Things To Do When You're 90 and other stories

 I can't see the news elsewhere on the internet yet so maybe this miscellany of literary, musical and entirely personal concerns of mine might have the honour of 'breaking' it to that audience.

My 100% reliable grapevine of cycling news assures me that my uncle-in-law, if that is such a thing without being 'twice removed', has now set probably the most astonishing of his many time-trialling records, many of which are age-related, having ridden such events every season for about 75 years, and has posted a time of 1 hour, 11 minutes and 42 seconds for 25 miles, which won him the Veteran Time Trial Association Championship title at the weekend, at the age of 90.

To explain that to those who arrive at DG Books not fully conversant with the details of time trialling or how the Veteran category works- I used to do 1.11 for 25 miles when I was 35 but I was not much good at it and only gained any sort of respectability by sitting on the bike all day, for 12 Hours, and thus being better at it than those who thought better of such torment.

25 miles was always the common currency of time trialling but it was also my worst subject. The point about the veteran category is that it is for those over 40 and was invented a long time before 40 was regarded as not much older than 25. 40 was old then but isn't any more and so the incremental allowance for each year over 40 that you are is worth having, especially if you're still not bad at the age of 90. I'm told that the fastest rider in the Vets Championships this year was a 61 year old who recorded a time of 50.20, which would have made him the overall record holder circa 1969 when the great maverick, Alf Engers, was drilling holes in his frame as well as such short distance records in controversial fashion and Concorde looked relatively pedestrian, breaking the sound barrier in the sky as it flew over our house in Gloucester.  

Ron Hallam's ride makes him, surely, the first nonagenarian to ride 25 miles on a bicycle at more than 20 mph, and then some, and sets a standard 9 minutes ahead of the previous record for a 90 year old which, one might think, is a record that might stand for some time if not forever but records are only there to be broken and the species, so we are told, is always evolving. Not that you'd know that from looking at some of the people various democracies have decided they wanted to put in charge.

But Ron Hallam is a good guy. I haven't seen him since I was a kid, I don't think, but he also brought a standard of good manners to sport in a way that generations since his have sometimes lost their grasp of. I'm not related to him anywhere near closely enough to have benefitted from the same DNA. If I had been, I might have spent more time on the bike and won something. As it has been, I persisted with the writing and ruined an entirely different set of people's chances of a few minor prizes at that instead.

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I finished Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks, I think it was yesterday or the day before. It's hard to believe that is the same book I abandoned when it was new, subsequently gave away in hardback and only bought again in paperback to restore some sort of Faulks completism. It is profound, compelling (all those things), presumably deeply researched and only suspect for how many pages, later on, are devoted to the verbatim lectures on psychiatry, or the vague feeling that Seb Faulks is playing with me here, making me feel 'moved' when the dry textbooks he's writing about, and the idea of 'what it is to be human', wouldn't usually do so.

But, credit where credit is due and, like an old raincoat, Sebastian Faulks won't ever let you down. 

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The TV drama, Roadkill, has been good. I'm not a devotee of TV drama because much of it seems to depend on people pointing guns at each other but, so far - and I'm up to episode 3 on i-player- that hasn't happened. It's been more English than that. It has all the dubious intrigue, the subterfuge and, basically outright lying and self-serving that we have come to expect from politicians. Its problem is that we like Hugh Laurie, we know he's a decent chap and he doesn't look anything like the cast of libertarian, leave, freedom-toting weirdos that we know to be real, such as Boris, Gove, Farage and Jacob.  You need to look strange to look like one of them. Hugh Laurie only looks like Hugh Grant did when he did his Jeremy Thorpe but the flamboyant MP for North Devon in the early 70's only had half of the very minor, ramshackle Liberal Party behind him then and had precious little more chance of 'power', whatever that is, than Mr. Farage has ever had, but, credit to Nigel, he won, he got his way if only by putting other lunatics in charge of the asylum.

The Marshes in Autumn and other stories

A few drops of rain are preferable to excessive heat for our weekly exercise afternoon. Remembering this week to go right-handed, like they do at Ascot, rather than left, like Cheltenham, it was more likely to be the cooler weather and fewer stops that produced a big improvement in our time rather than being more suited to a right-handed track.

