Not so swinging after all

Yesterday, my fifteen year old niece asked me about the sixties (the decade, that is; not my age bracket). The sixties are, apparently, now material for history projects ... which is, I suppose, fair enough since they are more temporally distant from her than the second world war was from me when I studied it in history at the same age.

I was somewhat deflated to discover that a rich period full of event, possibility, promise and terror boils down to this: I talked politics, wore flared jeans, had long hair, sang silly songs, and am of an age with the bursar at her school...

It's a mystery

Mysteries come in all shapes, sizes and kinds.

My first attempt to reach Topsham, yesterday, went well for the first couple of hundred kilometres but was thwarted in the last five ... a threatened suicide closed rail and road routes for long enough to lose me the evening. My second try, today, seemed to be following suit, as a fellow rail passenger was taken ill in the same last stretch and had to be airlifted out; but the evacuation was swift, and I arrived in time. Such an unlikely coincidence on the same line, on two consecutive days, constituted my own small personal contribution to the mysteries of the universe.

The mysteries for which I had come, however, were well worth the effort. I was there to see Ray Girvan (of JSB blog) play bayan for Estuary Players' production of Tony Harrison's The Mysteries, and even though I wasn't able to stay to the end of the evening, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The production was staged in the main body of St Margaret's parish church, and wonderful use was made of the setting: stage in the altar area, music section in the adjacent arch, audience in the pews. Eden's tree of the knowledge of good and evil was embodied in a human figure holding the fatal fruit. The shepherds and magi seeking the Christ child arrived (with sheep and dromedaries respectively) up the main aisle. The humour of the original mystery cycle was perfectly handled, with modern twists – the lamb taken by Mak the sheep stealer, for instance, being played by Shaun the Sheep, while the dromedaries were accompanied by Monty Python and the holy grail style clipclop sound effects.

Not that the humour was over dominant. The story of Abraham and Isaac (from Genesis 22), from which every fibre of my being has always recoiled, here became something to draw me in and break my heart. Mimed, to the solo accompaniment of  a haunting song from the music section, it highlighted the human pain at its heart, moved me to tears and became my high point of the night. Truly beautiful.

My only regret was that I couldn't, for much of the time, isolate Ray's bayan (my original reason for being there) from the amplified electronic instruments around it. He came through identifiably at times, probably because I was consciously tuned to listen for him, but was often lost as an individual voice – but his playing was, of course, a component in the overall success which is what really matters.

This is, I realise, a bit late to be singing the praises of a production whose last night I have just left. But if you are within reach of the Estuary Players’ next venture, I thoroughly recommend marking it on your calendar.

Express delivery

Last night we watched a comedy in which three friends are in an immobilised cable car with a pregnant woman when she goes into labour. The whole thing was wildly unrealistic, but we nevertheless scoffed at the utter incompetence of the characters in the face of this emergency.

After it was over, though, I started to think. The male character was completely useless ... but, truth be told, I was choosing to forget that  my own first human birth was, in terms of my own part in it, an even more inglorious occasion – happy in its outcome only through good luck.

Nineteen years old, with fellow student Jon, I dropped in on friends Karl and Hannah in their small town home. Hannah was heavily pregnant. Karl wasn’t there: Hannah, tired of his fussy worrying and pacing, had ordered him out of the flat for a night on the town with his friends to give her some peace. She welcomed us in, sat us down, and went to put a kettle on. Then she screamed. We rushed through to find her on all fours, on a wet kitchen floor, wide eyed, gasping and panting.

Wide eyed, gasping and panting ourselves, we ran around in a headless chicken manner and flapped our hands uselessly until Hannah caught her breath and called us to order. She told one of us to go out to the telephone in the square, call the midwife whose number was pinned to the kitchen door frame, then find Jon and bring him home.

I would have welcomed the chance to be out doing something and away from the centre of useless responsibility, but Jon reached the door first so I was left alone with Hannah.

Hannah, though only twenty and in her first pregnancy, took charge with natural authority. She sat me in a chair, held my hand, reassured me.

I discovered later that, at under two hours, it was an unbelievably quick and easy delivery – but at the time it seemed to go on for ever. Hannah saw me through it, patience itself most of that time though there were a couple of stressful moments when she shouted at me to “stop being a useless wanker”.

I did as I was told, breathed deeply and stopped panicking when instructed.

By the time the midwife arrived, I was holding a hastily wiped baby girl roughly the right way up and Hannah was plying me with heavily sugared coffee. Jon, who had had to visit many cafés, pubs and bars in his search for Karl, returned with him some time after that to coo in an inebriated manner over the baby.

