Cricket Wiseguy

 Maybe I'll extend the Wiseguy operation after assessing England's chances in the test match today at well odds on and so taking the even money at 12.30.

Not quite as wise, maybe, as taking 5/1 an hour or so later would have been but I didn't fancy them so much by then.

Today, the Test Match Special coverage, which is always great even if not much is happening, is a candidate for the Event of the Year but Malcolm Keeler, Portsmouth Baroque Choir and their Messiah need not worry. Listening to the wireless while flicking through computer screens to weigh up one's chances is a very artificial experience compared to being there.

 

The blowsy gratification of The Hundred that starts tomorrow at Trent Bridge can't, by definition, compete with days like today, matches like the fifth test and a whole five match series of them. It swung and swayed all the way through between two well-matched teams but I make my own decisions about who won and don't count the official result. England won that series, maybe not 3-2 but by about 2.7 to 2.3.

The thing about test cricket is the time involved. You don't have to hit the ball out of the ground every few minutes. A good delivery well defended is good cricket. A six in the Hundred isn't exciting, it's routine.

But Broady's record of 600 test wickets and 3000 runs, shared only with Shane Warne, is unlikely to have to be shared further because future players won't play as much test cricket. Whatever happens to circus cricket - the Parrots vs. the Pigeons, or whatever made-up teams are created to play it - it won't be going back to the 5 day game or anything like what happened when Hambledon used to play England.

Stuart Broad was never a big favourite of mine, certainly not compared to my own Golden Age of Derek Randall, Basil D'Oliviera, Michael Holding bowling to Brian Close, that unplayable West Indian side and a time when such all-rounders as Botham, Imran, Kapil Dev, Rice and Hadlee were all available. However, credit where it's due, notwithstanding some of the silly games he kept up until the end, fiddling with bails that weren't his to fiddle with, and the statistics are all in place, not least hitting the last ball he faced in test cricket for 6 but taking a wicket with his last ball, and the wicket before it, too.

Test cricket, like the 12 Hour in cycling, and maybe eventually all road time-trialling, might be in decline and not have such a glorious future to look forward to. That doesn't mean there's not plenty more to come from it or diminish all those things that have been done and, quite honestly, like those of us so pleased with ourselves that we had 60's and 70's pop music, some of us are beyond caring.

 

But, well played, the cricket. That was tremendous.

Being back in funds after minor weekend turf setbacks, we'll have a double on the first day of Goodwood tomorrow,

Array, 2.15

Courage Mon Ami, 4.35.

 

And P.S. The cricket statistics. Bill Frindall and his diligent pencils set a standard for a long time but what Andy Saltzmann can do with his computer is almost rocket science.

Did you know that Alec Stewart scored 8463 test runs and was born on 8.4.63.

  

Aitch and other stories

 I was taken by the important detail in Don Paterson's book, Smith, about Michael Donaghy, on the difference between 'aitch' and 'haitch'. I hadn't realized it was political or at least 'socio-cultural'. However, it's more or less, I think Catholic to say 'haitch' and Protestant to say 'aitch' at least in some places. 

I had always said 'aitch' because that's what we said in our house. I thought 'haitch' sounded childish but one feels pressure to fit in. On finding myself working with people who drank premium lager, having been more 'real' ale or at least bitter at university, I switched as readily as I did as I changed from disdaining the Human League's synthesizer pop to liking it, not least because I was buying more expensive drinks for others than they were buying for me, or modifying my Nottingham accent to incorporate elements of those of places I lived subsequently. Maybe some of us aren't as much who we are but what our circumstances and surroundings make us.

But, nearly 50 years on, with time to brood on things, the story of 'aitch' reminded me of an episode in school when, trying to conform to local orthodoxy, I said 'haitch' and the teacher corrected me. I knew what it was but I could hardly explain that I was only trying to sound like everybody else in the class. I burned with indignation, not unlike the times I mispronounced a word in a play by Brecht, pronounced 'liege' in a Shakespeare history play as if it was a place in Belgium because all I knew was a footbal team called Standard Liege and translated 'homme d'affaires', knowing full well it wasn't, as 'man of affairs' when I'd seen it coming but didn't have time to drag 'business man' from the outskirts of memory.

That's the least of it, really, but one little trigger can set of whole concatenations of long-nurtured sleights and injustice.

The Paying Guests has maintained its immaculate line in telling detail and various tensions which are what I re-read it for. It is a brilliant piece of sustained writing, hugely impressive and my admiration for it is undiminshed. But even in the few years since it appeared, things have moved on. I don't personally blame Keir Starmer for not knowing what a woman was although I'm told he's now made up his mind.

While political correctness was intended to be exactly what it says on the tin - correct - and 'woke' has now replaced it as a favourite target of right-wing intolerance, like so many good ideas, it gets out of hand in the wrong hands, even possibly those of feminist, all-round fine person, Sarah Waters.

