Paul Jones - End to End

Paul Jones, End to End (Little, Brown)

Running the 400 metres is a hard race because it's a bit too far to sprint, racing to beat the record for cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats is similarly, but vastly more, so because it's a bit too far even for those long distance riders who think 24 Hour races are perfectly normal and 12 Hours is not very gruelling at all. The last stretch up through the desolate outposts of northern Scotland are usually ridden in the early hours of the morning on a record-breaking schedule these days and riders hallucinate, lose all sense of what is what and perhaps are never quite the same afterwards. The current record is Michael Broadwith's 43 hours, 25 minutes and 13 seconds done in 2018. It's about 840 miles.

Paul Jones's book on the subject of these rides is not a comprehensive history of the record. He writes up his own ride, done in several sections, finding something out about what is involved and interviews those record-breakers still available to piece together a vivid montage of the discipline. He was a fast man at 25 miles, like Alf Engers, the subject of his previous book, but not inclined to big distances. He had been an English teacher until resigning that job at a time of personal crisis. He certainly fancies himself as a writer and is capable of some memorable descriptive passages but one wonders at times if part of the mental instability that he struggles with is a mild form of Tourette's Syndrome, his vocabulary fixating on the scatalogical rather more than my maiden aunt sensibility would like. There is some compensation for that to be had, though, in his references to the likes of Louis MacNeice and a footnote on Jacques Derrida which is not something one expects in a book on sport. He is also appreciative of his precursors in the 'beautiful' Coureur magazine of the 1950's and 60's.

Before meeting the living record-breakers, Jones picks out some heroics from the early years, notably G.P. Mills who had to be dosed unknowingly with cocaine, the great Marguerite Wilson who had never driven a car before driving back, unaware that cars ran on petrol and F.T. Bidlake who disapproved of lady riders, especially in attire he regarded as not 'contumelious', which was,

an archaism even then. It's a Jacob Rees-Mogg of a word,

which Paul's research shows reached peak usage in 1810, a hundred years before Bidlake's use of it.

Jones is laudibly inclusive, devoting as much space to the endeavours of female riders like Eileen Sheridan, Pauline Strong and Janet Tebbutt, as well as tandems, trikes and even tandem trikes which are,

like an articulated lorry and probably harder to maneouvre.

Paradoxically, it turns out, part of the secret of setting a new record is not going fast enough but knowing how to go slow enough and many attempts fail between Preston and Carlisle because a speed merchant murdered their schedule in the first half only for the schedule to get its revenge in the second. You can't win it in England but plenty have been beaten before arriving in Scotland.

More than once John Woodburn is found to be taciturn; Andy Wilkinson thinks he'll end his career with an End to End ride only for his success, beating the 847 mile record by 58 seconds, to lead him into a whole new phase of a career that led to him winning the 24 Hour Championship as a 'novice'; Gethin Butler has a resting heart rate of 30,

calm, unruffled, precise, seeing the world more quickly and in a more measured way

and Michael Broadwith first needed a neck brace before supporting his head himself and being tricked into continuing by his support team when he was insisting on packing. In the recent documentary series on Muhammed Ali, it was reported that he urinated blood for 2-3 weeks after his brutal third match with Joe Frazier. Reports of other physical side effects for weeks after an End to End record come as not much of a surprise, then. Lynne Taylor kept thinking she was approaching traffic lights but it was her bloodshot eyes deceiving her.

It is, of course, madness but any record by definition has to be at the furthest edge of possibility. Most people, of those that decide to ride from one extreme of the land mass to the other, take maybe 10 days over it, averaging 80 miles or so a day. Steve Abraham once rode 72388 miles in a year, 7014 in a month, or 236 miles a day for 30 days. But if that doesn't sound sensible or even good for you, Jones always remarks on how healthy and younger than their years these riders look when he meets them.

The overused cliché of the 'journey' is for once very fitting for this endeavour. Janet Tebbutt, in keeping with her modest demeanour, just says, 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' whereas others are hell-bent and delirious. John O'Groats is an anti-climax of a place for such monumental efforts to achieve their results in but, apart from a few fishing boats, it being the end of the road is the only point in it being there at all. Unless you turn round and do a few more hours in search of the 1000 mile record but many of the most intrepid have seen enough by then and decide not to.

End to End is a compelling book almost in spite of its author who has done a great job but could have done a better one, perhaps, if he had resisted the temptation to make it about himself and his own 'journey'. His writing draws attention to itself sometimes when the best writing is often that which one doesn't notice. But that does add another layer, a confessional account of a personal crisis that perhaps his fragmented ride and his investigation of those who did it under more exacting pressure helped to overcome but he fails to become the hero or central figure of his own ride which, it is to be hoped, was never his intention.

As a Cloud

It's only once in a blue moon, or in this case a lonely cloud, that I have an occasional feature here of photographs that bring to mind famous poems. 