It's not quite a different place going the other way round but one sees things slightly differently and the tide is never further out than it was today, which makes it mudflats more than an inlet from the sea. And there is much to enjoy about the deeper, darker colours notwithstanding that the birdwatchers, who have been there in numbers in recent weeks, presumably agog at the migrating season, have let us have the place back.  

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I heard this from Joni on a R4 tribute by Lynne Truss at the weekend and haven't been as moved by a pop record for a long time. I didn't know it. When Johnnie Walker then played In France They Kiss on Main Street on Sunday, I was concerned  that she might have died but, looking her up, it seems she's much better. That's great news. Without ever being one of my absolute elite list, she has always been great. All those 60's and 70's singer-songwriters seem to be predicated somehow on Dylan and I've got a lot of time for many of his things but it seems to me that Carole King and Joni are the preferred options. I'll be checking this posting with the words provided to see if she remains on the acceptable side of 'pop songs as poetry'. Sometimes they go a bit too far. Sometimes it's best just to catch a line or two and fill in the rest for yourself.

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More good news is finding Simon Armitage's Oxford lectures are due in print next Spring, which is very welcome. They are available on the internet as recordings but a book is something to have and hold, like ordering a couple more Joni albums on CD even though one can play them on You Tube whenever you like. Possession is nine tenths of expressing some allegiance to the work.

Simon's lectures included an exhaustive analysis of Thom Gunn's Tamer and Hawk and there's really no point in me doing a second rate job on the early masterpiece in my work-in-progress book when he's already put his first-rate account on record.

But, otherwise, Wide Realm, which is the current ante-post favourite to be my Gunn book's title, is emerging steadily. It doesn't matter how long it takes because it's enjoyable to do and there is no rush. It might be my own Key to All Mythologies and not really intended to be finished, not least because I know it will never be as good as it could have been.

But another 500 words or so a couple of times a week fit neatly into the routine that has built itself organically into the retirement days. The weeks bloody fly by and, for the most part, quite happily despite all the reasons why they might not.

Not having to be a professional writer and producing the thousand words a day as a job is a fine thing. Reading Sebastian Faulks's Human Traces is making me wonder if it's the same book I abandoned several years ago and then gave away, only buying it back in paperback to re-instate some sort of completism to my Faulks section. But I don't know how they do it, producing such quality writing out of the grind. I suppose talent has a lot to do with it.

Nobody could ever convince me that poetry is in any way a better thing than the novel. Try writing a poem and then a novel. Which of them is better and which was hardest to do. 

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I had heard about preposterous results that people had been getting out of a questionnaire on the National Careers Service so I did it myself. I dare say it works on algorithms, an algorithm being defined suddenly not as a clever bit of kit but a completely useless programme that gives out hilarious, or dangerously misleading, results.

Following the NCS feature as constructively as I could it told me I should have been an actor or an editor. I can't see me doing any more acting than that I use to get by in everyday life but editor is a good result. Maybe I could have been that. I have been it a few times. Fair enough.

Angelina Kopyrina

Angelina Kopyrina continues to save the music year in Portsmouth, almost single-handedly. Her appearances in Portsmouth's Lunchtime Live! would be a high point of any year but are particularly welcome in our current circumstances.

Beethoven's 'Appassionata' Sonata is one among many of his piano sonatas that I spent a lot of time with in the Complete Stephen Kovacevich edition, which is a world in itself. Had Beethoven provided two or three such, he would be great but the fact there are 32 of them is one of the things that make him a towering genius.

The unsettled weather of the first movement moves through storm, the triumphant main theme and ripples of contentment at the top end of the keyboard and slightly more foreboding at the other. He quotes himself, the familiar opening bar of the fifth symphony, surely, in between flourishes.

