The Missing Music and other stories

My Mott the Hoople Greatest Hits is now officially missing. I knew I hadn't seen it for some years but a concerted effort to find it that involved a bit of sorting of those that aren't missing revealed it to be nowhere I can find it although I am 31p better off than I thought having looked down the back of a settee. It's only slightly distressing and not the end of the world but the suspicion that there ought to be four albums by Matchbox 20 and Garbage when there are only three of each makes me wonder not only how many others aren't there but where they actually are. Unhappy is the man who can't find his Honaloochie Boogie.

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Neither could I see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn although I knew it was there. How different would the Christmas story be if it had been overcast in the Middle East all those years ago. Three wise men sitting around in midwinter with some surplus myrrh they need to offload but, huh, no stars to follow so we ain't going to find no redeemers, then.

We enjoy the benefits of living in what is still a relatively tolerant society and we are mostly grateful for that but, honestly, we did ought to remember from time to time what a load of fanciful, stuck together old nonsense it is that Christians are so in awe of.

My favoured account of Jesus Christ is A.N. Wilson's who gives the most credible version of him as a charismatic malcontent who took over the work of John the Baptist in much the same way as David Bowie gave Mott the Hoople a song worth having and reformed them towards some success and without who they'd be forgotten and not so achingly missed from my CD library.

Of course he wasn't born in midwinter. Like any successful gangsters, the Christians took over a festival that was already doing good business and said it was theirs now.

Of course he wasn't the son of God. According to A.N. Wilson he never said he was but his supporters embellished the story in the same way that other legends (Diana, John Lennon, Shakespeare) become credited with being so good that they were things they never were.

And, of course, he wasn't born to a virgin. Language is not that complicated. Virgins can't give birth. Miracles don't happen. If Fulham don't get relegated or I'm offered the Queen's Medal for Poetry there will be reasons for it. You won't need the scurrilous excuse of faith to believe in it.

I had a lot of time for Walsingham rooting out the most unholy but he, in his turn, was just as ardent and tormented. After some trying, I have a poem about him but it's maybe only 80% of what I think it could be. It would benefit from another stanza. I might have a line to make that out of.

And, anyway, on the rare occasions I feel like sending anything to a magazine, I realize that all I have is already available here, for what they're worth.

But maybe we keep arriving at new definitions of Christmas and shouldn't be bullied by anybody telling us about its 'true meaning' from weird, medieval agendas.

It's not even the 'cool' list of favourite records like The Pogues ft. Kirsty MacColl (for Christ's sake, as it were), Springsteen, Jonah Lewie, Chris Rea or Greg Lake. 

It's Leona Lewis, Mud, Michael Jackson's Little Drummer Boy, it's Wham!, Gilbert O'Sullivan and Joseph Spence. There's a Top 6.

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But, as an addendum to the recent little Year in Review I can add the other category of Television which was won easily by The Death of Stalin on Sunday night which was hilarious, possibly more accurate than we might know and Armando Ianucci's best work which, given what he was involved in years ago, isn't a bad thing to be. To be fair to Ben Elton, last night's Upstart Crow was good, but the Stalin sent me straight back to my old Solzhenitsyn books.

The Raymond Chandler had been mild entertianment, perhaps so good and so often imitated that it seemed like a parody of itself, but it was all style and no content and so, now twice abandoned like Zadie's Autograph Man, one can't see it coming back from there. 

My youth was not mis-spent in pool halls. That came later. When I was about 15, I was reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In much the same way as Salman Rushdie a decade or two later, it seemed important to me that a novelist was headline news and the mysterious workings of the Soviet Union had me rapt in the same sort of wonder that Christians save for the Christmas myth. Of course, they are as dubious as each other but in the mid-70's I ploughed through all available Solzhenistsyn, religiously you might say.

I went upstairs and fetched The First Circle (Fontana, 1974 edition, 75p, 700 pp) and made great inroads yesterday. I had no idea he was that good and, with the soundtrack provided by the Shostakovich String Quartets I was listening to then, the 46 years in between almost need not have happened.

It probably isn't the most 'Christmassy' reading one could think of but I dare say, to the soundtrack of Telemann and Bach, that will be what I'll be doing with my Tier 4 lockdown.

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As well as the new, presumably last Derek Mahon, which took nearly three weeks to get here because it's a mighty long way from County Meath but, by the looks of it, well worth the wait. I did say the other day I couldn't nominate a Best Collection this year when three such much-loved favourites as O'Brien, Kleinzahler and Mahon were in opposition but I have a feeling that Sean and August would be happy enough for me to pay my respects to Mahon in the circumstances. I had a look before going off on the Tuesday walk and it looks no less than well worthy.

So with all the hapless Christian prayers apparently still being ignored by their evasive God, pestilence still has the upper hand over them and the mindless optimism of the clown we have in charge. We all might have thought it would be over by now but it seems endlessly deferred. It isn't up to them, it's up to us and one hopes that many of us will come out at the other end. So, look after yourselves and each other. We can convene again soon to celebrate Derek Mahon and I'll see you then.