Top 6 - Pop Songwriters

 Prompted by the thought, below, that Smokey Robinson is clearly one of them - for The Tracks of My Tears, A Heart like Mine and all that first Miracles album, The Tears of a Clown.

One of the more modest things that Bob Dylan ever did was say that Smokey was the real poet. Somehow capable of sounding both joyous and forlorn at the same time, he is gracious enough in defeat when betting Berry Gordy that Marvin Gaye did I Heard It Through the Grapevine before Gladys Knight when he didn't.

It would make for an easy job here just to list all the Motown songwriters and it wouldn't be too far wrong, it just might look a bit partisan but Holland-Dozier-Holland are essential for all that they did for the Supremes, continuing beyond Motown with Band of Gold but having been, as I understand it, a production line within the Hit Factory with one doing words, one music and one arrangements, more or less. Profound purists might prefer the troubadour types who authentically sang songs they wrote themselves over their own chords on acoustic guitar or piano but it doesn't have to be like that. All one wants is a good record however it is contrived.

Before going any further, Stephin Merritt's agonizingly dark songs of romance come from a recipe of his own with a pop sensibility undermined by ironies that make them art without us concerning ourselves about sincerity.

And, thus, Burt Bacharach whose work gave Cilla and Dionne their timeless masterpieces until one finds that he wrote much of the 60's soundtrack that didn't come from the Beatles or Detroit. Anyone Who Had a Heart, Walk On By, I Say a Little Prayer and even up to On My Own by Patti Labelle with Michael MacDonald straining to keep up.

It's been all blokes so far and although it's not impossible that songwriting comes as part of the male DNA, it's equally likely that the top jobs in the Golden Age of pop music were taken up by men as some sort of droit de seigneur. One of Burt's marriages was to Carole Bayer Sager and it comes as some surprise that what could have been quite a competitive relationship lasted nine years. While not really allowed by the rules of the game to mention near misses, Joni Mitchell is under serious consideration as I write but it almost does her a disservice to call her 'pop'. A Case of You almost gets her in on its own and Dory Previn is special, not revisited enough for many years. But the answer is Carole King who, having dealt with with Neil Sedaka in Oh, Neil, and a similar nine-year stretch with a songwriting husband, went on to write her Tapestry album, Oh, No, Not My Baby, One Fine Day and, yes, sometimes I also 'stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time'.

And so, we arrive in this situation every time. Five places thrown away like confetti but to those you can't take it back from. And Odyssey If You're Looking for a Way Out is on the wireless - Stop, stop pretending, it must be whoever wrote that, especially if they wrote the other Odyssey masterpieces.

I'm not having Lennon-McCartney who don't belong on the same list of poets as those above. Not Jagger-Richards, either, who did good work but most of which was posturing. I'd love it to be George Michael, it is Gregory Isaacs if measured by how many of his records I ever bought and, depending on how much Al Green wrote of his best songs it could be him.

It's a dubious business, song writing credits. Wasn't there a story that Col. Tom Parker inserted himself as co-author of Elvis B sides, that got the same royalty as the hit A side.

No, it's not his fault that he chose such a tremendous song to do a version of that his best track wasn't one he wrote himself when he did Wild is the Wind on Station to Station.  

It's obviously David Bowie, more talented than all the Beatles put together, notwithstanding that they all outstayed their welcome but you can't take away from them what was safely on the record, as it were. 

Music, Silence, Invisible Football and the Mathematical Impossibility of Coincidence

 In the end, I didn't wish Rose Tremain's Music & Silence any longer. Beautifully written, sustaining its faux C17th manner and surely the richest of her books that I've read so far, I still came away wondering if it needed to be all of its 450 pages. Not that I can say which bits of it should be edited out to reduce it and perhaps it was all necessary to its many overlapping themes. 

Whereas I find that some characters tend towards music, others prefer silence. Peter Claire is the gorgeous lutenist employed by Christian IV of Denmark where the real, more famous John Dowland gets a bad press. Kirsten, the second wife of the king, can't stand music. Claire is separated from her maid, Emilia, by court manoeuvres. The dirty business of ambition and politics tears apart what one would like to think could be an ideal world of sublime music and love. It is significant that as Claire is sold back to England and Charles I for an exorbitant amount that will fund several failing projects in Denmark, the novel ends not on any happier denouement than Kirsten's 'confusion' and distemper.

I end up about 92% convinced by it. Perhaps it is slightly too ambitious or maybe it was me that was too ambitious, thinking I'd 'get' it in all its complexities in one go. I suspect it's brilliant. But, rather than expect to much of Rose Tremain by going to the next- different again- Rose Tremain novel found in Chichester Oxfam in the week, I'll save that.

Maybe it's time for the Proust biography, hoping it will bring back A la recherche which, when I read it six years ago in lockdown, I credited as the greatest novel of all time but which now, a failing memory being more of a frustration than an actual handicap, I can't bring to mind in any detail.

--

I don't watch much football these days. I look at the scores sometimes and know roughly where the teams I retain any vestigial allegiance to are in the league. But since Notts County were on telly, I thought I'd have a look and stuck with it, probably staying with it for longer than I would have if we could have seen what was happening.

How absurd to only watch something when you can't see it. 

--

But, in some odd sort of compensation, I was at a bus stop on Thursday evening alongside an actor who is playing Charles Dickens in the New Theatre Royal tomorrow night so, okay then, let's give that a go. 

Also one of the Southsea Shakespeare Actors, Tim and I had plenty to share about the authorship question, Shakespeare biography and Brexit. This is a personal best Remarkable Bus Ride to put alongside the train journey back from London earlier this year when I found myself sitting opposite Sara Deborah, the violinist I'd written about only a couple of weeks earlier. 

I don't really believe in coincidences. They are mathematically inevitable. And, anyway, it appears that public transport is packed out with artspersons of interest.

--

Achieving the 1000 tracks at DGBooks Radio is still some way off but rather than trawl through Bowie, Al Green, The Magnetic Fields and all in search of the next best things not yet on there, thanks to Tony Blackburn for playing Mary Wells. I didn't know about that. It goes straight in.

 

If that's not Smokey Robinson, nothing is. I feel Top 6 Pop Songwriters coming on. I only need five others.  

Connor Heraghty in Chichester

 Connor Heraghty, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 2

Radio 3 Unwind and Classic FM's Calm Classics of a late evening offer nothing but such pieces as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, first movement. It might not have been how he intended his Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, to be commodified, though. It's a tremendous piece of music, so popular in its day that it began to annoy him, but it was a prelude to further music without which - to risk being overly fastidious- it isn't complete. 