I have an uneasy feeling throughout The Paying Guests that the baddies are all men and the goodies with who our sympathies lie are female. Not only that but that Leonard, the murder victim that we not encouraged to be attracted to, is gingery which makes him apparently less attractive than if he'd been, say, dark-haired. It's Sarah's story and it's a very compelling one but one wonders if the story was translated into characters of other gender or ethnic identities, say, if it would remain quite so powerful. I don't think it would but surely it ought to.

 

Omitted from the Top 6 Things it says here, below, were my chronic search for a proper 'big project' and the futility always felt not long into thinking it could be a novel. Writing a novel should by now be an ambition put aside as once and for all as opening the batting for England or writing a song that gets into the hit parade. Wanting to achieve something is no kind of place to start. Being able to do it is the place to start, wanting to comes next.

But maybe my version of C20th English Poetry in something like 10 x 5 5000 word essays is something into which I could put lots of the things I've said before, all tied up together and I'd have a 'big project' to put alongside the Collected Poems, Strange Fowl and other essays but never, I imagine, the pop music book and they could be produced as kindles once the facility to do so and the trepidation have been summoned.

The plan for the C20th book amounts to 77 words but several passages of it can be lifted from things already done. Let's hope that can stand as some sort of decision. I look forward to having a less disparate oeuvre in due course.  

Living without the letter 'a'

I thought it was a writer called Queneau who wrote a whole novel, I think, without using the letter 'e'. It looks like it was. I've looked it up. I'd imagine that's even harder to do in French than it is in English but, what's the point - see below under 'avant garde'.

But then I find that Georges Perec undertook a similar project and find that he looked as mad as Spike Milligan multiplied by Michael Bentine and so it figures.

But earlier this week I was without the use of the first letters on each line of the keyboard. One doesn't need q or z very often but one is left with the choice of cutting and pasting in a's every time one needs to, which is tiresome but you get used to it, or writing sentences like,

It isn't possible for me to use the second most occuring letter in English so I'm expressing myself here without it.

A new keyboard was only £11, arrived quickly and is not only immaculately clean but the most commonly used letters haven't worn off so it's great but I don't always feel like paying £4.50 delivery when I can spend that on some stuff and thus spend over £30 instead. It's only money. Whether it's false economy or not, I dunno.

Another shirt. I haven't even worn the last ones I bought yet. There's a very sad character towards the end of a Sebastian Faulks book, A Week in December, who stays up all night successfully playing the Hong Kong stock markets and as a result has a wardrobe full of  pristine, unworn white shirts for the sake of having them. I hope I'm not in any small way turning into him.

Maybe not. The other item arriving today with the boho chic attire was Tales from the Colony Room by Darren Coffield on the flimsy pretext that it's somehow about 'art'. 

The Gary Schwartz Rembrandt is much heavier on detail than a dilettante like me really needs but I'll plough through it in my own time. Then there's Caravaggio and Vasari. It's getting mighty crowded. Perhaps, by the autumn, I'll have read enough about painters and fall in love all over again with poems, as if it really could be better the second time around.

 

I doubt it but you just can't tell, can you. 

Top 6 - Things it says here

 You keep writing long enough and you will repeat yourself. Time and again, the longer you go on.

Caitlin Moran, Robert Crampton and Giles Coren have furnished the pages of the Saturday Times for as long as some of us can remember, it seems, and by now we might be excused for thinking we've heard it all before. Caitlin still has her moments, Robert is clearly an okay sort of bloke but Giles is transparently struggling to pad out the requisite word count when he yet again resorts to an unfunny 'listicle' which is what they call one of those items that begins with a passable idea and then offers less and less convincing variations on it until the space is full of words, like those less gifted writers in junior school who, when asked for two sides, wrote in their largest handwriting, managed to get onto page 2 and then wrote THE END in huge letters.

I know what it's like. None of us are a bottomless well of inspiration. One of my lesser used ideas not repeated often enough to quite make the list below is that poets are 'mature' by the age of 30 and start repeating themselves after they reach 60. It is such a theoretical theory that I'm not even going to name one example as evidence of it.

But, for anybody who's been a regular visitor here over the years - and thank you for being there if you have - they must be becoming aware of certain 'set pieces' like I am. I am because I'm aware of having written it. The music reviews recycle the same 35 or so adjectives. I know. I've made a spreadsheet of them. I am reviewing the situation regarding the reviewing of concerts when they resume in September but it can't go on like that. By now, Artificial Intelligence should be able to produce the DGBooks concert review.

These might not be statistically the proven Top 6 Things it says here but they are six that come readily to mind.

There is no manifesto. That is the manifesto, mainly with respect to poetry but further afield, too. There are no rules. By all means go with whatever rules you want but voluntarily undertaken rules aren't rules, they are 'form'. 

Which leads to all you have to be is any good, unashamedly lifted verbatim from Danny Baker. 

And a thoroughgoing scepticism about anything purporting to be avant garde. No, every generation has some. They think they're the first to re-invent it all but the mainstream is a more inclusive tradition than they think.