Having seen a fair number of deliveries since then, it's easy to forget, easy to pretend to myself that I've always been where I am now. But no; I really shouldn't judge the characters in the ski lift comedy. In fact they stepped up to the plate better than I.

Quotation of the day

“[Auntie Jean’s] flat, although still in a state of disarray, actually looked considerably tidier than it had before the forensic team began to search it.”

This is from Freefall, third in the “Tunnels” series of books – aimed at a teenage audience, but a good adult read nevertheless – which I am gradually reading and will review together when I'm done.

Aunie Jean is a deliberately cartoonish character, half slattern and half goodhearted salt of the earth, but the above quoted sentence made me laugh out loud.

This illustrates one of the advantages of eReading, since I allowed myself to be seduced into it: I read mostly on a 120mm tablet (since I only eRead when on the move), never on a PC which is impossibly clunky ... but I can mark a section (like the one above) when I see it, on the spur of the moment, then instantly call it up, copy and paste it, later when (as I am now) at a “proper” keyboard. A researcher's dream.

---

• Brian Williams & Roderick Gordon, Freefall. 2009, Frome: Chicken House. 9781906427054 (pbk).
  Also 2012, London: Scholastic, (Kindle edition, location 908-909)
  

Careers advice

Vivid's mention of careers advice in her latest post prompted me to post this … though it has little to do with Vivid's intent, nor her important message. It is just an aimless an anecdote about careers advice, 40+ years ago.

In my mid teens my parents were on a home posting in Britain, between two overseas ones, and I was doing time in an all boys grammar school in … let's call it Shirecester.

At some point the school was visited by Mr Tombs, external careers advisor. (I change his name to spare his blushes … but his real name did have an equally ominous and sepulchral sound.)

I went into my careers interview with high hopes.

“So” said Mr Tombs, jovially, “what do you want to be when you leave school?”

“A photographer!” I replied, with enthusiasm, and waited expectantly for advice on how to pursue this career ambition.

[As I have mentioned elsewhere, I was eight when my maternal grandfather gave me an ancient Brownie box camera. I was captivated by the endlessly subtle shades of grey, in both print and negative; I would sit and lose myself in them for hours at a time. Even the utter failures were a wonder to me. That such a rich tonal range could exist between white and pale grey in an overexposed frame! Then my father showed me how those tones grew before your eyes, under a red light in the smell of hypo. This was magic made flesh, and I was hooked. By the time of my interview with Mr tombs, I had a complete portable darkroom, understood metol and hydroquinone, the use of borax as a buffer, the effects of temperature and agitation. And the Brownie had been replaced by folding wartime Dalmeyer which was my pride and joy.]

“Don't be silly” replied Mr Tombs, with a dismissive laugh, “you can't make a living at that. You seem to be good at mathematics; that's the way to go.”

And my first ever career advice interview was over.

I thought carefully about Mr Tombs' advice. Was it really impossible to make a living as a photographer? What of my heroes such as Eve Arnold, Jane Bown, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Barbara Morgan, Yousof Karsh, W Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange; did they not make a living?

[I didn't bother my parents with this. I knew that they had no detailed knowledge to help directly, but they did give me something much more valuable: unfailing, unquestioning support for my passions and a belief that I could do anything at all if I wanted to. They also gave me, just after my my meeting with Mr Tombs, a concrete vote of confidence in the Russian-built Leica-copy camera which replaced the Dalmeyer.]

The editor of Shirecester's weekly local newspaper was as generous with advice as Mr Tombs had been brief. Naively, I just turned up at his office, one day on the way home from school, and he invited me in. He explained pay scales, apprenticeships, qualifications and the importance of a portfolio. He introduced me to the local technical college, and steered me through its complexities.

When I next saw Mr Tombs, a year later, I was older and wiser. I had completed an evening course at the college, going there twice a week straight from school and gaining a vocational qualification certificate. I could quote salary scales. I walked confidently into my second careers advice interview.

“So” said Mr Tombs, jovially, “what do you want to be when you leave school?”

“A photographer!” I replied with deliberate determination. On the desk between us, as evidence of seriousness and feasibility, I placed prospectuses for relevant degree-level courses in Bath, Hounslow, London, Rochester NY, and Vienna.

“Don't be silly” replied Mr Tombs, “you can't make a living at that.” With a magician's sleight of hand, my prospectuses disappeared. “You're good at mathematics; that's the way to go.”