The Andante is, in comparison, a model of restraint in its hymn-like tune before moving into the exhilarating headlong dash to the finish. Angelina is always likely to be most memorable for the power of her performance in the forte to fortissimo passages but one needs respite from the high-octane material, too, and she delivers that coolly. Getting there early enough to find an optimum seat to see the keyboard adds considerably to one's appreciation of what is going on. Never mind the memory to hold it, a pianist playing this repertoire also needs the hands to scatter the patterns across the keys in presto markings and, especially after the Liszt, I began to wonder how many notes we had heard in about 40 minutes.

Liszt was about 16 when Beethoven died and ideally placed to pick up certain aspects of his music and take it further. It was the Romantic, most flamboyant aspect he chose, of course. The Mephisto Waltz no. 1  begins in a gear not much below where the Appassionata finished. One might have thought the Beethoven was a piece to programme last but not when Liszt is going to take it to more outrageous lengths, or heights. It is the devil's dance, making Portsmouth Cathedral's Bosendorfer chime, thunder and resonate all at the same time. It performed very well, possibly not being accustomed to playing the devil's music very often. But it's not all rapid and wild, with the run up the keyboard thrown in just in case it wasn't energetic enough, because in the quieter middle part, one imagines one might be hearing where Rachmanninov found an expansive, rhapsodic mood to use as the template for his Greatest Hits.

The piece ends more suddenly than one expects if one doesn't know it and I think Angelina had to stand up from the stool before I, or many of the rest of the audience, were sure it was all over. It's a shame that a small, distanced audience can't provide the reaction that such a performance is worthy of but Angelina and all at Portsmouth Cathedral ought to know that it is all very much appreciated. 

There's one more to come from her, on November 5th, and it is likely to be where the best fireworks will be heard. I hope you can go and support it without getting to my favourite seat before I do. 

Andrew Motion - Randomly Moving Particles

Andrew Motion - Randomly Moving Particles (Faber)

Andrew Motion's name has always offered itself for wordplay, from there being 'poetry in motion', the fact that Motion came after The Movement or, now, Motion's Randomly Moving Particles sounding like something half-forgotten from the 'O' level Physics syllabus. The joke is never quite there, though, and it isn't here, either, this being serious and with plenty of science in it.

It is two long poems with three not so long in the interval. I have to admit I haven't seen the most recent Motion books but none of the length of the poems, their fragmentary nature, their narrative structure or the impressive line in imagery come as much of a surprise even if they have come a long way from the water-colour, reflective post-Movement poetry he began with, winning a Cholmondeley Award in 1979.

The title poem here ranges widely over America, where Motion lives these days, from memories of the death of his father, exploration of the solar system, culture apparently being reduced to a lowest common denominator, whether or not as a corollary of Donald Trump, the extinction of species and the science implied by all of it essentially the action of randomly moving particles. Much of it retains Motion's non-urgent tone but there is something more desperate in it than his usually calm demeanour suggests, as there always has been.

Some of this sounds as if it's been lifted from a text book rather than fired in the red-hot kiln of poetic inspiration,

More than 40% of the planet's insects are now in decline

at a rate eight times faster than mammals, birds and reptiles,

amounting to a collapse of 2.5 per cent every year for the last thirty.

 

It is a sort of evolution but it's not pretty and, even if it's a bit late for our generation who presided over so much of it, there is still time to side with Greta Thunberg even if only in Faber's Armani- style hard covers. Later, in Rainfall, he demonstrates some of his old gift in lines like,

after one partucular inundation

     and the shadow of an ark

            darkening fish shoals

as they scooted over valleys and hills  

 

where, as ever, I'm not sure what the line indentations achieve, but there is enough to be admired of the Motion we once knew while much of the book finds him too (perfectly understandably) cross to be lyrical.

The passage beginning O Trump is he still here expresses something beyond exasperation for so many of us and although any portrait of the president becomes obsolete before the ink dries as he outstrips his own astonishing performance in the race to the bottom, this section captures him accurately in his,

spasmodic, self-interuppting, false, severely unintelligible

as explicit statement but highly expressive by implication,

false, egocentric and inconsiderate, never showing teeth

when smiling, smiling seldom,

 

but once one has started, there is really nowhere one can stop. Awfulness is its own defence and I fear that Motion's sombre mood is because he's taken on more than he can do justice to. 

