Craig Greene & Robert Patterson at Lunchtime Live!

Craig Greene & Robert Patterson, Portsmouth Cathedral, Apr 16

Chopin and Debussy provide a nutritious and enjoyable staple diet for the piano repertoire, often heard and fare enough. If it seems we don't get enough Bach perhaps it is unrealistic to expect to live on champagne all the time because then what would one have left for a special treat. Gladly, Craig Greene and Robert Patterson served up Three cantata movements, arranged by Leonard Duck, which were exquisite and long on the palate.

The congestion of four hands over, under and across each other in Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring was like watching a game of Twister, the timing and teamwork required something to behold with it getting mighty crowded in the middle of the keyboard. These Edwardian settings were by no means overly sentimental but works of great artistry in themselves. Sheep May Safely Graze was beautifully done and Wachet Auf completed an idyllic triptych with the melodic line moving from Craig at the higher end of the register to Robert in the engine room.

Three popular classics from Bach's Greatest Hits done differently but gorgeously as if champagne had been successfully re-invented.

Before that, Schubert's Fantasie, op. 103, was imperious in its blaze of activity with no trace of the melancholy that I try to find evidence to the contrary of in his music. As such compulsive composers do, he goes to great lengths to find all that can be found in the thematic material if only because it must be there.

In both that and the Bach, it's hard to say whether Craig or Robert had the best job or starring role, not least because there's really no such thing. But three of Dvořák's Slavonic Dances were a headlong flourish of dazzling tempi with Craig rollicking along among the high notes. I can't remember the last time I was quite so glad of a prime position to see the hands. Any faster would have made it unviable. I asked. They had tried. And it wasn't.

A brilliantly thought-out programme made for a joyful occasion with mostly familiar music re-presented gloriously. Schubert and Dvořák are both great, forever with special places in one's favourite music, but - as regular readers might one day tire of hearing me say- Bach is well beyond that.

Without any more dispensing of enthusiasm, I must get on the internet and see if there is a CD of those cantata movements for four hands on piano. I need to serve my own purposes and it's no longer obvious that what remains of our lives is going to be quite as amenable as it has been so far. We might find ourselves needing such rafts to cling to. The opportunity to hear Craig and Robert play them again might not present itself so four other hands will have to suffice.

Retirement Diary

Anecdotal Evidence today reflects on the realities of retirement. I'll soon be six years in, well aware that when meeting retired people some years ago and asking how long it had been and they said 'xx years', I thought it sounded like forever. Except, of course, it doesn't feel like it to the incumbent of those years, in yet another one of those tricks that time plays on us. 

Maryann Corbett looks like a name worth reading more of.

Meanwhile, mention of seeing a Vermeer from a correspondent coincided with me realizing that not all my art books were shelved together. In among the misplaced batch was the sumptuous catalogue of the Pieter de Hooch exhibition in Dulwich in 1998. And if retirement is about anything it's about reading and gazing at such a thing while proceeding through more of the Complete Bach. Followed by The Hissing of Summer Lawns in an attempt to play a pop record once in a while.

C17th Dutch painting is the choice Golden Age of all Golden Ages. Some might say C18th music with Bach and Handel, maybe Shakespeare is a one man show, 1960's Tamla Motown, please insert your own examples. But Vermeer, de Hooch, Carel Fabritius and their contemporaries up to and including Rembrandt, set a miraculous standard. Quiet, domestic and suburban, Delft was something of a backwater to host a gathering like them, apparently not thriving economically and it's true that many painters went to the more cosmopolitan and more lucrative Amsterdam. 

One thing you need for a Golden Age is outrageous talent and it doesn't take long looking at what we have from Delft to begin to recognize that but then one notices how short-lived those three, at least, were. Fabritius was so cruelly killed by the massive gunpowder explosion aged 32. Vermeer, at 43, apparently by something like a stroke or heart attack in reduced circumstances and de Hooch at 54 after seven years in the asylum about which no more is known. It's no use at all to them that their stories add a patina of sadness to their brilliant lives. There may or may not be a connection between the hard times of Vermeer and de Hooch who could have fared better in Amsterdam but Fabritius is another case entirely.