I'm no great Wordsworth expert, apologist or admirer but one couldn't help but notice this and think that loneliness isn't always a natural thing to attribute to clouds because they usually come 'not single spies but in battalions'.

Does nobody ever question the fitness of Wordsworth's simile or is it a bit picky to find fault with it because it's not a cliché. It's a poem everybody knows, especially its first line, but it's not about the cloud, it's about the daffodils and then more than them. The solitary cloud only represents the poet, deep in abstracted thought as a poet is expected to be. This one wasn't 'floating on high o'er vales and hills' but 'o'er Swindon' and, if we sometimes imagine we see pictures in them, like the bear smoking a pipe once perceived by Brian Wells, the late Portsmouth poet who succeeded in writing worthwhile haiku in English, then this one was Iceland in the blue, blue North Atlantic Ocean.

--

It might seem impetuous to snap up on sight two CD's of pieces one already has but I wasn't sure I had them and charity shops can hardly give away that olde worlde music format these days. The catalogue of one's record collection one keeps in one's head becomes blurred so now I have two versions of both Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Charpentier's Lecons de Tenebres to compare. They cost £1 each. They could have cost £1 for all three discs but I simply couldn't take advantage of that offer. It was daylight robbery already for anybody who cared and it's possible nobody else in Cosham High Street ever would.

--

But while compiling some sort of outline for a further scholarly essay that may or may not be aimed at the About Larkin journal, I looked up a reference from John Lucas and his Modern English Poetry - from Hardy to Hughes, Barnes & Noble, 1986, only very belatedly discover how prolific and right-minded the Nottingham novelist, academic, editor, critic and, it turns out, jazzman, really was.

There are the Burgundy Street Jazzmen, in which he played trumpet and cornet, to catch up on, maybe also the novels he continues to write into his 80's and his The Trent Bridge Battery, the Story of the Sporting Gunns, the dynasty that provided Nottinghamshire with players as well as bats. But, for the price of less than a pint of Shipstone's Ale in a pub, I thought I'd have Poetry: the Nottingham Collection (Five Leaves, 2005) in which he selects poems from contemporary poets associated with Nottingham and thus not Byron or Lawrence but a goodly few, none of whose contributions can compare with his own masterpiece, An Irregular Ode on the Retirement of Derek Randall, Cricketer, which in four stanzas of eight twelve-syllable lines of contrived doggerel does a better job of setting out the Randall story than Rags, the very underwhelming ghost-written biography.

Sport and literature are very different things and aren't always brought together successfully and Randall was heroic and highly loveable for what he did but it was never going to be writing. John Lucas provides an appropriate tribute in fittingly makeshift, knock-about style and for those of us for who there will never be another Derek Randall - and there had been nothing like him before- it's what we wanted. 

I'm glad I found it. I wouldn't have known of I hadn't looked. Derek became,

                          fit cause

of Arlott's measured words: "He made the method men look sad."

...

you were too rare a player for England, dear Derek Randall.

Ali Smith - Companion Piece

Ali Smith, Companion Piece (Hamish Hamilton)

The novel is not what it was. Even as long ago as Orlando, it wasn't what it was. Like Julian Barnes's Elizabeth Finch, Companion Piece extends in several directions without having much in the way of traditional plot.

Ali Smith is highly contemporary with her novels written and in print so quickly, as with the Seasonal Quartet, that they are vividly if sometimes grimly very much of our times. The NHS is a heroic, miraculous thing that a pandemic only serves to underline the worth of, and cancel culture, text-speak and,

Like I'm hallucinating a government, I said, running this country so successfully, with such calculated ineptness that we've one of the top death rate tolls per capita in the world.,

not least with the absurd advice to flag down a conveniently passing bus while you're being attacked in the street.

But there might be as many ways of interpreting Companion Piece as Sandy says to Martina Inglis when she helps her with an e.e. cummings poem at university, whose 'luminous and sensually disruptive love poems' are scarred by the knowledge that their author supported McCarthy and the US witch-hunts among other miscreancies. One knows where one stands with Ali Smith and knows she's right.

Perhaps it is all a hallucination derived from language and wordplay, perhaps that's what all literature is. As is advisable with much 'modern art', I'm not going to provide a definitive verdict on what's going on but I'll contemplate it from many and various angles.

The sudden shift from the hospitalized father who is 'touch and go' to the nightmare of barely-acknowledged acquaintance from the past and her menacing daughters are traumas we never know when they might take over our lives. The wealth of incidental detail like 'gypsies' having derived from 'Egyptians' to refer to anyone foreign and the history of the letter 'v' pack an immense amount into a book it took much less than a day to be so absorbed in with its excursion into the possible origins of 'hello', the female blacksmith from deep history and the implicit meditation on injustice all offering much to decipher or, at the very least, ponder. It is risk-taking, both mundane and elemental. It's less easy to explain away than the cummings poem was and thus, if inconclusive also vastly inclusive.