But, let's face it, this is that dread thing, a 'poem sequence' if anything ever was. For me, it is a poem under one title in a number of sections in different forms but they can stand alone or be allowed to accumulate to more than their individual parts by being read in sequence. I only ever opposed the idea of the poem sequence because it seemed unnecessary and a bit effete when any such thing is either one big poem in parts or several poems that belong together but if anything is such, it is probably this.

The sciences involved are physics, astronomy and Environmental Studies with the three middle poems being themed on extinction and survival.

Longest, though, is How Do the Dead Walk, a narrative about a veteran back from Afghanistan who is taken into the underworld into a sort of Inferno where he meets his dead mother under whose influence he murders the rest of the family. One might compare it with Thom Gunn's poems on Jeffrey Dahmer that sees atrocity from the inside. It is not without memorable moments, like

beneath tickertape herring shoals

flickering                     glimmering 

and one is tempted to consider the effects of post-traumatic stress, the after effects of war manifesting themselves in further gratuitous violence. We are, I think, left with the suggestion he's off to shoot himself, too, at the end. It is a disturbing addition to Motion's war poetry to date and it certainly shouldn't be an easy read but I don't know how successful it is here, or would be in poetry by anybody else. One can say it's powerful without wanting to read it again any time soon.

But we can't complain that Andrew Motion has not taken risks and ventured beyond his gentlemanly meditations. From Anne Frank Huis to his National Poetry Competition competition winner, The Letter, we should not be taken aback by violence either. The difference might be that in writing about his mother's death or his friend's on the Marchioness pleasure cruise in Fresh Water, we were dealing with the aftershock rather than the graphic illustration.  

I'm not going to be easy to convince that Randomly Moving Particles compares with Motion's best work which provided a few of the best poems of his generation but he moves on, unhappily for the most part, it seems, and nobody is going to find fault with him for that.

   

My Life in Sport - Pub Games and other stories

What university students are missing out on in the current lockdown situation is that 'full university experience' that goes beyond the ostensible reason for their attendance, their subject. Universities do offer any amount of opportunity and it should be made use of while one has access to it. While I was at Lancaster to 'do' Eng Lit with a bit of Philosophy, I did manage to include concerts of various types which, in 1978, included The Clash, Elvis Costello and Third World as well as Beethoven, and taught myself pool and darts which I'd done not much of before.

One finds one's own way, knowing that Alex Higgins is the height of rebel glamour and needing to play a few shots. They are always possible on a pool table but much more difficult to execute at snooker.

Having made it up as I went along, I made easy progress through the college knock-out tournament, dispatching one of the 'team' 3-0 in the quarter final, finishing with a black down the cushion that didn't even occur to me as difficult in those early days. Except I was out of sorts in the semi-final and barely played a coherent shot. Thus, if I was in any way like the Hurricane it was by being 'mercurial'. But if I carried forward any of the education I took from there in Literature (and you can be the judge of that), the lessons in pool took me to the dizzy heights of the Portsmouth Pool League a few years later, playing for the town centre dive bar team against some disreputable opposition. 

Some of them didn't like losing and neither did I, walking home in disbelief having not won my first match and coming face to face with a need for a match play mentality rather than devotion to looking good. Much of it is about where you leave the white. Some of it is about making sure you pot the ball. In the Portsmouth League in 1983, a lot of it was about how the opposition's referee sees it.

But the great joy of 'winner stays on' outside of league matches was having several games in a row for your 50p as one's confidence grew and each successive opponent was new to the table. Less joy was to be had from the hustlers, like the one on a Thursday lunchtime who casually asked if I wanted to play for a pint. No, I didn't. So, we played and I, very unsurprisingly, won. So, did I want to play for a pint now. No, I still didn't and I was wise not to because I lost that one. But then some young, brash type came in and put his name on the board and, yes, he'd play for a pint. And got beat in short order. The wily operator said he'd have a pint of lager and went to the toilet but, rather than go the the bar, the vanquished firebrand followed him into the toilets and, after not very long, the pro came out, flustered, picked up his cue and announced he wasn't coming to play in there again if that's what happened. And such is the shadowy world of pub pool where sportsmanship and honour are not always top priorities if money is introduced into the equation.