Look how many ways de Hooch recesses backwards through doors and windows, and into another painting, in this. The gentle foreground scene is extended into other places where perhaps even less is happening. He didn't have to do that but time and again he does it. 

 

And this detail is spectacular. No need for guns and shooting, charging horses or Trump in the role of Jesus Christ for that matter. This is heroic, not only to think that anything so ostensibly mundane was worth representing in art but to do it so magnificently. To contemplate such a thing is what retirement and not having to attend paid employment was surely intended for.

 

Marco Polo on Hormuz

 Towards the end of his vivid accounts of his travels, Marco Polo does what Lyse Doucet does so well and reports on a conflict. The malik of Kalhat 'had a powerful hold over' the sultan of Kerman due to his control over Hormuz and,

commands the gulf and the sea even more effectively. 

If only Donald Trump had read Marco Polo before getting himself embroiled out of his depth.

 

The Travels are full of good stories, whether they're right or wrong. It's very much the sort of thing that can bring me a poem and I've been in search of such a thimng for quite some time. A Million Lies, a couple of weeks ago, isn't really it but Witness is a better effort. It was to be in ten syllable lines and two eight-line stanzas but attemps at form like that can be discarded. Some rhythm can be maintained without them, having used it as a framework to begin with. It could be revised further yet but, grateful for it as I am, it might be allowed to stand as it is.

Witness 

this region is so far north that the Pole Star
is left behind towards the south.
                           Marco Polo, Travels

Except there is no such topography
in which anything is further north than north.
No wonder some weren’t having it
about him seeing unicorns
but not quite as advertised,
ugly brutes wallowing in slime.
Well, yes, that was preposterous
but not for one
who’d not previously come across
such a thing as a rhinoceros. He believed his eyes.

Hyperbole is all that one has left
when one can’t see a limit to such wealth
and strangeness so that it looks infinite
like the universe still does and might be yet.
He didn’t tell the half of it, he said,
recalcitrant and not giving an inch,
for we see what we think we see. It’s true
as far as we know and not for them to say. 

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, An Eightieth-Birthday tribute to Peter Didsbury, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books).

 Happy Birthday, Peter Didsbury. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep is published today and this festschrift, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley, is available for pre-order at Broken Sleep ahead of its imminent release date. It features poems by an impressively gathered cast of the great and good with such as Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Carol Rumens, Rory Waterman, plenty more than that and some good wishes from Douglas Dunn. And me, actually. It's a bit like a non-league player finding themselves in the England squad for a friendly match. 

Peter Didsbury has long been a central figure in the story of how Hull became an unlikely-sounding epicentre of British poetry in recent decades, post-Larkin, post-Stevie Smith and a long time post-Andrew Marvell. If Larkin's provincial hideout in its university library began something there and attracted Andrew Motion, it is perhaps more properly Douglas Dunn who might be regarded as the godfather of its mafiosi although 'movement' might be a gentler term for what could be regarded as a more coherent grouping than The Movement ever was. 

It would surely be improper to submit the sort of poem one might place in the middle of a book to thicken it up, or for the editors to include such things, in a tribute to a respected writer and that hasn't happened. I must look further than I previously have into the work of Carol Rumens on the evidence of The Sense of Vision. If Paterson's Hedgehog appears to begin like Aesop, it becomes more like Einstein. If, as I sometimes suspect, we are not living in a Golden Age of British Poetry then the ongoing parade of talent now assembled here is evidence that it's not so bad after all. And there's little for poetry to fear from AI when O'Brien puts in a signature performance in The Lost Language of Trains that only he could have.

Didsbury is inimitable and I don't think anybody has dared to try. It would have been unwise. What has resulted is a profound tribute to one who has always done it his own way from a litany of admirers doing it theirs.   

 

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

Grand National Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 It's too soon to say that the Grand National is getting easier but Willie Mullins is making it look so, even if he thus makes it harder for everyone else. He had five of the first seven last year, including the first three and could have as many as eight runners this year. The money has been for I Am Maximus, the 2024 winner and close second last time and those first two can't be left out again while they are obviously kept specially with this date in mind.