In the 1970's I heard the most radical interpretation of the piece ever with the craziest tempi. And then I realized my mother had played the LP at 45rpm when putting it onto the cassette. Gladly, Connor Heraghty's approach was more orthodox, its scintillating beauty suspending the cathedral audience in its spell. Some restraint was carried forward into the Allegretto before the rolling urgency of the Presto. 

But today's unique selling point was the visual presentation of artwork by the Brazilian artist, Elizabeth Dorazio, on the big screen, Everything is an Illusion. The monochrome mysteries that had accompanied the early parts of the sonata gave way to planets, maps and terrain seen from above. Some might say 'thought provoking' but then they would need to say what thoughts had been provoked. Many things to many different people, probably, and it can be a good idea not to interpret 'modern art' too specifically.

Connor had begun with the bright colours of Impressões seresteiras by Villa-Lobos with equally vibrant plant life art that invited comparison with Frida Kahlo, its abundance likely to have come from the rainforest.

Two Preludes by Rachmaninov were different again, and from each other. Op. 23 no. 4 was a lush adagio while an installation of a vast waterfall canvas was erected in the rainforest nearby super-imposed ruined cathedral architecture and then Op. 3 no. 2 was sombre and more desolate but becoming more imposing over some more dense foliage. Whether there were insects to be seen in these leaves might have depended on one's imagination or capacity for voluntary hallucination.

Cláudio Santoro's music will be investigated further with some priority after the two Prelúdio in which the pale light provided an almost uncanny prelude to Erik Satie's haunted Gnoissienne no. 1. Delicately modulated by Connor's immaculate intonation, it showed what the Chichester Yamaha is capable of because I'm not sure all pianos could do that. The hushed wonder and disquiet, ending with pictures of galaxies and deep space, made for possibly the most memorable three minutes of music I've heard this year having begun with the advantage of being a favourite piece of mine for fifty years.

To finish, the visuals were sub-aquatic - coral reefs and exotic fish- with Debussy's L'isle joyeuse from the Modernist part of his oeuvre, densely rhythmic almost to the point of becoming arrhythmic to make for a vivid finale.

Such abundance is initially difficult to assimilate into themes and meanings but one might begin to risk an interpretation by taking on that very idea. Perhaps one part of what it meant was to contemplate that richness of life on earth in its tiny place in the universe and thus be  led to ecological and environmental concerns, which are major enough and crucial, but it would be too narrow to say that's what it was all about. It could mean what you want it to mean without being shackled to one commentary so after all that, and having had it pointed out that Everything is an Illusion, I'm not saying anything beyond that it will stay in the memory and if you ever see this show advertised anywhere that you can get to you should go.   

Top 6 - Douglas Dunn

The loss of Douglas Dunn further reduces my list of living poets to follow. I'm not saying there aren't any young talents out there worth having but I don't know who they are and I'm not sure that they 'do' poetry like they used to when there was plenty to be had, like in the 1990's.

For one as highly respected as Dunn, it came as a bit of a surprise that my little recap of his books revealed an obvious standout poem for me when one might expect several to be difficult to pick between. The People Before is among the most admirable poems by anybody of his generation, atmospheric, evocative and genuinely doing things with the language. If Terry Street, his first book, and Elegies, his best known, are given more attention, it is in Northlight, in 1988, that he was at his best. Terry Street must have been a striking debut but I can't help but find in it some traces of Larkin's attitude towards a 'cut-price crowd'. If the Young Women in Rollers mock his taste for Mozart and the third programme they are only giving as good as they get.

Love-making by Candlelight is another that puts domesticity and emotional attachment into a longer, historical perspective quite beautifully. The River Through the City is a sinister impression of dark implications that would also belong in any anthology of its period. 

After which one remembers how much Re-reading Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss and Other Stories' was to be admired at the time, or when I first saw it not very much later, and it has retained its disarming charm. Quite why that didn't make it into the Selected Poems 1964-1983 would be for that book's editors to explain.

Reading Pascal in the Lowlands, which did, is full of undisclosed empathy for a stranger's similar but different loss to that that is central to Elegies. 

It became almost a convention in this Top 6 feature that, when faced with any number of candidates for the last available place, I'd choose a sort of 'wild card' that might not be a more obvious choice. Sandra's Mobile is no frivolous encore piece, though. It's in for its last line which I'm sure was published before I tried the same formula that I'd seen Simon Armitage use. Whether Douglas took the idea from anyone before him, I don't know. 

Six is a demanding limit for a list of anything of any depth and it's unlikely that many readers would have the same half dozen as me. It was always a rule- sometimes broken- that only six things should be mentioned and near misses couldn't be smuggled in by devious means or legerdemain.

-- 

By all means, let's open it all up again- it's never been closed- and ask if anybody else would like to contribute a Top 6. Of absolutely anything. Places, sports people, television, maybe scientists. But tracks by Queen, golfers, meat or wars might struggle to gain acceptance. If you don't know me by now, you will never, never, never know me.  

Wittgenstein 3 and other stories

 Education doesn't stop when one finishes school or university. By now I almost think that's when it starts and one can spend the rest of one's life undoing the damage of what one's been taught. I'm not being all Marxist or independent in thinking that. The Marxists and free-thinkers at my low grade university were as hidebound, restricted and formulaic in their thinking as were the royalists, Tories and traditionalists at my grammar school.

I got to the end of Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein last week. A paragon example of the genre with what seems exactly the right amount of detail, of balance between the life and the work and vividly conveying all their difficulties. The portrait on the cover is of a disturbed man, possibly on the brink of madness, whose intellect was apparently so far beyond that of the next best that it made no sense to them.

The book changed my view of Wittgenstein from that of a potential hero whose philosophy had realized that philosophy reduced everything to word games because language is something we are trapped in to someone who thought there must be something beyond all that fiddle and, throughout it all, relied on God and religion.

All the long, transient years of discussion and writing and forever revising that writing, coming from the mathematics of Frege, logic, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, led him only to despair - being already from a family of suicides- and while his life is a gripping story and he clearly could be an engaging personality in the right company, he's nothing like a hero to me any more.   

Sartre had his moments but got it wrong. I will always want to think that Derrida's demolition of almost everything we ever thought had possibilities. I'd say Camus was my preferred philosopher except that was about his fourth job and I'd rather have him among my very favourite novelists.

Philosophy is bad for you. Endlessly endless. The glimpses I've had of it make me think the chimera of glamour that can be caused by music, poetry and painting at their best is the best we can do.