Ali Smith does as much here as she ever does and a bit more. One sits back afterwards and can't help but be moved and impresssed. 

From 'The Pop Show'

The Osmonds, I’m Still Gonna Need You 

Donny Osmond, Puppy Love 

David Cassidy, Daydreamer 

The Partridge Family, One of Those Nights 

 

From 1971 to 1973, it wasn't my business to be interested in heart-throbs so successfully designed to be adored by girls. Notwithstanding much regard for the very cute Marc Bolan, who was also a creative genius, I was a serious 12 to 14 year old and those like me at a grammar school for boys had been told we were intelligent and were inclined to believe it. The orthodoxy was to regard the outbreak of mostly American good-looking boys as 'teeny bop' or 'commercial', despite the fact that such a portentous and dull album as The Dark Side of the Moon outsold them all.

At a relatively early age I had despaired of daytime Radio 1 with its cast of cheerful DJ's playing chart hits, new releases, 'records of the week' and golden oldies interspersed with their breezy good humour in favour of listening to Sounds of the 70's, from 10pm-midnight when there would be the sardonic Dancing Jack Peel, the soporofic Bob Harris or the minimalist Pete Drummond on Friday nights would just tell you what you'd been listening to and then play the next album track by Spooky Tooth, Vinegar Joe or Tonto's Expanding Head Band.

My chosen favourites were denim-clad post-hippies with lank long hair like Lindisfarne, for ultimate preference, but also anybody like them, including the influx of bands from Europe, like Focus, that I attributed to Mr. Heath's brilliant maneouvre of somehow persuading both Europe to accept the UK into the Common Market and the people of the UK to vote in favour of it.

While it might have been easy to dismiss Donny Osmond and his brothers and the transparently vacuous ciphers later to be featured in such magazines as Non-Threatening Boys that Lisa used to read in The Simpsons, it wasn't quite so easy to put away David Cassidy who quite simply had it all, not least by being better looking than most girls but also by having some good songwriters on his side.

In One of Those Nights,

  you say to yourself
"Hey, couldn't I live without it"
Well I think so, on the other hand
I doubt it
Suddenly she's crashin' through my mind
Like waves upon the shore.

 

Not many teenage boys devoutly expressing devotion to their Emerson, Lake & Palmer albums or labouring through the latest drab epic by Pink Floyd didn't furtively glance at their sister's copy of Jackie and know, somewhere inside them, that they were wrong and she was right.

The Osmomds had a go at being wild, Mormon boys with Crazy Horses, Down by the Lazy River and One Bad Apple on which they most obviously revealed themselves as an attempt at a white answer to the Jackson 5 but it was with the 'ballads', the mournful love songs, that they exceeded themselves, with Donny not forefront but taking his place in the line. In Love Me for a Reason, the songwriters, that include Johnny Bristol, find,

I'm just a little old-fashioned
It takes more than a physical attraction
My initial reaction is
Honey give me a love
Not a fascimile of

 

They were guilty of no more than vaudeville, of song and dance, and being good and successful at it. Those still nostalgically listening to the music of the mountebanks that sold them records with more outrageous claims to artistic significance in 1972 still haven't realized they bought a pig in a poke but as long as they never realize, they'll be happy enough and it won't matter.

Norman Scott - An Accidental Icon

Norman Scott, An Accidental Icon (Hodder & Stoughton)

We believe what we want to believe. In the 1970's, Jeremy Thorpe was my favourite politician and I didn't want to believe that idealistic Liberals arranged to have troublesome people's dogs shot (1). I clung, like a drowning man to a disintegrating raft, to Harold Wilson's claim that it was all a plot by the South African government to discredit the anti-apartheid cause. It wasn't, though.

Even during Michael Bloch's biography and John Preston's televised A Very English Scandal, I still had some regard for the charismatic charlatan in his struggles to rid himself of the feckless pest, Norman Scott, as one might be led into sympathy for an anti-hero on the run in a Hitchcock film.

Quentin Letts, in The Times, said he 'believed about half of' Norman Scott's account, published only now at the age of 82, but Mr. Letts is one of those who doesn't entertain versions of the world that are not as he imagines it and, being 'libertarian' rather than liberal, he is steadfastly still of that same 'establishment' that saved Jeremy Thorpe, who was 'one of them', in a travesty of justice.

I can't see what there is to disbelieve about Scott's detailed report. He was itinerant, unstable, with a dysfunctional family background and by nature a victim, it seems, and so easy prey for a manipulative predator with a sense of entitlement like Thorpe. Scott has such anxieties that he took vast quantities of pills for his nerves but in due course he had good reason to be anxious. There were people out there who were trying to kill him but if much of this book is the story we had already been told from a different point of view, I don't think we knew that Norman had considered killing Thorpe a long time before the compliment was returned and the farcical episodes of shady money men and incompetent hitmen unravelled so badly. It is only the minor characters that are likeable and they emigrate out of the picture as soon as they can or, like the Great Dane, Rinka, become innocent collateral damage.