From Shirecester we went eventually to a Mediterranean island, where we would stay until I took my A level exams at age eighteen. Though we were not an Army family I travelled, in a local bus with a motley mix of other expatriate children, to a British army school 80km away – a raucous bus journey over the Island's pitted roads. At this school, too, there was careers advice and I was looking forward to a fresh start after the disappointments in Shirecester.

At first, I had hopes of the permanent careers teacher, Mr King. He was available every day, but I soon learned that he had little or no idea of life outside the school. He was only the careers teacher because nobody wanted Latin any more and he could teach nothing else. I settled down to wait philosophically for the professional careers specialist, flown out from Britain by the army once a year, just after the Easter vacation.

[Meanwhile, I fell in love with the island and, being 16, heroically but unsuccessfully with every girl in sight. My camera went with me everywhere; my friends called it my ‘growth’, but without malice. All my friends and classmates were documented (especially the girls). When we staged A Winter's Tale and Waiting for Godot as part of the English Lit course, my photographic record took longer to view than the performances themselves. All my money went into film, chemicals, paper. The island's Ilford Photographic importers, a genial pair of Armenian brothers, maintained a shop between a brothel and a mosque, and encouraged me just as the Shirecester editor had done. I got my materials at a discount, and was sometimes given marginally outdated stock at no charge at all.]

The day came.

I had learned some lessons; this new start would be on my own terms.

First impressions count. I would give clear signals to this new careers advisor that I had done my homework; that I was not a romantic, glamour-seeking, head-in-the-clouds David Bailey wannabe. Under my arm I had a clean, brand new ring binder, carefully devoid of teenage graffiti. It contained three years worth of notes and questions about potential photographic career paths.

I went up to the first floor balcony, found the room, checked my watch, knocked on the door and entered with a spring in my step.

And stopped dead, horrified.

“So” said Mr Tombs, jovially, “what do you want to be when you leave school?”

This is the way the year ends...

This is the way the year ends

This is the way the year ends

This is the way the year ends

Not with a pie but a 'flu bug.

---

(With tongue cheerfully in cheek, and with an apologetic nod to T S Eliot's The hollow men...)

Why grandmama...

Conversation overheard

In a book shop, two boys around eleven or twelve years old. The first suddenly grabs his friend's arm in excitement.

First boy: “Oh, WOW , look – Charles Dickens!”

The second boy says nothing, but looks bewildered.

First boy: “He writes brilliant TV history dramas … and now, look, they've made books out of them!”

Top secret, hush-hush...

Checking for availability of any free wi-fi hotspots in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, I'm amused to find this one (shown left) at the top of the list.

For non European readers, Garda (more formally “An Garda Síochána”; informally “the gardai”) is Eire's police force, the intelligence arm of which is the “Garda National Surveillance Unit”.

---

Post Script, 1007: Alas, I have to spoil the story. One who knows, living in that area, tells me that this is a private individual's humorous label for a home network. Ah, well ... it was fun while it lasted!

---

Conversation overheard

“Oh, yes, I've been all over America. Lots of places, but my favourite one was Norway. It must be in Colorado, because they have all these fjords and the largest one is the Grand Canyon...”

Autres temps, autres blagues

It's always interesting to see different variants on the known, different perspectives on the familiar.

Julie Heyward, in a post yesterday which I have only read today, quoted a joke from Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life by Allan Kaprow:

A man commits a crime and is sentenced to life in prison. When he arrives at the prison gate, he is met by an older inmate who has been assigned to supervise his adjustment to prison routine. After he has checked in and been given a uniform, they proceed to the mess hall for lunch, where the new inmate is introduced to the other prisoners. They begin eating, and after a few minutes he hears someone say “Fourteen!” Everybody laughs. Then he hears “Eleven!” followed by good-natured groans. Then “Ninety-two!” and giggles. Then “Twenty-seven!” Howls and tears. This goes on through the whole meal.

The new man gets more and more confused. So he leans over to his mentor and whispers, “What’s going on?” The older man replies, “We’re telling jokes. But we’ve told them so many times that we know them by heart. So to save time, the jokes have numbers. That way we can tell a lot more jokes.”

The new inmate nods and realizes he’s going to be eating with these men for a long time and might as well learn the ropes. So he says, “Sixteen!” and looks around at everyone. Dead silence. He leans over again and says, “What’s wrong?” The older prisoner says, “Simple. You didn’t tell it right.”

Now ... I recognise that joke ... but in the version I heard in my late teens, and have retold at intervals since, it goes like this

A weary traveller in the Himalaya finds shelter for the night at a remote monastery.

At dinner, as everyone is otherwise eating in silence, a monk further down the long refectory table looks up from his soup and calls “Fourteen!” Everybody laughs. Then the traveller hears “Eleven!” followed by good-natured groans. Then “Ninety-two!” and giggles. Then “Twenty-seven!” Howls and tears. This goes on through the whole meal.