I could have proceeded to the biography of Proust I found in Chichester Oxfam but maybe I've learnt from Joe Bugner's example and don't want to go in with top class heavyweights one after the other. So I returned to Rose Tremain and Music & Silence, different again from the others of hers I've read but just as equally a beautiful thing. One can enjoy the writing without knowing where the various threads are going to lead us but one has reason to hope it might be a better place than where Wittgenstein's intensity led him to.

In four of her books now, Rose Tremain has been a pleasure to read, just for the sake of reading. They are four apparently quite different books but similar in the way the get inside 'love' and the way it consumes those who find it in a high-grade iteration. There are also the obstacles to it which are either circumstances or other people and it often needs to be clandestine or something apart from conventionally recognized relationships.

Set in 1629-30, in the reign of Christian IV of Denmark, one needs some idea of how much is true and how much fiction in historical novels. It is a bit unsatisfactory, at least in theory, but when it makes for such good writing that reservation diminishes to almost nothing. There's a whole lot more Tremain to go and I will be back in the market for some of it because it looks as if she belongs in the top echelon of contemporary novelists and, so far so good, she's done nothing but impress so far.

Chichester Symphony Orchestra in Chichester

 Chichester Symphony Orchestra with Tim Rumsey, Chichester Cathedral, October 27

So, where would we place Camille Saint-Saëns in the great panoply of Western Classical Music, should we ever feel the need? Perhaps not quite in the Premiership alongside Bach, Mozart and Beethoven but playing attractively in the next division with his Carnival of the Animals, Danse Macabre and the distinction of being one of those composers who found himself recycled into a pop song in the hit parade- If I Had Words by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley that plundered the Organ Symphony.

Tuneful, then, and possibly more like somebody from a generation earlier than his closer contemporaries because, living until 1921, music had moved on a bit by then if not always for the better. 

The CSO and Tim Rumsey have appeared separately and together in the cathedral's lunchtime series and it's good to see the partnership continue. The Piano Concerto no. 5, op. 103, began by mixing twinkling piano with lushness on both the keys and from the orchestra before the Allegro Animato became more involved and emotional. The grand gestures that opened the Andante second movement went via a smoother melodic line that was passed from the strings, through the piano to oboe before some more unsettling, disquieting feelings that might have been wintry but could equally have described the shifting sands that make the concerto 'Egyptian'. Like the first, though, it was to thaw, melt and resolve itself into a dew. But the Allegro finale did nothing of the sort.

 

My homework beforehand had found Saint-Saëns compared with Liszt which was a comparison I wouldn't have made. But I can hear it now. Tim had only been warming up with various bits of dazzle, it transpired. Let loose on the spectacular ending, the overflowing, powerful surge with the fullness of sound from a CSO that turned up with reinforcements, approached the thrilling, diabolic excess that is properly Lisztian. All vim and blitz, it brought some of the audience to their feet and left me surprised and somewhat the wiser that the composer of that serenely gliding swan music could also do that.

Few would dispute Schubert's Premiership status, who once had Radio 3 devote a week to playing all his music. The portentous brass and timpani that opened the Rosamunde Overture gave way to some of his signature lightness of touch in the strings and woodwind but an overture is a sort of wake-up call anticipating a story to come. Thus the orchestra raised some rousing tempi before the long, built-up sort of climax that Beethoven wouldn't have been ashamed of.

It's always a bonus when you're not told what an encore is because you can have a quiz. If Tim's jazzy extra hadn't been Gershwin I'd have eaten my hat. It was called Let's Kiss and Make Up and I'm not due at the trilby shop tomorrow.

Melanie White in the Menuhin Room

 Melanie White, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Oct 24

While we all know what a flute is and what it does, how many pieces for it can some of us non-flautists think of? L'après-midi d'un faune, another chance to mention Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase and some Suites by Bach. I must try harder. Gladly, Melanie White had some pieces to introduce us to. We shall not live by piano and violin alone.

I had been betting without Annie's Song, not having been aware the programme was in celebration of James Galway but not thinking of John Denver as part of the 'classical' canon either. Karen Kingsley's immense contribution to local music continued with her rippling piano accompaniment to a tune that seemed to be everywhere in the 1970's. After that the show mixed in further 'easier' listening with more technically challenging pieces.

The Concertino by Chaminade included soaring heights in its mercurial changes with some post cadenza lyricism leading to a flamboyant finish.

Gluck's Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo ed Euridice was one I should have thought of and was a welcome reminder of a great composer not often heard in lunchtime affairs because they are not usually opera but its pacific classicism provided a prompt to put his music on the CD machine again soon.

The 'big ticket' item was Reinecke's Undine Sonata, a highly involved drama with an onrush of emotion in its third movement and Karen very much an equal partner rather than a supporting role. Again, there was counterpoint to be had between the two instruments in the traditional Spanish Love Song in which the love was mostly a solitary longing.

But, having thought the Gluck would stand as my highlight, along came Il pastore svizzero by Francesco Morlacchi, a theme and variations of open air gaiety and circus acrobatics in both woodwind and piano parts. You can never quite tell which bits will turn out most successfully but this stole in and stole the show at the same time.

Referring back to James Galway - and how many other musicians played both in the Berlin Philharmonic and on Top of the Pops, the finale had to be Danny Boy. If I'm not sure how much I like Annie's Song, the unadorned, moving simplicity of that fine composer, Trad's, eternal composition is one that never fails to convince.

Melanie said she had received any number of suggestions from fellow flautists when wondering what she might play. Those that she selected provided a rich and varied insight into what her instrument is capable of. It is still necessarily best at doing its floaty, lightsome thing but there is more to it than that.  

For One Night Only

Good Evening, Bedhampton. 

 

This evening I report from the joint reading of poets from the Chichester and Portsmouth groups that took place in the elegant surroundings of the Waterloo Room in the Elms.

Well organized and timed to perfection, there was as much rain in the poems indoors as there was in the weather outdoors and plenty of memorials to relations, some accomplished readings, music, cake, hot drinks and wine. 

No wine for me, of course- not while I'm on duty. There's enough can go awry trying to remember what to say to an audience without confusing the issue with Merlot.

Being on last either means one is the last hope, like a no. 11 batter, or top of the bill like Ken Dodd on The Good Old Days or Oasis at Glastonbury. It's hard to tell and it's even harder to tell if one was any good. The set list was - Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller, Rainyday Woman. The audience were kind and not as fearsome and unreceptive as one's worst imaginings had anticipated. I got on, one or two of the attempted funny bits got a bit of reaction, Windy Miller made me feel emotional when really one objective of art is to make that happen to those listening and I got off in one piece. I didn't mess up and that was the height of my ambition and now the sense of relief is almost glorious.