Thorpe was a fantasist addicted to high risk. Duplicitous, ambitious but with a talent for publicity, it is surprising that he thought he could become Prime Minister via the route of the leadership of the ramshackle Liberal Party with its 12 seats in the Commons, or that he could marry Princess Margaret. By now we know that the first ambition, at least, can be achieved by mendacity on an industrial scale but you need to be in the Conservative Party.

Scott's nature made him naturally vulnerable and, like many who have difficulties with other humans, he found great solace in the more reliable companionship of animals, mostly horses and dogs, and had considerable success in dressage and other equestrian events. To adapt Oscar Wilde's line, he might have been in the gutter but he mixed with stars in the society of Francis Bacon, in the infamous Colony Room Club, and he manages to include Margot Fonteyn in his litany of friends. 

But the item at the very centre of the story is his National Insurance cards which are withheld by a previous employer and Thorpe is chronically undertaking to retrieve for him. Without such, he can't get legitimate work but Thorpe never comes up with the goods. It is a story so outlandish that Shakespeare, Franz Kakfa or Cervantes would have decided against using it but fiction is a pale imitation of fact. When Norman talks about 'hitting rock bottom', he knows what he's talking about, having once used a public toilet in Barnstaple to sleep in.

Beneath the ongoing traumas of Scott's life is the leitmotif of all the people and animals that are credited with being the sweetest-natured of any he ever encountered but they always, until his partner of 26 years standing, either leave him (perfectly understandably) or he loses them as his life moves on from one rented, country beauty spot with stables to the next short-term refuge. But he has enough resilience to be left to tell the tale and reflect on Thorpe's brilliant House of Commons speech in 1962 when Harold MacMillan sacked seven members of his cabinet and Thorpe said,

' Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.'

which is precisely what Thorpe did when his case came to trial. 

Our lives are all possibly the story of our loss of innocence, however gradually it happens. It might be best to begin with as little as possible of it to lose and be born with the cynicism and self-seeking of Boris, Trump and, indeed, Jeremy Thorpe but what sort of world would that be. A number of long-standing heroes of mine have had to be demoted from that status over the years but none as utterly and comprehensively as Thorpe and the seismic effect continues to rumble on. I didn't always vote Liberal when Labour or Green seemed preferable options but I regarded the non-conformist, radical agenda as my natural place. I'm not even sure I do that any more and maybe the satirists and those worried about the threat from wholesome, well-meaning vegetarians were right and the Liberal Party was just where a disparate agglomeration mis-fits gathered. I don't know.

 

Footnote

1. page 266, People felt sorry for Jeremy and perhaps they weren't prepared to question his character because it would mean changing their ideals.     

Led Zeppelin - All of My Love

 

Rock music, or Heavy Metal, suffered from the same doctrinal subjection of its followers as Catholicism or Marxism. It had its uniform of tenets, beliefs and dress sense, none of which were to be countermanded by the faithful.

I worked in the same building in Southampton in the late 1980's as a rock disciple who was admired not for his work ethic but for the drum solos he tapped out on his desk. If I had worked in the same vicinity he would either have been taken on with some reggae rhythms taken from Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare or he'd have met an early demise which is what sadly did happen to one of his mates in the club he habitually haunted, presumably an innocent follower of his chosen fashion who got on the wrong end of a drug deal. What was almost impressive about it was the story of how the news percolated through the club and, having no other appropriate response, they 'just boogied'. It was as appalling as the quote attributed to Bill Shankly that,

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that. 

which was refuted by Brian Clough concentrating on family life in retirement and attending football hardly ever.

Led Zeppelin are exempted from the boycott that covers Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and the further excesses of Judas Priest, Motley Crue and Spinal Tap, though. I was even reminded of an impressive stage performance by Angus Young in his school uniform recently but all that headbanging still didn't equate to the athleticism displayed by Grace Jones when he kept her hula hoop going throughout her performance of Slave to the Rhythm in front of Buckingham Palace in 2012.

Led Zep were certainly any good. Stairway to Heaven was as indisputably regarded as the greatest ever rock track as Eddy Merckx had been regarded as the greatest ever Tour de France rider but now, five decades later, the lambent beauty it was credited with sounds mystical in a way that has lost its mystique. 

It had been possible to stand on the coast of the Bay of Biscay in the summer of 1977, having gone there with a fellow student of 'A' level French to improve our conversation français, and think,

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west,

but there wasn't, it was just an old quote and by then I was more interested in predicting that Never Mind the Bollocks would be the last and only Sex Pistols album, which is really what it was.

Boogie with Stu was the track that I first put in here. Physical Graffiti is surely the magnum opus with its Kashmir and Trampled Underfoot but it's all looked a bit different for a long time since those televisions were so dutifully thrown out of hotel windows, the music was so pompous and overblown and they had an aeroplane with their name written on its side like Donald Trump still does now.