We once had an exhibition evening with a pro called Leo 'The Hat' McMackin whose publicity consisted of having once played Higgins for £400. They didn't say if he won.

But the great days were in the 2000's when I met the best player I ever played, my mate, Gill, against who you knew you were in a match. It made you think, it made you concentrate and it made any success you might have all the more worthwhile. For a couple of years we were not a bad double act on pool tables in Portsmouth and as far afield as Fairford, Cumbria and Newcastle. I can't imagine picking up a stick to play again because it just wouldn't be there and I'm happy enough with the 1-1 I had against her last time, some years ago.

-

One of the coterie I was a part of at University was Lancashire through and through, captain of the college darts team, admirer of John Lowe but not the 'Crafty Cockney', Eric Bristow, and so, having given him a game a few times, I made my debut for County College, who were bottom of the league having Played 4, Lost 4.

We made our way to Bowland College which was a good two minute's walk away on the campus precinct. As fate would have it on such monumental occasions, I was drawn to play last, in game 9 which, as it turned out, was the decider over three legs with the score locked at 4-4. You had to 'double in' to get started in those days and, having done that, I knew enough to get myself onto double 16 to finish, split it but got out on double 8. The Bowland man equalized to set up a one-leg shoot out.

I can't remember now how that went but I think it was tight. I don't know which double it was. It might have been the finish I've already attributed to the first leg but I hit it, County College had recorded their first win and although the other four who had won their matches had made just as significant a contribution, for all the world it looked as if it had all been me. Joy was unconfined among the County faithful and I was an instant darts celebrity, of a very local sort.

I played for a year in which time I hit two 180's, one in a warm up and one in a friendly. I was part of the Mixed Doubles team that won the College knock-out, the final being nothing special with both sides hoping the other could hit double 1 and end the misery but somewhere upstairs is the wallchart record of it that records all the glory and none of the misery. We were knocked out in the preliminary round the following year and I went on to develop the 'yips', or 'dartitis', the condition that afflicts players who can't let go of the dart. I attributed that to thinking that I had reached a certain level and didn't want to commit to any throw that wasn't going to go where I intended it. Eric Bristow suffered the same affliction but not before he'd made a few quid out of the game. 

--

I think we've covered all the sports I ever did at any organized level by now and almost come to the end of the litany of modest achievement in often low-grade competition lit up only by the quaint quality of anecdote. Except that I was once selected to play Gaelic Football.

When we were about 16, the lad from the Irish Club recruited three of us from school to play in what he said was the final of the cup and we would get either a winner's or runners up medal whatever the result. Looking back, and for many years since, it has seemed an unlikely story that a team good enough to make its way to a final should find itself three players short but one of the more marauding members of the first XV pack, the golden boy scrum half who played for England under-19's and I, regarded as a fine exponent of the round ball game, turned up on a Sunday afternoon on the pitches out by Haw Bridge on the way to Maisemore. I was picked up from home by Brendan with the cartoon Irishman who ran the team. I'm already starting to think I dreamed all this. It was about 44 years ago.

I think the formation of a Gaelic Fotball team was 4-3-3-3 but that is not supported by looking it up on the internet. But, as a natural goalscorer in Association Football, I was put in as middle of the front three, purely on reputation.

Gaelic Football isn't quite rugby but it's certainly not football, either. The goal is a mixture of both. What I remember of the first half is how very quickly it all happened, how I was always a yard short of getting to the ball, which was always in the air and up for boisterous grabs rather than being played in to my sophisticated feet. I don't think I got a touch in the first half and found myself re-shuffled back into a midfield position at half-time, which was a relief even if it put an end to any remote hope of scoring a goal, whatever I needed to do to achieve that.

Gloucester Irish Club, if that was who we were playing for, got thrashed. I was never more glad to get off a pitch as I was to get off that one. And, no, there was never any sign of a runners up medal.