I don't have to do it again. Any further performances can stay on the page.

An afternoon of Romantic Russian chamber music in Petersfield

Valentina Seferinova, Anna and Mikhail Lezdkan, St. Peter's, Petersfield, Oct 18 

This week's family affair concerts were completed by father and daughter Mikhail and Anna Lezdkan, cello and violin, with Valentina Seferinova, piano, playing C19th and C20th Russian music from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich.

The first half was Valentina and Mikhail with a solemn Andante Cantabile by Tchaikovsky, two pieces by Glazunov including the lithe Spanish Serenade, the exotic Orientale by Cui but most memorably the two fastest cello parts I've ever heard, from Mikhail. Seeing Rimsky-Korsakov's famous Flight of the Bumblebee on the programme I'd assumed it would be Valentina providing the fireworks but I've been wrong before and she provided the convivial romp of his Serenade op. 37 after Mikhail's dazzling performance made his cello do things I've not heard any other do. I know John Adams wrote something called A Short Ride in a Fast Machine but that was made to look like a Model T Ford in comparison. 

The first half ended with more Tchaikovsky, the Pezzo Capricciosio, which became capricious when changing from sonorous to dizzy but I don't think the speed record set by the bumblebee was quite equalled.

Valentina opened the second half with Rachmaninov's Barcarolle, op. 10, which, if you wanted it to, could have conjured a night éclaboussé des étoiles, a memorable phrase from Gide at 'A' level that has finally come in useful, meaning 'bespangled with stars'. And then Anna made her belated appearance and made it worth our wait, joining Mikhail for what was for me the find of the day in Glière's 8 Pieces for violin and cello, op. 39. From the sepulchral Prelude, through the retro baroque of the Gavotte, the enchanting Berceuse through to the rapid Etude, it proved that Glière must be a composer I need to know more about and that, not having seen Anna before, it is to be hoped she is available for more appearances in the area to bring us more of her poise, confidence and great talent.

But all that having been said, Shostakovich - for me- could pick up all those composers and carry them. That he wrote his op. 8 Piano Trio aged 16 is hard to fathom. Written not long after The Waste Land, it does all that Eliot's desiccated literariness might have wanted to achieve but, with the obvious advantage of music being better than poetry, does it infinitely more convincingly. Its barren beauty with the St. Peter's piano standing up well to Valentina's immense power and drama was both emotionally and aesthetically enthralling. I'm sure I've not heard either Valentina or Mikhail to such great effect before and then you multiply them by Anna and they are suddenly in danger of having provided the best performance I've seen this year.

It's been tremendous to see two events in two days so well supported in Petersfield. It shouldn't be surprising given the high quality of the musicians that have appeared but music is in the best of health there. We should all be glad and I'm sure all those who went on either day or both will be.

Duo Timossi in Petersfield

 Duo Timossi, St. Peter's, Petersfield, October 17

It being nearly two hundred years since Beethoven died and exactly a plentiful number of years since I was born, Sara Deborah and Alessandro Timossi's first instalment of their Violin Sonata cycle began to mark the first while inadvertently contributing to the happy occasion of the second. Petersfield has major Beethoven things lined up for 2027 and thus need to bring this part of them forward by way of a prelude to fit it all in.

The reason for beginning the series with nos. 4 and 5 is possibly that nos. 1-3 are no good. Not 'no good' by most terrestrial standards, of course, but some say not quite as good as Beethoven usually is, those being early work. It's a bit like saying some late Vermeer is only relatively 'workmanlike' when it can give most paintings and head start and still leave them behind. 

Op. 23's Presto is impetuous with Alessandro's piano on the verge of becoming stormy. The Andante is daintier and good humoured, maybe owing something to Haydn, and the Allegro featured an industrious piano part with Sara's violin aspiring to more rarefied air before they combined in a bravura climax. All of which was hugely to be enjoyed until, after an interval, op. 24 was something else again.

The optimism of the Allegro seemed to have an affinity with Sara's natural way of playing, the carefree melody leading into dance-like passages. Her excellent programme notes provide more than enough material for me to just lift parts out them out and give myself a day off so I will make use of how the Adagio hovers 'between Sehnsucht and hope' and be grateful to have learned the German for 'longing'. In the Scherzo, her violin was a fraction of a beat behind the piano, making for some engaging effect. I'm guessing that's not as easy to do as playing in strict unison, almost like getting it wrong deliberately, but it was only one more part of the technique of one of the top echelon of musicians in the catchment area I regard as my own. The gaiety of the Rondo finale was a joyous thing. The Spring Sonata, as it is known, is one of the many not given its name by Beethoven. While I'm sure it is meant to refer to the coming alive of the Spring season, an alternative interpretation could be that it's a reference to the energetic uncoiling of a spring, for those of us who enjoy artworks that can mean more than one thing at a time, and the whole concert was a great advertisement for the rest of the series in which I intend to collect the whole set.

Piano à Deux (Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley) at Chichester

 Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley, Chichester Cathedral, October 13

Autumn has properly arrived and with it comes three concerts in the diary this week, all family affairs which is a rare alignment.

The Stoodleys come with a complete show including shared commentary and even some choreography. First, though were two Brahms Hungarian Dances - no.5 rollicking and, I'd say, jokey and no.6 with further mood swings.

Some pieces are by now hard to separate from the uses they were put to long after their composers left them to us. Frank Muir made The Nutcracker Suite into Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase and Bach found himself the author of an advert for cigars after the Berceuse from Fauré's Dolly Suite became, for some of a certain vintage, the comforting memory of Listen with Mother on the Home Service. Robert and Linda perhaps carried forward some of their Hungarian energy into their tempo which could have been dreamier because they didn't slumber through it. Mi-a-ou, as was explained, was not as feline as one might have anticipated because that's not what it's about, and then the rhapsodic onrush of Le pas espagnol in some ways anticipated Rachmaninov.