No, Robert Plant was the singer in Led Zep from 1968-1980 and henceforth whenever a reunion could raise a few million quid, and even though for more than 40 years he's been doing other things it's what you make your name by doing that you'll be remembered by.

All of My Love from In Through the Out Door, the last track on the last album, is where they arrived at and effectively stopped, not unlike Abba with The Day Before You Came, almost hinting that they could have gone further in that new direction. I'm not sure that either of them could have but they both ended before showing any sign of decline. 

Julian Barnes - Elizabeth Finch

Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch (Jonathan Cape)

Like Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and others to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Finch is another Julian Barnes 'novel of ideas'. A considerable amount of it is surely 'research' more than it is fiction but most importantly it is 'writing' and fine writing.  It's not a tale with cliff-hanging chapter endings but it would still be a page-turner in the appropriate hands.

One might compare Elizabeth Finch with Miss Jean Brodie or even the real-life Monica Jones as a charismatic teacher and the comparison would find similarities in their idiosyncracies and contrasts in the ideas she evinced. Neil, as narrator, had been a mature student of hers, remained in contact with her and was close enough to inherit her notebooks and an acquaintanceship with her brother. She becomes his subject as he moves towards writing a memoir about her and, in turn, the central section of the book is taken up by his essay on her subject, Julian the Apostate, the last Pagan Emperor of Rome who,

attempted to turn back the disastrous flood tide of Christianity.

Those dissenters from the ecclesiastical among us immediately realize we are onto something and concentrate a bit harder from that sentence onwards, liking much of what we read. Reviewing Peter Doherty and Frédéric Lo a few weeks ago, I couldn't see where The Guardian's reviewer's objections lay and again, although it's Sam Byers this time, I can't fathom how he can concern himself so much with the perceived absence of personality in Elizabeth and spend almost no time on Julian the Apostate whose ideas and alternative history are obviously the point.

Elizabeth is an object of fascination for her students because she is private but her cultural critique of all things 'mono', from monopoly to monoglot but most crucially monotheism is what makes her the pluralist, insightful and, if it is still possible, optimistic heroine she is. Or, as the vehicle for Barnes's liberal, intellectual elite agenda, something we should remember is nothing to be ashamed of after the battering the referendum, the Age of Boris, Trump and Putin have inflicted on our modest idealism.

In Elizabeth's notebooks is a disparate list of authors that includes Hitler as well as Thom Gunn, the latter being a clue to any Gunn scholar that they are those that wrote about Julian although his poem is dismissed in Neil's survey as 'a baffling homage-poem'. It is the quote from Swinburne about the 'pale Galilean' that is given more attention and the line of thought that 'getting history wrong' is who we are and the obvious absurdity that,

the religion into which you are born , or have chosen to adopt, just happens to be the one sect which is true among hundreds of heathen creeds and apostasies out there,

which either results in or results from the 'crooked timber of humanity'.

 

Admirers of Barnes, and there is no other novelist writing today that I prefer reading, will treasure this. It took no more than about four hours to read and, while it does all that it needs to do and needs to be no longer, that means the wait for the next Barnes begins all the sooner. Readers who want a story to follow or find him a bit too heavy on ideas will wonder what the point was, I dare say, but it sends me first back to the Gunn poem which, being early Gunn, fetishises on his rule of law and violent death rather than his stand against one god rather than many, and then to see whatever else there might be about Julian of who it might be asked, as it was of George Best, 'Oh, Julian, where did it all go wrong?'

Portsmouth Choral Union, Haydn Seven Last Words

 PCU, Haydn, Seven Last Words

My latest piece of debonair handiwork in this most choice role of music writer is at the newly re-orchestrated Music in Portsmouth.

I don't know how much longer I can sustain this incidental leitmotif of adapting the opening lines of famous novels but there's a couple of weeks or so until the next one and so time is on my side in the hope I can find more to continue with.

Today at Cheltenham

 Back at God's Own Sport Venue after a hiatus of three years, there's much to be grateful for. Just being there is the first of them but doing one's homework and getting so much of it right is less something to be grateful for but something one would usually expect a reward for.

Admittedly, it was a good day for favourites but they weren't all favourite when I picked them. More crucially, I did mix in some second choices into the various combinations I defrayed my investment across, a couple of the more confident selections got beat and it was actually a concatenation that included a couple of alternative picks that saved the day.

In the words of Led Zeppelin it was Nobody's Fault But Mine that I could have the winners of the first six races and be second in the other one and only come out a fiver in front. It sounds unlucky but it isn't. Those were the combinations I chose and you only get paid out on the successful ones. That's how it works. It could have been worse but it also could have been a lot better.

No, not at all. I had no idea while watching so much of the Wiseguy Midas Touch come true that once I checked the account it would amount to so little but the money is not quite the point. It was hugely enjoyable.

