All Things Must Pass and other stories

 Sometimes things are integral parts of our lives and then suddenly gone. I think it was when we scored 59/60 in a pub quiz that was the last time we did that, having in various combinations of players been doing them for several years. I don't think it was that there didn't seem any point anymore on account of the almost perfect game but there soon didn't seem any point anymore.

Radio 3 has gone the same way in recent months, once at least the day-time wireless of choice if not always the evening concert but they switched it all about, gave it Friday Night is Music Night, aimed themselves at some other demographic and then Record Review, This Week's Composer and The Early Music Show were on at different, less convenient times. Maybe I'm not one for change but change rarely seems to be for the better.

It is subtly life-changing when such things happen. Radio that I had assumed would always be there was taken away, most dramatically when the BBC sacked Danny Baker for the final time and Saturday mornings were drastically altered and Radio 5 disappeared from my schedule. Much further back, Sunday teatime and the Top 40, falling asleep to Brian Redhead and A Word in Edgeways or listening out for the most outlandish music I could find on the late night Sounds of the 70's fell away, I'm no longer as devoted to Bells on Sunday as I once was and Clue, despite Jack Dee's fine efforts, is back-filled with 'comedians' unworthy of the tradition.

Sic transit gloria mundi, one might say, as Time - our unconquerable enemy- wins again but Times Radio has been some sort of godsend, its appalling sports reports implying a contempt for the po-faced seriousness that 5Live apply to sport. After 5 years, though, the welcome losses of Michael Portillo, Amber Rudd and the Giles Coren show have not made up for those of Mariella Frostrup, Matt Chorley and the forthcoming onward progression of Aasmah Mia. It is only to be hoped that Stig Abell, John Pienaar and the Jane Garvey-Fi Glover double act stay now, stay another day.

The Listener magazine ceased long ago, the TLS isn't what it was, the Times on Saturday every so often loses something good that it had. There are no poetry magazines I've subscribed to for years now, perhaps because there's so little poetry worth having in them compared to the fin de C20th Poetry Review. It's a right old media misery memoir, isn't it except there must have been a reason for me collecting quite so many books and records. Perhaps it was so that I could read and listen to them. They are an archive, from the past which is a place where things were done differently. I'm not necessarily saying 'better' in every respect but one preserves those bits of it one liked to return to and so now one does and it's often at least as good if not better than how it was in the first place.

--

Wow, we saw some horses in the post-Christmas bonanza of racing, writes Racetrack Wiseguy. This week in the middle of the National Hunt season is like a symphony rising to a first climax before slowing again to build towards Cheltenham in March and its coda.

It's best if one knows in advance and is on, as I was with The New Lion today defying market moves but even if one's missed the boat, as I did with Sir Gino, one is left deeply impressed - perhaps even moved- by performances like those, brilliant in themselves and promising who knows how much more. 

I don't think Harry Skelton was too concerned about the betting market on The New Lion as he had good horses in behind, their jockeys flailing away, while he did little more than shake the reins on the horse he clearly had the utmost confidence in. While one has to watch a certain number of races in which one's selection starts to tread water and that sinking feeling of money going bookmaker-wards sets in, it is compensated for in races like that when confidence coming out of horse and jockey are like a blood transfusion and for those gorgeous moments everything feels wonderful.

The money's not the point, it's just a way of keeping score and making it matter, perhaps even 'proving oneself' if one is so querulous that one needs to do so. But even if 2024 didn't go entirely to plan, it showed the necessary plus and there's the required carry over to begin 2025 in good order.