David Green: Music, Silence, Invisible Football and the Mathematical Impossibility of Coincidence

Sunday, 8 November 2026

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.