Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Firstly, absolutely hats off to Tony Blackburn for this morning's Sounds of the 60's.

Cliff, Cilla, Dusty, Petula, Miss Ross, Auntie Dionne, the Walker Brothers, Glen Campbell sings Jimmy Webb and some upstarts with one of my first ever favourite records called Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, but that came after my very first which was Doris Day and Move Over Darling. And that is what pop radio can be like when it's not made dreary by Dire Straits, Coldplay, Radiohead. It was a masterpiece of broadcasting by the very doyen of the art.

-- 

While there is nearly always something missing these days, looking for those things can result in finding other things. Like looking for the print out list with my lost, last ISBN number resulted in me finding some old cassettes and, in turn, that reminded me that quite some time ago I did buy a machine that could play such things with such things in mind. So, a 1992 R3 programme with Thom Gunn interviewed and reading poems from The Man with Night Sweats had me bathed both in nostalgia and bathwater but while that was a fine thing, it's the August Kleinzahler programmes I almost want more so the dialectic between things lost and found continues like a Trotskyite manifesto.

--

Radio 3's change of schedule throws one's sedate life into turmoil like never before.

The final, once-and-for-all sacking of Danny Baker from Radio 5 changed Saturday mornings forever. Five lost its flagship and I've not been back there much since. 

Radio 3 won't lose me by moving Composer of the Week to 4pm but I won't hear Donald MacLeod's gentle tones as often as I have been doing, especially when he's doing Buxtehude, Pergolesi or Josquin des Prez rather than Bruckner, Wagner or Korngold. For a week or two I'll think it's 9am when it's actually 9.30 and Petroc hands over to Georgia but after that it will be the new normal.

--

29 runners in six races at Fontwell on Thursday was indicative of both heavy ground and a gaff track in decline but that doesn't make it a waste of time.

I was out with my mate, who went, the night before and advised that Mr. D. Maxwell was worth avoiding on a short-priced favourite whereas Gavin Sheehan in the bumper was worth a look if he was backed so that's a 4/7 chance shot down, a 100/30 winner tipped up and a self-proclaimed Wiseguy reputation intact.

--

The Joyceana project continues most satisfyingly with Kevin Birmingham's biography of Ulysses, The World's Most Dangerous Book (Head of Zeus). 

Made so much weightier by putting the difficult birth of the seminal book, the Moderrnist revolution is shown to be much more of a plot by dissident factions than the inevitable shift in sensibility or consciousness that hindsight has since seen it as.

Ezra and his committed sponsors worked long and hard under what look now such antiquated laws and attitudes and it didn't come quite as naturally as those Blair and Boris landslides seemed to.

Joyce's life was a nightmare of impecunious itinerancy and irresponsibility but he lived for his art, he

believed that marriage was the first step toward foisting upon their children the same nightmares of history and belief that they had traveled so far to escape. It was a coercive institution of property and power, and Nora's pregnancy made that coercion clear - the couple was forced to leave three different flats.

But rolling home drunk from bars having spent money he didn't have doesn't make him seem feckless in the light of the 'Oxen of the Sun' chapter costing him a thousand hours of work. Being a writer can't always be equated with being a layabout.

--

It can be for such a small-scale writer as me but not one in pursuit of such epic achievements as Ulysses.

I had more telling revelations, though, when happening across Dawn French in her one-person show entitled Dawn French is a T***, in which the forbidden word is a bit like, but isn't, 'twit'. I didn't watch it all. I didn't need to. I'd had enough of my own 'Me, Too' epiphany after half a dozen of her shudderingly cringe-making anecdotes.

Yes, Dawn, I know. I have maybe nearly sixty years of similar, if not worse, stories stored up and they take turns in their multitude to ambush me either when triggered by something or when brooding unhealthily on bygone days.

For some reason- necessity more than anything else I dare say- I spent most of my time thinking I was okay, mostly reasonably liked well enough, getting by as best I could within a vague agenda and while clearly out of my depth in some circles, cool enough to do okay in favourable conditions.

It comes as some small compensation to know that much-loved Dawn had her share of gauche moments, too, and that she can even monetize them. It's not Impostor Syndrome. I have that by the gallon as well whereas she shouldn't have. It's being found out as being utterly dreadful.

It is further, and almost as small, compensation to be sure that others were more conspicuously dreadful much more of the time and that we are betting without Boris and his like. But, but, but Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia had a chapter entitled 'The Stigma of Selfhood' and that, even thirty years or so ago, made a lot of sense.

How much does one sometimes wish not to have to be oneself. It is the ultimate prison. I might have once thought I'd rather have been George Best or Alex Higgins but they didn't seem to like it much. Cliff Richard or Paul McCartney are better options but one has less chance of being born as either of them than winning the big Premium Bond and landing the ITV7 in the same week so we are stuck with it.

Without wanting to sermonize too much on this most Christian of weekends, it's all about forgiveness, isn't it, and we should hope to be forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.