The worlds of Literature and Horse Racing don't intersect a great deal. One is a dodgy world full of spivs and wide boys and the other involves taking horses to a countrified location to see which one runs and jumps best. But if Rachael remained unaware that such an eminent man of letters and admirer of hers was there and saw her, well, no, it is unlikely she'll ever have enough time on her hands to resort to the obscure places that my writing turns up in but perhaps she'd like it if she did.

Did You Ever

Any anthology, whether it sets out to or not, comes with its own manifesto or agenda. I didn't want A Perfect Day of Pop Radio to be any more than what I'd play if I had Radio 2 to myself for a day but The Rock Show is only included as an outlet for some loud records, and plenty that aren't very loud, that didn't fit in elsewhere. The problem with music that sets out to be 'rock' is that it caters for the aspirations to machismo of teenage boys, and the girls that want to be involved with them. Ideally one would lose interest in it once one had achieved maturity. Thus, compiling this playlist at the age of 62, many of those noisy records I moved on from at the age of about 14 don't get in.

What was remarkable was the innocence of the censors that let such subversive records as Did You Ever through because they sounded so middle of the road, and presumably because Nancy Sinatra was a far better singer than her groany old father, while they didn't get My Ding-a- Ling, The Bellamy Brothers, Dr. Hook or the shockingly mundane Starland Vocal Band. 

By all means, they managed to spot Judge Dread's reggae nursery rhymes, Jonathan King's equally inane, but harmless, St. Cecilia and did the likes of The Sex Pistols and Frankie Goes to Hollywood the most enormous favours by banning them and making them the more notorious. That is exactly what the sinister Svengali, Malcolm McLaren, would have hoped for. But it depended on the heroic, Christian, wholesome Cliff Richard to withdraw his single, Honky Tonk Angel, in 1973 when he inadvertently found out it was about a prostitute. That was the same year that Hawkwind withdrew their Urban Guerilla because sectarian violence had escalated in Northern Ireland.

But, no, none of that. Did You Ever was absolutely fine when The Benny Hill Show, Miss World and Pan's People were mainstays of family entertainment. Some of it was better than other bits but none of it was quite as cute as this blatantly knowing duet, 

 

Could I fix you once more?
No thanks, I just had one
Then how about a nice big?
That would be just fine
Is there any special way?
Oh no, whatever you say
Well, I just wondered, have you ever?
All the time

 

Hello to Isherwood

I had no idea there was Goodbye to Berlin upstairs in the library. I have no idea where it came from or when it did except that it must have been a long time ago. Yet again, the resource serves its purpose by filling in a gap until the next books arrive and whyever it was I first acquired it, the investment eventually paid off. I've certainly not read it before.

It is categorized on the back as 'Fiction/Literature' by Triad Granada. Really? Of course the Marcel in A la recherche is not Proust and Stephen Dedalus is not Joyce, Paul Morel is not Lawrence, and a lot of fiction is going to have its origins in the life of the person that wrote it but the fact that 'Sally Bowles' wasn't the name of the person Isherwood knew doesn't seem enough to make Goodbye to Berlin fiction rather than memoir. It's a fine line, to be sure, and eventually any sort of reportage is partial, subjective, selective and thus somehow fiction. But I arrive at the same broad conclusion that I did with 'free verse' a little while ago. It doesn't matter. It's writing and our only concern is whether it's worth reading.

And, yes, it certainly is. Isherwood is a very good writer because he's easy to read. The pages flow by like the smoothest of gin cocktails, leading you in so beguilingly until you realize you've enjoyed yourself more than you thought you had.

In his looks, deportment and writing, Isherwood was the tidy, well-presented one. Auden had the capacity for greatness but his facility could sometimes make him verbose and possibly even a bit 'general' in the wide sweep of his plentiful wisdom. MacNeice was the sensible one and Spender lucky to be involved. Berlin 1930-33 could have been sleazier this account if it had been reported by others, I dare say.

If everybody was reading La Peste two years ago, Goodbye to Berlin might be relevant now with an expansionist man suffering with his own ego de-stabilizing Europe, the far right candidate in France not a complete no-hoper in their democratic election and a narcissist with a very low IQ with chances of four more years as President of the USA.

Among Isherwood's stories of his nights out with his various acquaintances, who range from Nazi-sympathizers to Jews, is one to a wrestling show which is quite clearly fixed and, as professional wrestling mostly still does, is more choreography than sport but he writes,

The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.

 

And ninety years later, it still is and it's no less depressing now. 

If I Was Your Girlfriend

 Eventually the list-making for 'A Perfect Day of Pop Radio' must stop. And so it stops now, the last adjustment being made in the Jazz Show, from midnight - 1 a.m., underwhelmed by Miles Davis's cover of 'Time After Time' and so replacing it with this.

And so now I can begin work on my Unfinished Symphony, the little essays on each track that would have made up my book on pop music had I lived long enough to do them all.