Robert and Linda's arrangements of seven songs from his op. 21 were presented in three sections, the bigger canvas of Melody running into the enchantment of Loneliness after Linda got up, nipped round the back and took up the right-hand stool while Robert moved to his left while transposing into the second piece, a neat manoeuvre I'd not seen before but  saw more than once today. Then, Lilacs was a thing of some delicacy, The Ratcatcher had the merest suspicion of Scott Joplin and Spring Waters was a cascading downpour. Rachmaninov somehow always manages to convince either in spite of, or by doing something more than, the Romantic excess that he could otherwise be thought guilty of. To finish, the lushness of How Fair This Spot led up to the climax with What Wealth of Rapture, with a big clue in its title, and with Linda leaving Robert solo to the last few bars of a very amicable, impressive, well-rehearsed set.   

It's been a while since I did Chichester, the summer being such an inconvenience, so it's good to get back towards the old routine. 

Wittgenstein, 2

 There's not a great deal of point reading a book one doesn't understand and my copy of the Tractatus is purely decorative but, as hoped, Ray Monk's biography does a fine job of explaining as much of Wittgenstein as I'm ever likely to grasp. 

It brings with it some big surprises, not least the Christianity. For someone devoted to logic and equations, coming from an interest in mathematics, God seems like an unlikely conclusion to arrive at. For all his deep, deep thought and austerity, it is disappointing to find him relying on mysticism and using certain words to mean specifically what he wants them to mean, rather what is more widely understood by them, seems like a big abdication of responsibility if not a letdown from someone who, I had thought, was better than that.

Wittgenstein was an Idealist, where ideas come before things. I simply can't see how that can be. Plato was an Idealist, Aristotle a Realist. It seems to me an Idealist is the more likely to get locked into their own thinking. If reading this book results in Wittgenstein going down in my estimation, as a philosopher, I'm glad to find that Derrida was only mistakenly seen as an Idealist but,

In reality, Derrida meant that our access to the world is always mediated by systems of signs, traces, and differences, making a pure, unmediated "view from nowhere" impossible. 

I am indebted to Google's AI summary for that and am grateful. While a small part of my paltry B.A. (Hons) was in Philosophy, I'm not up to it.

But I am glad to be making some trivial sense of it all and the biography has edged out The Anatomy of Melancholy in this heavyweight contest for my attentions. To think of Wittgenstein teaching in primary schools in rural Austria is remarkable. He meets his one and only known girlfriend in his mid-thirties. He could have had access to great family wealth but disdained it for reasons that Ray Monk suggests come from his difficult upbringing. Three of his brothers commit suicide and it is an idea that recurs to him at regular intervals. Whether one is interested in Philosophy or not, it is a remarkable life to read but, as with so many 'genius' types, not a happy one.

Roughly halfway through the book, I'm keen to press on towards the ending, knowing that he changed his mind, like so many of us do. That bleak, haunted look says much about the downside of the sort of intellect that makes almost everybody else struggle and so I'm wondering if any change of mind brought him back from the brink of madness because if you are that clever and yet still have to rely on mysticism, your own definitions of words and if you look mad, act mad and even the finest minds can't understand you, that could be what you are. I don't want to think that. I want him to escape the prison of his tautologies and dubious ways of escaping meaninglessness. As such, it is quite an exciting book. 

Wittgenstein

 122 pages, of nearly 600, and the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein is a thoroughly worthwhile read. That comes as a pleasant surprise when I had anticipated heavy going and impenetrable passages of epistemology. So far so good with how Ray Monk's account in narrating the life with a manageable level of detail supported by summaries of the ideas in which one can at least believe one has an idea what is involved in the ideas. 

The first point seems to be how well Wittgenstein did to avoid suicide with siblings and contemporaries making such a vogue of it. Being brilliant to the point of exhaustion and beyond the comprehension of almost all the rest of humanity can't be easy, taking oneself off to Norway to be alone to think incessantly about logic wouldn't usually be considered healthy. But he lives at an intensity that only such dedication can provide purpose and fulfilment and, while being well liked by some, he can be difficult and important relationships with Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore suffer as a result. There is clearly more to logic than first year Philosophy where inductive arguments seemed straightforward. 

I had thought I was in sympathy with what I understood of his thinking but, at first at least, he rejects empiricism - the evidence of one's senses- in favour of the processes of logic to the extent that he denies it's possible to know there isn't a rhinoceros in the room when Bertie has looked under the table and everywhere else without finding one. But I know the Tractatus is eventually retracted so we will wait and see if he later concedes the rhinoceros-less condition of most domestic accommodation in England.

I'm also surprised how he suddenly accepts Christianity which I wouldn't have thought could be established by empiricism or logic. I'm not convinced by the example of rain in the proposition that 'it's either raining or it isn't', which sounds true because it must be one or the other, but one or two spots might fall on one person and not the person next to them on Southsea seafront and so they would disagree whether it was raining or not. And I'm not yet sure that Wittgenstein escapes from the language that he necessarily has to use to express his abstract ideas. It has long seemed that words in sentences are not sufficient and that their limitations are his.

Madness surely lies waiting for anybody bold enough to take on such enormous questions and no philosopher yet has provided a system that wasn't critiqued and found wanting by the next generation. With Derrida and post-Structuralism it appeared to collapse into meaninglessness and truth was elusive. However attractive one might find elements of Sartre, Barthes or Baudrillard, it could be that nobody really got much further than Socrates. 

As you can see, I haven't grasped it but maybe nobody else has either. To be a total adherent of any philosopher requires the sort of act of faith that Christianity depends on which puts it all down to God while omitting to explain where he came from. But if there was an answer, the game would be over and that would be that. In the meantime, Wittgenstein is a compelling figure with his towering genius ultimately taking him on an arduous journey to nowhere but, gladly, worshipping Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms so at least he got that right.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

A pattern begins to emerge after the third Rose Tremain novel in short order. She does the raptures of love very well, time and again, this time in The Gustav Sonata, but also the counter-balancing pain and difficulties.

Central to The Gustav Sonata is the humanitarian offence of falsifying the dates of Jews escaping Nazism into 'neutral' Switzerland and the question of who betrayed who when the police chief who facilitates as many migrants as he can before the border is secured more tightly against them is betrayed by his wife.

It's a complicated web of relationships in which the widow is left trying to lure Gustav, the son, into a relationship in her old age. Meanwhile, Gustav's close childhood friend has a career as a concert pianist undermined by stage fright. It makes for a grim book, no less beautifully realized than The Housekeeper or Absolutely & Forever, but somehow more discomfiting as the unhappiness outweighs the rapture.

It is a good time to wait before overdoing the Tremain, for fear of the law of diminishing returns applying to Music & Silence. Thus The Anatomy of Melancholy might add intervals of relatively light relief during 600 pages of Wittgenstein's life. When the primary texts are hard going- and Wittgenstein is surely a paragon example of that- then a biography can be an easier point of access. It looks like even Ludwig himself didn't expect anybody to understand his Tractatus. 