It looks like we are in another period of hardy perennials like we used to have with Red Rum, L'Escargot, Corbiere and Tiger Roll turning up time and again with solid credentials. Taking last year's race as a form guide, Nick Rockett and Grangeclare West are given a couple of pounds extra which makes it too close to call and by now none of them can be regarded as handicap good things.

I was in a betting shop not long after West Tip won in 1986 and some geezer was saying how his mate had made it a handicap certainty whereas his interlocutor said he had thought something else had been. Red Rum and Tiger Roll maybe but with 40 runners over more challenging fences in those days where anything can happen, such 'handicap certainties' are only such after the event. 

But it's not easy to look further down the weights to find much with which to take on this politburo of proven heavyweights. I'm happy to put lines through Banbridge, Gerri Colombe and Haiti Couleurs who have all had their moments but don't look to me like having another one here. Spillane's Tower, maybe; Iroko might be thereabouts; Panic Attack wouldn't come as a shock but, even given that it hasn't been quite the all-conquering season for Mullins and his recent strike rate is below par, you'd think he's ready again for this and so one surely has a sensible chance in what used to be regarded as such a hard race to pick. Not for me, it wasn't, though. Horses that I'd seen stay and jump once kept up a steady percentage of successes.

However, while not being able to keep Maximus out of the first four, I can't get away from Jagwar, receiving a stone from the big guns, after the way he finished at Cheltenham over the shorter trip having had to come from too far back. That looks ideal as an indicator since there is clearly still something in his handicap mark with a further win surely waiting to happen.

And since the weight difference between him and Johnnywho, who beat him half a length there, remains the same, the story suddenly writes itself. It could be all yellow and green and an index to the various different caps used to subtly mark out the JP McManus horses from each other and 1-2-3-4 for the likeable owner of an empire of horseflesh.

So,

1. Jagwar

2. I Am Maximus

3. Spillane's Tower

4. Johnnywho     

 

Update. With Spillane's Tower now running on Thursday, make that 3. Johnnywho, 4. Iroko.

Marco Polo on Kubilai Khan

In Marco Polo's Travels, I went straight to the bit about Genghiz Khan but soon found much more follwing that on Kublai Khan, as per the Coleridge poem we learnt at school. It's a remarkable and gripping account. 

As with most history, power is glorified and Marco might not be an objective witness even if he is in some ways reliable. At school the teaching seemed to assume that the likes of Julius Caesar, monarchs, God and their like were to be admired. In the 70's there was still much more residual belief that Britain ruled the waves and that rulers were the great and good like we were. On closer inspection, and in hindsight, it now looks like we too readily accepted the publicity of tyrants and turned blind eyes to their methods.

Marco's in-depth account of Kublai's reign is a tremendous, sustained, overawed account of its immense grandeur. It lacks irony, passes over the methods by which it ruled as if, and because, they were commonplace and to be expected. But now we can see Marco's report as a precursor of President's Trump's chronically ongoing reports on himself, how nobody has ever seen anything like it, it's the most successful presidency ever in the most powerful country ever and all the statistics that can be used to measure it are off the scale. 'Measureless to man', indeed.

Except there is one episode recording an uprising despite the highly organized discipline with which the empire was held in place. The place has maintained the tradition. I hadn't realized that where Kublai ruled from is much where Beijing is now.

But the people eventually had seen enough of how Ahmad, a governor with great influence over Kublai, managed things much more for his own benefit than even any others in such positions did. Having revolted and Ahmad having been assassinated, Kublai turned up to investigate and found out about the 'abominable outrages committed' and, as we might expect, 

caused all the treasure that Ahmad had amassed in the Old City to be brought into the New City; and put it with his own treasure; and it was found to be beyond all reckoning.

But don't all 'great' rulers, or many of them, find the same thing. Piers Gaveston for Edward II, the Duke of Buckingham under James and Charles I, Peter Mandelson, Dominic Cummings, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Surely history is cyclic and doesn't make linear progress.

I'll either go back and start at the beginning with Marco or find another sensational bit but I'm sure he'd be glad to know that, 800 years after writing up what he found on his long holiday excursion, it is still providing enthralling entertainment.