Prince & Miles Davis - If I Was Your Girlfriend

 'Cool' is a highly-prized commodity in certain parts of the pop music industry. For many of those who take it seriously, it is a necessary, implicit thing that the artist must have or else one simply doesn't give them the time of day. It's likely to be a high priority among young people keen on establishing the value of their chosen taste and thus in universities but I hope by now most students have seen through that and the situation isn't as bad as it was from 1978-81.

'Cool' is only really what you say it is. It shouldn't be achievable by trying to achieve it. That should instantly disqualify you from it. It should be effortless. Thus, I remain unsure if the 'cool' of Lou Reed, Prince and Miles Davis, three of its most apparently successful exponents, is valid or not. Perhaps their attempts succeed in spite of their efforts because the music was still good whereas the likes of, say, Bono bombed abysmally because it usually wasn't.

Disdaining the uncool, detaching oneself from the bourgeois, mainstream, square sorts that define the ordinary might have seemed a good idea but non-conformity very soon becomes a new uniform. The dissent from middle class standards of dress and behaviour into long hair, denim, some Marxism and maybe even substance abuse was as conservative as Jacob Rees-Mogg is now with its adherence to party lines, properness and herd instinct.

It could be turned inside out. If only they had realized how absurd it all was. They seemed to think they were one step ahead but they were a step behind and drenched in their own righteousness. Nonetheless, If I Was Your Girlfriend is a slinky thing and made for Miles Davis to step into as the two uber-cool giants from different generations overcome all accusations of 'trying too hard' by 'being any good'.

Some Comfort

 The problem with comic novels is that one knows they are intended to be funny and so I, for one, have some resistance to them. Go on, then, make me laugh. I bet you can't.

Ulysses and A la Recherche are comic novels but there's more to them than that. Somehow, art should be sad to be great but, certainly, comedy can be sad, too.

Cold Comfort Farm has been upstairs for years unread. Not even looked at. It came in a bundle of other Penguin funny novels but wasn't the point if why I was gifted them. I wasn't overly impressed with any of those I looked at and only now does the cloud reveal its silver lining. Stella Gibbons was doing nicely enough until that moment when something clicks and you decide it's a fine thing indeed which happened in this instance on page 93 with a description of a film with an,

audience [that] hadf run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear...made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve close-ups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly.

Humour is a dark, conservative thing. Liberal, 'woke' types might want to understand and empathize with the reasons for the suicides but in this ironic take on art house cinema, as early as the 1930's, they make it funny by being representative of serious issues being laboured more than somewhat.

The farm is a place the family know they can't leave, like the inertia or paralysis of those characters in Dubliners. The pest, Mr. Meyerburg, has a radical theory that Branwell Bronte wrote all the books while the sisters were dissolute,

'You know how dreadful intelligent people are when you take them to dances.'

and Aunt Ada Doom, the dominant matriarchal presence, 'saw something nasty in the woodshed' when she was two, the deep Freudian legacy of which has thwarted the family ever since.

I'm perhaps sometimes tempted to laud such enjoyable things beyond their true value in the excitement of finding them and it's possible that our sensibilities by now ought not to find fun in a clever girl's depiction of non-cosmopolitan rural types but, as we've noted already, she doesn't spare sophistication, either. So, let's not appoint Cold Comfort Farm 'best comic novel ever' just yet or make a list of favourites just so that it can be included but it's always great to discover something so good in the library that one hadn't known was such.  

 

 

What to Read Next

 With the new Julian Barnes not due for another week, the minor Vermeer festival over and the desperate need to have a book on the go and nothing on order from the library, I had to resort to the reserve of my own library to maintain the strategic position. Having at least one book to read is not only a default setting but a defence against such realism as decorating, dusting or any deeper spring clean.

The pile of About Larkin back issues have been great but that's 'occasional' reading. And maybe all poetry is that. I'm ever more unwilling to accept its own advertisement for itself as a higher calling, aspiring to the condition of music and in any way 'better'. Thus, the option of selecting a handful of poetry books to revisit was soon discounted. The chronically deferred intention to have a proper look at the C18th has been given the least diligent attention by moving the Complete Alexander Pope from its shelf, wiping the dust off it, opening it and leaving it in the front room. I'm sure it's good at what it does, I'm sure it's clever but it's verse, not poetry, and satire has a point to make and the best poetry, as per the quote about Vermeer below, has to be better than that. Politics, morality and points of view don't lend themselves to poetry which does what it does best when it's allusive, illusory, perhaps even evasive but mainly unwilling to be defined. The Dunciad takes up 100 pages. I'd like to be able to say I've read it so that I can decide for myself if it's any good, or if not why not, but my mind would wander and those few hours could be spent watching old films, horse races I'll have forgotten by next week or trying to think of a book to write rather than which one to read. One looks at the first page of Finnegans Wake yet again, knowing that the weight of annontations required to 'get it' outweigh the pont of reading it.