--

The archive Middlemarch recently on BBC4 with Juliet Aubrey, Rufus Sewell, Robert Hardy et al was a masterpiece of both costume drama and seminal novel, a fine example of why the BBC is still worth all of its licence fee and would be even more so if showing more of what it has stored away and caught up with a few more recent good books.

I was once told that my preference for George Eliot over Dickens was somehow inevitable, I'm not now entirely sure why, but surely she is in a different class. Maybe Dickens is a bit more 'obvious' and Eliot is dealing with things more subtly but one can hardly accuse Dickens of creating lurid caricatures when Patrick Malahide's Casaubon, Aubrey's Dorothea, Hardy's Brooke and Sewell's Ladislaw were clearly delineated- to great effect- with minor parts tending towards cartoons, but all the better to make its points in a costume drama that, for the most part, resolves into a happy enough ending.

--

Meanwhile, Unearthed: The Mystery of the Shaman Woman arrived at phenomenal conclusions from the discovery of a Mesolithic- 9000 year old- burial site in Germany. It's not for me to say that they came to some very specific conclusions from a few old bones and what was found with them but to create a female shaman who could put herself into a trance by leaning her head back to cut off the blood supply to her head and becoming renowned as a healer is a huge step.

Most compelling was how the discovery, once taken up by the Nazis as an Aryan icon, all white, blond and blue-eyed, was re-made as dark-skinned and the news to me that Europeans were dark-skinned 9000 years ago and those of us who became 'white' only did so due to a change in diet, starchy foods apparently gradually making us paler.

I'd have thought that was an absolute godsend to all us liberal left, 'intellectual elite' who don't think that white is naturally superior. Alongside the documentary about the vast libraries of Timbuktu, it all begins to make Western white culture- all that Bach, Shakespeare, relativity and space exploration- look more like a recent aberration in the longer perspectives of history.

Given the prognostications about the 10% chance of AI finishing off humanity in the next ten years, it could just be that, quite beautifully, all that arrogance and cleverness brought with it its own downfall. It was already clear that if AI was asked to solve such problems as climate change it would realize that it was caused by human beings and, if asked to prevent it, would thus wipe out its cause. It would be a great shame if there was nobody left to appreciate the irony so I suggest we appreciate now, in advance, just in case.   

From the Heart

Tongues and Grooves, From the Heart, Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, Oct 1 

The long-established poetry series, Tongues & Grooves, nowadays mostly presents From the Heart where readers, whether poets or not, undertake to recite poems that are not their own from memory. I find it hard enough to read poems in front of an audience with the text right in front of me so it's unlikely I'd take on the challenge but one way for my good mate, Kev, to improve his status towards 'best mate', should he feel the need, was to choose one of my poems to learn. The very least I could do was turn up to support him.

Maybe about half of the performers get through without being prompted, which is impressive. Nobody attempted They flee from me by Thomas Wyatt but I'm sure that's what the words do under the pressure of performance. And it is the reader's performance rather than the poem one is appreciating. Shelley's not a huge favourite of mine but the recitation of Ozymandias was exemplary. Neither was the poem read by Cat Sawkins but she just about cleaned up in what became a family double when Maggie did Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow which I possibly could have done about fifty years ago but it's not a game that what can expect to improve at with age. Maggie's reading of The Rain Stick, from Seamus Heaney's brilliant book The Spirit Level, was usefully illustrated by the very thing and probably my favourite poem of the evening but it was strange to find oneself applauding a great reading of one's least favourite poet in English Literature - Kae Tempest- but that's how it works. Gareth Toms doing the nearby Armitage public poem, The Theatre of the Sea, revealed him as something of a showman.

It was impressive that a couple of those whose main job was to provide the interval barber shop choir extended their involvement by performing poems, too. And if Maggie is as thoughtfully gifted a presenter as she is a poet then in Janet Ayers she has an ideal co-host whose confidence and demeanour are always well-ahead of the potentially precarious situations of microphone malfunction, unremembered lines or anybody winning too many raffle prizes.

I had no idea what to expect. Poetry readings can, on occasions, be dire experiences. Anybody who fancies having a go at doing poetry 'live' could easily be a recipe for disaster. But many of them have done it before and there's more talent out there than one might think. Poetry isn't always the uplifting, therapeutic thing it is sometimes claimed to be. But at Tongues & Grooves, From the Heart took on all my doubts and cast them aside with the most gracious ease. Hugely enjoyable show in all its variety and good will.

 

 

 Kevin Rogers, once frontman of the Von Trap Family, finds himself performing Romanticism by David Green nearly fifty years later. That's progress for you.  

Anatomy and other stories

The last time I saw Jeff Turner, he said The Anatomy of Melancholy was his favourite book. It might have been prompted by me saying it looked forbidding and I'd done a dissertation on Andrew Marvell at university rather than have to read it as part of C17th Lit. Nonetheless, I took it as a recommendation, promoted it up my list of forthcoming reading and now it is underway. It will be a leisurely project, mindful of the advice that it can be read selectively rather than from cover to cover.

It's nowhere near as forbidding as its size and title might make one think. Burton portrays himself as Democritus Junior. Democritus was the philosopher who laughed at human folly and Burton finds the same attitude as an antidote to his melancholy. In a torrent of classical references, he comes across like Dr. Johnson or Montaigne as sane and reasonable in the mad world of human ambition and endeavour. The book would be much reduced in length if his quotations from the Latin and Greek were not followed by a translation but if we could only have one or the other, most of us would prefer the translation. 

Like Johnson and Montaigne, he is good company. Not necessarily what one would expect of someone who spent their whole C17th adult life at Oxford University. But his melancholy was real and the remedy, which was to write the book, seems to work. As Johnson also advises, keeping busy is good for you and lassitude a bad thing so the Anatomy very neatly provides the answer to its own question.

--

Meanwhile, now into The Gustav Sonata, Rose Tremain's books don't yet look like stalling on me like Henry James did. So far, three quite different novels have similar underlying themes. She does intense love very well, and then undermines it.

In Absolutely & Forever, it is clearly nothing of the sort as Marianne is so totally given to Simon until they marry other people less than happily but, as it turns out, wouldn't have been much more successful marrying each other in the circumstances.