Retirement Diary

 National Poetry Day all but passed me by. I was grateful to my usual landing places on the internet for reminding me and then yesterday's Free Thinking provided some discussion about poetry biography with special reference to Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

I had been sent in search, by such a mention, of a new biography of Heaney which caused me some excitement but I think the really big occasion will be the Fintan O'Toole book I found out about which isn't yet. There has never been a shortage of Plath biography and while I thought for a bit about the new Anne Sexton Selected, I prefer it if poets keep themselves out of their own work as much as they can rather than putting themselves on the dissecting table. Sylvia is an exception because she was sensational and hugely talented but I'm not sure everybody was capable of following her.

 

The weeks fly by, or have so far, and I can only wonder that I ever devoted most of most days to the day job. I only wonder if the winter will seem quite as good as my first three months. In theory it should, with every reason to stay in and the proper jump racing on the telly, but I've done more of those things I had lined up than I anticipated already and what to read after my little Balzac festival is a question. I might go upstairs and find two books I didn't finish at the first attempt - Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man and Sebastian Faulks's Human Traces. There was a time when I would finish a book out of a sense of duty but that duty was increasingly derelicted from time to time. The great success of going back to Proust encourages me to make use of other unfinished books there are.

 

My project on the Thom Gunn book is likely to remain a private enterprise as it's not likely to add much to the sum of human knowledge on the subject but since it has been my main area of study since I was about 17, it makes me feel as if I'm doing something to make gradual progress grinding it out. It's possible I don't want to finish it as I'd then need another project and so a couple of sessions a week seeing where it goes next are re-acquainting me with old ground as well as finding things I hadn't been aware of before. But it's a big job to organize quite so much material coherently and although a pristine paperback to have and hold and belatedly find the typos in might be satisfying but is beyond my level of ambition. 

 

But the rhythm of the days is not what I thought. I can't devote a day to such a job, or any other, like I thought I would. I thought I could 'be a writer' from 9 to 5 in place of the old job but there's no way I can adapt to such a discipline. Things come in smaller portions. R3 provides a reliable soundtrack but not all day and not if it doesn't come up with much of interest when I could be playing my own playlist. The 30-minute chess rating is at the bottom end of my acceptable range, at 1800, at the moment so has to be recovered to at least that before I make my way back to 1850. And today's racing at Fontwell recovered yesterday's awful return of 0 out of 4 and so we play again tomorrow, when there are big races at Ascot, Newmarket and then Longchamps, in the Conditional Jockey's race at Fontwell, which might be the risk-averse option.

It's Autumn walking, walking for the good of my health, one might say, from now on, which might not be quite the same as the glorious days we've been granted thus far but there are far worse things to be doing.

Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon, who died yesterday, was one of those rare poets whose books you could open at any page safe in the knowledge that you would find a good poem. Norman MacCaig was another one. Something about his writing meant there were no bad ones.

He was an important part of an outstanding generation of poets from Northern Ireland who provided more than their fair share of the best poetry being written in Britain, from Seamus Heaney through to Paul Muldoon.

His poems were unsentimental but lyrical, set in dark times but always cognisant of potential reasons for optimism. His Selected Poems opens with a meditation on the burial place of Louis MacNeice, of who he wrote,

All we may ask of you we have;

which we may now use of Mahon himself.

His best known poem was probably A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford with its powerful evocation of mushrooms being kept in the dark and there was a strong political theme to be read into much of his poetry that was not usually explicitly about politics. 

Courtyards in Delft, The Dawn Chorus, the early poem, Morning, which was one of Four Walks in the Country near Saint-Breiuc, and Old Roscoff are just a few of many highlights from his work I was reminded of this afternoon in going back to them. But he had continued publishing books regularly with the Gallery Press until not very long ago, all maintaining his rigorous standards, sometimes more discursively, and sustaining his interest in versions of poetry from other languages. 

This seems to me like a more than usually significant loss with a major figure and particular favourite of mine reducing further the number of living poets whose new books I look out for, whose example one could admire without consciously imitating but finding, like his later decision not to do public poetry readings, one was following it anyway.

 

Awaiting still our metamorphosis,

We hoard the fragments of what once we knew.

It is not sleep itself but dreams we miss.

We yearn for that reality in this.