An internet item pops up about comic novels and lists The Confederacy of Dunces which I know is upstairs. It came highly recommended and delivered to me with others but I didn't get on with it. I look again and reflect that all such Garp, Jonathan Coe, probably Wodehouse and certainly Douglas Adams don't make me laugh whereas I can watch Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Blackadder and much of The Office time and again.

But, there was Cold Comfort Farm, one of those 'others' that was begifted years ago, that might be given a chance. It is filling the gap most ably. I didn't see the TV adaptation but have some idea that it could be bracketed with The League of Gentlemen and Royston Vasey but, having googled that combination and found nothing, can only think I've either stumbled on a similarity or I'm very much mistaken.

Still, it's a weirdly entrancing and, so far, superbly sustained performance and it's hard to know how much more unread material there is upstairs. The furniture, the clothes, everything else, would be first to go ahead of the books and records in any emergency.  

Aintree Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 Protektorat (tomorrow, 2.55) has done nothing wrong so far and so far hasn't been beaten at Aintree. He's very much the flagship horse that the Skeltons need to crash into the big-time with and early indications in the betting suggest that the 7/2 was good value before it started to dry up and so he is a bet with which to gather some ammunition for the races that follow.

On Friday, Jonbon (2.20) had nothing to be ashamed about in finishing second to Constitution Hill at Cheltenham, who is a wonder horse on all known facts and figures and so even money is a very fair offer about him returning to winning. And Paul Nicholls was probably wise to pull Bravemansgame (2.55) out of his Cheltenham engagement in order to come here fresh and ready for a showdown with L'Homme Presse in a small but select field which will indicate if his already mapped-out plan towards next season's King George and maybe Gold Cup is realistic.

But it is the National that will inevitably attract those in search of a more exciting price. The Irish must be odds-on to dominate again with another powerful raiding party coming across the water. Using some statistics, though, it takes some horse (like specialist Tiger Roll) to win with much more than 11 stone. That would take out last year's third, Any Second Now, and Delta Work with his collection of placed runs in top class chases and Cross Country win not giving him any leeway in the weights. Minella Times is now top weight but hasn't completed in two attempts since last year's win so the sensational headline news might be that Rachael Blackmore does not win a big race this time.

Fiddlerontheroof (Sat 5.15) is 2lb well in, which only might make a difference in a close finish but, more than that, he has been consistently impressive for a revived Tizzard stable this year, possibly more so in defeat than when winning, compared to last season when he was underwhelmingly finding one just too good. Only twice in 14 starts has he finished out of the first two, his form figures include no letters and he's been putting in good work at the end of races over 3 miles and more and so 14/1 will do for me.

Two UK runners at big odds are Two for Gold and Deise Aba, the latter a dour stayer who's been unlucky in close finishes over long distances but we can't expect to keep the Irish completely out of the frame and so Delta Work could be in there and I pass on, rather than entirely endorse, good words for Enjoy D'Allen and Longhouse Poet. So, maybe,

1. Fiddlerontheroof

2. Diese Aba

3. Delta Work

4. Longhouse Poet

More Vermeer

Not much is known about Homer. There might have been no such person but if there was he might have been blind. But otherwise there is usually somebody finding out what they can about everybody else. I once read that not much was known about Shakespeare but now have a yard of shelf space full of evidence and what inferences might be made from it. Similarly, Anthony Bailey pieces together an impression of Vermeer from contemporary records, a few anecdotes and the same sort of imaginative supposition.

Such a book is filled out with context and the painter does make much of an appearance in the first two chapters but eventually we are assured he married Catharina, who came from a Catholic family whereas he was Reformed Protestant, had 15 children, 11 of which survived childhood, didn't make a fortune, inherited an inn and died quite suddenly aged 43.

That he didn't produce many paintings is attributed either to perfectionism or that a house full of kids wasn't conducive to art-making but, to critcize the critic, one can read some of the bookish man's aversion to children into Bailey's theory there as we all sub-consciously assume our subject to be like ourselves.

But the jacket worn in six of the paintings is surely the one listed in an inventory and other such circumstantial evidence can be used to identify the figures in several.

It comes as some surprise that he wasn't quite perfect, that the Allegory of Faith is 'bad Vermeer' and the last two canvasses, Young Woman Seated at (and Standing at) Virginals aren't quite as good as The Art of Painting, which is accorded the status of the signature mastepiece, like Hamlet, here, and the earlier famous pieces. 

I'm glad to know that,

Vermeer went out of his way not to be caught drawing moral lessons,

because it is that avoiding of bad practice and element of free-standing ambivalence that makes art great and him so essential.

If Vermeer's Hat worked from the paintings outwards towards a big, wide C17th world that was being discovered, Vermeer, A View of Delft, does as much as can be done in the other direction, towards the man. Anthony Bailey won't necessarily have got everything right about him but he sets out the story, it is a very satisfying read, and we can take from it as much or as little as we feel able.