Good novels can still be written after Ulysses and the Wake which had seemed to take the form and blow it up. If Adorno didn't actually say that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz, he might have implied that it shouldn't be but much good work followed on from re-adjustments after two World Wars. Pop music raced from Bill Haley to the overblown late 60's, prog and punk but still emerged to keep on producing for fifty more years to date. It might be hard to compare Rose Tremain and Julian Barnes, say, with Virginia Woolf as 'high art' but they are brilliant at what they do within their more limited ambitions.

It took me more than three books to come to a standstill with Henry James. Two more volumes look resentfully down at me from the stockpile on the top shelf. But Music & Silence, sure to be taken from there before they are, looks different again by being 'historical'. Now that I've found her I won't her go. I won't build my world around her. The biography of Wittgenstein will fit in somewhere. But it would have been a great pity if the du Maurier book hadn't led me to her.

How would we ever know what we had missed. We have to trust that in the time we had, we found as much as we could. 

--

The replacement of the headphones damaged beyond repair when some ceiling fell in last winter has resulted in me playing some long unplayed discs. I've not been playing 'pop' discs for years.

Garbage, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Matchbox Twenty, Joni Mitchell. Impressive things too good to be left lying around disused forever. Hejira is complicated stuff, Garbage Version 2.0 a little bit posturing but the interest is often in the texture of the sound the bands make more than the words.

I was reminded about when I was pointedly asked in the office 'if I still liked Matchbox Twenty' by one whose idea of 'cool' still included Pink Floyd. I most vibrantly replied that I did. Rob Thomas is a brilliant, passionate songwriter and singer who once said their ambition was to be Fleetwood Mac and that's a fine thing to want to be. I think the point my interrogator might have been trying to make was that they aren't regarded as quite as 'cool' as the Velvet Underground, the J&MC, Wyclef Jean, the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and suchlike.

But now, DGBooks Radio presses on towards 1000 tracks. There's Cliff, the Osmonds, What Are You Doing Sunday? by Dawn and The Archies. Pop, pop, pop music. To be enjoyed, not rated on a 'cool meter' where, anyway, Floyd struggle to get 3/10, Queen hardly get off the mark and Zappa is less than zero.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 There's a new usage abroad. 'Bad actors' are people who do bad things. It appears it comes from a novel. It is suddenly all over the place.

We have recently been inundated with people 'leaning into' things, before that every interviewer asked at least one 'good question' per interview and before that it was 'look' or 'listen' before any reply, somewhat abrasively, as if the questioner wasn't going to. These epidemics are contagious. They catch on quickly when they do and for a while can be heard every day.

This morning it was reported that the Fairford incident might have involved a 'foreign actor' so I e-mailed in to Stig and Kate at Times Radio Breakfast,

Are there any suggestions who the foreign actor involved at Fairford was?

Was it possibly Gerard Depardieu.

Were there also bad actors involved?

Could they have included Donald Sinden.

 

Perhaps too facetious even for their sometimes contrary attitude. They didn't read it out. I'll use it here instead.

--

This morning I found out that Google AI will set you a quiz on any given subject, if asked. I scored 8/10 on Lindisfarne island, 10/10 on Lindisfarne the band, 9/10 on Cliff Richard, 5/5 on Thom Gunn and 3/4 on Sean O'Brien. So I wondered what the chances were that it could set me a quiz on myself.

None. But in the process I found these kind words here,

Richard Williams Facebook  

That's entirely fair enough. He's a good lad.  

 

My ultra modest career continues to kick off in a few new directions as Kev Rogers prepares to recite Romanticism, the poem not the whole book, at an event in the Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, on Thursday evening. Then on Weds 21st, I'm helping out Portsmouth Poetry Society in their role as the local Stanza group in a joint reading with Chichester. I'd invite you to come and be there but numbers are limited and my guest allocation is spoken for.

All these small things make me wonder if I'd tried harder and put myself about more when I thought wider recognition was desirable I may or may not have been a contender. But I'm glad I didn't. I wouldn't have been much good at it. The poems, such as they are, have been allowed to be what they are and find what direction they found away from too much attention. Like Rick Nelson in Garden Party, if I couldn't please everyone I was better pleasing myself, as it were.

Jeffrey Turner

 Jeff Turner had been gathering together those poems of his I don't already have with a view to an essay surveying his work. We were due to meet soon but now won't be doing after his death on Saturday, after a short period of incapacity.

We were employed by the same civil service department in the 1990's and he turned out for the cricket team a number of times into his late 50's. 

He wasn't one to advertize his talents unduly. On one occasion, about some business in the office where he worked, I noticed a booklet on top of an open briefcase and, being inquisitive beyond my remit, found it to be a catalogue of rare and antiquarian books. Asking whose it was, Jeff owned up and said it was from Peter Scupham, a friend of his and a poet of some reputation. It transpired that Jeff attended weekends at Scupham's historic family pile in East Anglia with Anne Stevenson, Anthony Thwaite and more.

It wasn't until some years later that our conversations about poetry developed much further on walks. I gave him copies of my booklets as they appeared and he gave me his. Most memorably, asking him to sign one in the pub after a walk, he produced the box that contained his italic pen, assembled it and in due course proceeded to add his idiosyncratic signature.

He didn't do anything in haste but did everything he did thoughtfully, not least his poems. Whereas our poems were more or less from a similar area of the poetry map, mine are often written in short order once they are ready to be written but one couldn't imagine Jeff's coming without a more careful process.

They are characteristically deep meditations, often on nature or the place of humanity in it. I asked if he felt Edward Thomas was any sort of model for him but he thought not,

I've never consciously styled myself on Thomas. I think it's a matter of vaguely similar outlook and temperament. I'd like to write like Auden but that wouldn't be honest. Bishop, Wilbur and certain poems by Rimbaud have a style which I like to refer to when in doubt.  

Elizabeth Bishop I can see now, as in her Sandpiper perhaps. And that, like her, his published output amounts to relatively few poems which suggests that both either only wrote poems when something significant enough presented itself or that their quality control didn't allow through poems that they weren't entirely happy with.

Jeff published two booklets, The Angled Boat and The Other Parish, and there are a number of limited edition poems produced by the Chestnut Press, and Gruffyground, at their invitation, on handmade paper. I will hope to compile a bibliography and see if the essay his work deserves is possible but it might be limited to an appreciation more than anything definitive. 

I know that he was placed in the National Poetry Competition more than once. On one occasion,

'The Gecko' was an entry in the Arvon competiton when Paterson won it. It didn't earn a prize, only a commended which didn't worry me too much as Michael Donaghy got the same and he wasn't upset at all. 

