entirely appreciate that music should not recognize boundaries and maybe shouldn't have been.

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Gladly, though, the Strange Fowl website has found some support for 'twins theory', the idea that Hamnet and Judith, born to Anne Hathaway, were not biologically Shakespeare's children. It's taken some time to attract any such sympathy, like nine and a half years since it first appeared in print in the TLS letters page. 

Almost inevitably, our sympathizer comes from a radical tradition and sees a lot of things very differently to the traditionally presented and thus generally accepted ways that things are said to be. It's vaguely comparable to Jeremy Corbyn agreeing with an imaginative idea put forward by a couple of commonsense centrists. But, having had nothing but dismissive abuse in what little reaction we've had, it's good to have someone capable of taking the point. It's a point that we don't doggedly defend at all costs but put up as a theory for consideration.

A lot of people seem to think what they think and would rather keep thinking it than adjust their opinion. But, as Cliff sang in Some People, we're

      not like that at all.

   There are worse Cliff songs to leave here over Christmas.