Larkin's An Arundel Tomb goes to great lengths to undermine its famous last line. If I learnt one thing at University- and I didn't learn much - it was to read the whole poem and not help myself to certain lines in isolation from the others.

 

Boris Johnson was a compulsive liar, vanity project and completely unfit for office and we knew that many years before he was ever in a position to be a candidate for leadership of the Conservative Party, with Prime Minister attached.

 

What I know about 'rock' music comes from the early 70's in the first years of being a teenager. I soon saw through the posturing designed to sell its machismo to impressionable white boys, though, and spent 1974 listening to Beethoven and Shostakovich. I returned to pop music via Al Green's Greatest Hits, Tamla Motown and Bob Marley's Exodus about 47 years ago. The other gang at school had been right and I and my mates had been wrong. I remember John Peel being quoted as saying a similar thing about Tony Blackburn. I never tire of saying it about Cliff Richard.

I love saying they were right and I was wrong.  

Racetrack Wiseguy

 Following last week's win in the Irish Oaks by Savethelastdance after Tony Blackburn had played the Drifters record on Sounds of the 60's, I've been through tomorrow's racing for a 60's record to request to see if we can repeat the trick. There are stacks of pop-related horses but sadly no titles from the period Tony covers.

There's Fresh by Kool & the Gang, Beast of Burden by the Stones and there's Chairmanoftheboard. With not much doing with serious investment potential, we might have some loose change in a mindlessly optimistic combination of some of them.

However, having looked, it's hard not to notice the 4.35 at York. We do need to get the favourite beat, Mark Prescott's Golden Shot, but one can hardly ignore the 60's pairing of Baez and Zimmerman for a reverse forecast. They were close together and to the forefront of 60's music so maybe they will be again at York tomorrow.

Such chancy foolishness will almost certainly cost me a couple of quid but that can be recouped by betting more scientifically in due course. In the meantime, maybe for once I'll have the sort of daft bet the bookies want me to have. They are good to me after all.

There's a Place for Us

 ...somewhere, a place for us.

I might have found it on the number 55 bus route from Chichester to Tangmere today,

 

Boxgrove Priory and Gwen John

I had a day out, making use of the £2 bus fares to visit Boxgrove Priory, of which I'd been only vaguely aware until being invited to a concert there that I probably can't go to but it looked worth investigating even without a choir in it. There's two of them, really. There's one of the ruins that Henry knocked about a lot and a newer one, notwithstanding my most favourite theme for a photo, a cemetery full of mostly time-worn and weather-beaten headstones that no longer record the names of those they were made to commemorate.

Inside, the organ was being maintained by a young organ builder and it's not every day you meet one of them. 

Idyllic, and modest, hidden away off the beaten track, it's hardly Wells Cathedral but if Wells is a big, strapping Beethoven symphony, Boxgrove is a tidy little miniature by Chopin in a village that presumably knows it's gorgeous but seems to go about its business like Camberwick Green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 With time on my side, changing bus at Chichester, it was convenient to include the Gwen John exhibition at Pallant House, especially as this summer has found itself nominated as a deeper excursion into painting.

It was a surprise to find that the Corner of a Room in Paris is only about 10"x7", having become so accustomed to it at 19x16 in a print that came free with the Sunday paper many years ago that had been in the front room but now furnishes a corner of the new, blue room. Reproductions should really reproduce the scale of the original because the artist must have had their reasons but, no, we wants pictures to be the right dimensions for us and not how big or small they made them.

Gwen is more austere and muted than her brother, Augustus, and in a well thought-out show, comparisons were readily available with Whistler, who we might see as her most significant reference point if not mentor, Rodin and Sickert. But the highlight for me was the side-by-side, intertextual connection with Hammershøi. At first, from a distance, I thought, blimey, that one's a lot like Hammershøi, only to find that's exactly what it was when close enough to read the label. So there's not much wrong with what I know about the art I know about, it's just most of those written up by Vasari that I'm not so sure about.

It was busy in there considering it's been on for a while now. I don't know where so many discerning, vaguely bohemian types can come from. They don't live round my way. It wasn't because it's the first week of the school holidays because there were no children in there. Boxgrove Priory and Pallant House are places one can go to hide from them.

But one has to reserve top markings and superlatives for the likes of the recent Messiah because if one reports everything as being unbelieveably tremendous there's nothing left to say when something is even better.

Gwen John was a fine painter, quiet but not quite as quiet as Hammershøi. She belongs with Whistler more than she does with her brother. We are offered a few by Vuillard, by way of contrast, it seems to me. I'd rather have had more versions of the room in Paris aspiring to abstraction, of which there are a few - window open, window closed, it makes all the difference - than four versions of some of the same restrained portraits.

 

One has to be strict and not dish out Grade A's all over the place like an examiner who's been told to make it look as if the education system is working. It's an 8 or maybe 9/10 exhibition about a 7/10 painter, on a scale on which you need to be Vilhelm Hammershøi or Maggi Hambling to get an 8.

These are all very convincing poems but that is easier for them to do than it is for poetry whose words are expected to say what they mean.

 

Until October 8th.