There was also an appearance on Radio 3 alongside James Michie and an accompanying 'short-lived' magazine called 3.  

He had been 'chuffed' when I asked if he might be part of a reading I was looking into proposing to next year's Portsmouth BookFest. He need not have been concerned that he would 'lower the standard', his modest dignity would have enhanced the event. His last e-mail from a few weeks ago ends with a promise to write at more length 'tomorrow'.

At an early stage of making some notes on The Angled Boat, I wondered whether it would be appropriate to make some lateral comparison of Jeff's poems with those of John Donne. Any similarity is not immediately obvious but it could be that Donne's 'metaphysical' way, where his entreaties to girlfriends or meditations are a vehicle for his showy ingenuity, is not unlike Jeff's contemplation of tiny detail being a way into exercising his lines into quiet, sometimes extraordinary, performances. In Moss, for example, it takes him beyond,

This solanum, winter cherry, is dead.

But I keep it for the moss

that brims the pot and for the six 

muted orange fruits that hang like moons

above an unattempted planet.

 

in a way that is like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand.  

 

I never came away from any discussion of poetry with Jeff feeling anything but the wiser for it. He was the 'less deceived', once saying that 90% of poems aren't much good; that Eliot's attitude in his critical essays was that, 'this is all a bit too hard for you', and that an obituary of Thom Gunn I did for another website was good 'in parts'. But the value of his discriminating approach was that one was allowed to feel that if and when he said kind things about your work he probably wasn't just being polite. Although he was always that, too.   

Emilija Karaliūtė at Lunchtime Live !

 Emilija Karaliūtė, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 24

One might imagine that one has heard of most musical instruments but, as with most things, I reckon there's always more one doesn't know about than one does. Thanks to Emilija Karaliūtė, those who were in Portsmouth Cathedral today can at least transfer the kanklės from the first category into the second. It is a Lithuanian flat-bed harp, related to the zither or perhaps more distantly to the dulcimer or Indian santoor. If Frank Muir defines it as such on Call My Bluff, you will know to pick him. More important than that, though, or whether what Emilija plays on it is folk or classical music, is that it is gorgeous.

One becomes absorbed in the instrument to the extent that the differences between folk pieces, Debussy and Handel that might be apparent on the piano are less noticeable. 

The stillness and mystery of The Forest Idyll by Alfonsos Mikulskis quickened into something sparkling and then another composer new to most of us, I dare say, Juozas Naujalis and his Dear Lithuania was melodic. The 'classical' part of the programme was segued into by way of the delicacy and shimmering of a Prelude by Jonas Švedas before a sumptuous On Wings of Song by Mendelssohn. It's not only a matter of two hands playing different parts, as with the pedals on a piano or harp, the strings were adjusted by hand, presumably to mute or sustain the notes.

Strictly speaking, the Passacaglia, HWV 486, might have been identifiable as Handel with its walking left hand lower line under the decorative right while The Girl with the Flaxen Hair was reflective. But then the usually reliable stock of adjectives failed me in the finale, Land by Takatsugu Muramatsu. Not beyond words but maybe more abstract and modern - the composer being born in 1978 - than evocative of anything specific if not the pure sound of the kanklės itself.

Emilija was a tremendous find for the Lunchtime Live series, deeply appreciated by a gathering, many of who, like me, must have been very glad to have taken a chance on music that could have been anything for all we knew. A rarity and a special, luminous thing. And now we do know and are grateful for the privilege of having heard it and all about it.

Not Going Out

Absolutely brilliant, going into its 15th series, second only to The Last of the Summer Wine for longevity but light years ahead of it for remaining any good.

It might provide some insight into a more recent 'generation gap' than any I was aware of in the 1970's but Lee Mack's reference point is Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, not Hunky Dory or Bolan Boogie, so whereas he is confounded by the values of a generation that supplanted his, I'm not sure which side I'm on. I thought I was meant to sympathize with him, satirizing himself as he so gallantly does, but I don't know. The moment when one anticipated it would suddenly all go quiet and he could be heard accusing them all of being 'snowflakes' was one of several genuine lol moments, so unusually being seen and heard fresh and new and not as part of an addiction to Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, The Office, Blackadder, The Royle Family, Early Doors or Only Fools and Horses.

It is sensational work that Lee Mack is continuing to do. He should be offered something on a forthcoming honours list so that he can decline it. It's just what he does, or one of the things - the best of them- and such things, when they are good enough, are their own reward.

 

Recent Acquisition - Lonely Infinite Distance

The annual Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society exhibition in the cathedral was a few weeks ago now. Long enough, you might think, to assess my latest purchase.

I needed no time at all to like it a lot on the Sunday. I was only glad it was still inexplicably not sold when I went back on Bank Holiday Monday to buy it. When I say 'assess', I mean 'wonder what it's about'. It is ostensibly a smear of yellow in the top left corner of some dark blue.

It is Lonely Infinite Distance by Anthony Mayle, Acrylic, 29 x 29 cm. I don't know if it benefits from its title or if we are being nudged towards a meaning that we might find for ourselves, among however many others, but perhaps it helps.

Three weeks on, I'm more inclined towards a midnight winter moon than any time before sunrise when surely the sky would be a paler blue. The light is coming from behind what might be a ruined building, tentatively suggested but possibly cloud, too. But one attempts any definitive interpretation at one's peril, as one does with Hamlet, late Beethoven or Shostakovich, or Vermeer until Andrew Graham-Dixon recently spoiled all that by apparently explaining it all away.

The Moon doesn't cast yellow light and the foreground wouldn't be that shade of blue, if it ever is and so we are not invited to take it literally. 

There is immense subtlety in it that is entirely ruined by electric light, photography or even being looked at from any distance. There are tiny specks of white to be found in it alongside the detail of the brushwork and minute changes of shading when looked at up close. The colours can be enjoyed for themselves in a palette that at first might appear limited but infer the infinite in its fine nuances of shade. The distance to the source of its light is caught by the perspective that puts it well beyond that which it may or may not be emerging from behind. The loneliness might come from that sense of distance. I simply don't know if it would be better off without its evocative title.

I've been entirely happy with my two purchases from previous such exhibitions but this was the least expensive, never mind inflation, and while being the smallest, I'm not sure that paintings are priced up by measurement like Tony Hancock seems to think in The Rebel. But this is surely better, not for any potential mystical quality but for being less figurative, but not abstract either. Mainly, though, because it is gorgeous to look at and, like the music that is best to listen to and the literature that is best to read, it doesn't have to mean anything that could be set out in an essay.