The Differences

 It's been music here recently. The website is called David Green Books but that has become a misnomer. But Sheffield Wednesday play on other days, too. It's an obvious thing to say that music isn't held back by words and thus in some ways seems able to do more than poems and stories. Painting, similarly, although they are both bound by their respective aural and visual limits and perhaps poems are of interest for the ways in which they can slip their surly bonds but you won't get a Ph. D. in Aesthetics for doing 100 thousand words extrapolated from that.

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I'm not in a bookish moment at the moment. Sport books don't often raise themselves to the condition of literature but, like the Larwood biography, Peter Oborne's Basil D'Oliveira is a story of high controversy and provides some insight into how the world was in some places at the time.

We very nearly didn't have the privilege of having heard of him, never mind getting his autograph at Worcester. Born in 1931, his test match debut for England was in 1966 and he only just got there in time without possibly the selectors knowing how old he was.

John Arlott comes out of the story with great credit, which can't be said of everyone involved.

There are similarities in the careers of Larwood and D'Oliveira in the ways they were treated by a sport ridden with such divisions but the difference might be that Larwood was saddened by his experiences in professional cricket whereas D'Oliveira heroically overcame his circumstances. Whereas Larwood's test career was over at 28, the D'Oliveira dynasty at Worcester continues to this day with Brett currently captain.

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There is a human trait that tends to be dissatisfied with things as they are that then complains even more when they are changed. I saw it in work plenty of times.

I know the audience of Radio 4 are well-known for any change to their schedule because they are a conservative lot and change necessarily means disruption. Perhaps I've become their Radio 3 counterpart, in counterpoint, suddenly lost and disorientated by the new arrangements. 

They benefitted from having me as a listener from earlier on Saturday mornings when Danny Baker was sacked for the final time by the BBC, from Radio 5, and I've hardly been back there since. But with Record Review now broken up and moved elsewhere, I'm not sure if the estimable Tom Service doing a weekend morning show is what I want and certainly Earlier with Jools Holland is well-intentioned but Astor Piazzolla is a poor attempt at eclecticism, on Thursday Essential Classics played the theme from Star Wars and Friday Night is Music Night is now on the wrong channel.

In the school summer holidays in the 1970's, Radio 3 played something C18th and I was prompted to imagine a formal garden like that set out in Winchester, sunlit and timeless and if it's possible to have so many radio stations on which one is guaranteed to get Dire Straits followed by Madonna followed by Huey Lewis & the News then one station centred on 'classical' music through the ages isn't much to expect and fits the BBC's allegedly non-commercial, Reithian remit.

But in the same way that there is no magazine beyond the Saturday Times that caters for me and so I write this for myself, so I might spend more time with the discs on the shelves and do my music for myself because there's a lot of them up there that don't get played and I must have bought them for a reason once upon a time.