The traveller, puzzled, whispers to the elderly monk sitting on his right, “What’s going on?” and the other replies, “We’re telling jokes. But we’ve told them so many times that we know them by heart. So to save time, the jokes have numbers. That way we can tell a lot more jokes.”

The traveller thinks about this, then asks “Can I tell one?. The elderly monks says “Certainly; we'd like that”.

So, the traveller calls out “Two hundred and seven!!”

There is a moment of dead silence; then waves of hilarity start to roll around the room. Monks choke on their soup and have to be clapped on the back by their neighbours. Others fall out of their chairs and roll on the floor in helpless laughter.

The traveller is amazed. When the table has returned to something resembling normalcy, the noise subsiding to hiccups, snorts of suppressed laughter and occasional spasms of giggling, he turns to the elderly monk on his right again and asks “What was so funny about my joke?”

“Oh” says the monk, wiping tears from his eyes, “nothing, really ... but we hadn't heard it before!”

Same joke; different context; but also different point.

Fascinating.

A bestiary (Bush Falls)

When I bought a second hand paperback copy of Jonathon Tropper's Bush Falls for fifty cents from a charity shop, it was only to make up a round sum of money with my other choices when I took them to the counter. I thought that I was getting a light, forgettable, humorous read. What actually got was a fine, wonderfully written piece of literature which I enthusiastically recommend to anyone ... but I did get the humour, which pervades the book.

Practically every page has at least one line which I itch to quote ... but this one, echoing as it does my recent A bestiary (2) post, is the one I've chosen.

The narrator, Joe, after nearly two decades of alienation, wants a rapprochement with his family. In this scene he has accepted an invitation to dinner with his estranged elder brother, sister in law Cindy, and their children. The children have a cockatoo, called Shnookums, which they are teaching to talk. We join them in the middle of a fraught conversation...

“Before I can ask him what he means, Shnookums comes flying into the dining room and performs a reckless dive into the chicken marinara, splattering the red sauce across the tablecloth as she flaps her wings in a frantic effort to correct her flight path. [... ... ...] The bird spins around on the serving platter as if it's standing on a lazy Suzan, unable to take to the air again because of the saturation of sauce in its feathers. Cindy swats at the bird, missing completely but knocking over her wineglass, which spills onto the table, and the wine bottle, which hits the wood floor with a resounding thud. "Goddammit!" Cindy shrieks. We all watch, mesmerized, as Shnookums finally extracts herself from the chicken dish and takes a few jerky steps across the table, leaving perfect red footprints on the tablecloth in her wake before coming to a stop directly in front of me. "Hey, dickhead," she says, and that pretty much wraps up dinner with the family.”

---

• Jonathon Tropper, Bush Falls. 2005, London: Arrow. 0099461234 (pbk.)

To day, the world ... tomorrow, Basingstoke.

I've just seen two luxury tour coaches in the same company livery. There is a stylised globe as a logo, above the proud strapline:

“The future of travel in Basingstoke!”

Just imagine it ... starting, perhaps, with a grand air conditioned tour of the roundabouts...

Bryant and May, light

In my "Prostho plus" post, a couple of days ago, I focused on humour – not difficult, in what was, in one of its many dimensions, an openly comic novel.

I wouldn't describe the Bryant and May novels of Christopher Fowler (which I discovered, as with so much else, through JSB) as comic, but they certainly contain immensely comic lines and passages. Here are two of my own favourite examples...

From Seventy senen clocks:

“The coven has a resident numerologist called Nigel. He's very good at Chaos Theory, which is just as well because his maths is terrible...”

and from The water room:

“The last time Bryant had accessed police files via the Internet, he had somehow hacked into the Moscow State Weather Bureau and put it on red alert for an incoming high-pressure weather system. The Politburo had been mobilized and seven flights re-routed before the error was spotted and rectified.”

---

• Christopher Fowler, Seventy-seven clocks. 2005, London: Doubleday. 0385608853 (hbk).
• Christopher Fowler, The water room. 2004, London: Doubleday. 0385605544 (hbk).

Prostho Plus

In his JSB post "The roots of fiction", yesterday, Ray Girvan mentioned Prostho Plus, a novel by Piers Anthony. The protagonist is Dillingham, a dentist kidnapped by aliens, who tries to buy his freedom by practising his profession on a variety of worlds and life forms.

As I said in a spur of the moment comment to the post, “I loved Piers Anthony at a certain age ... but I went on loving Prostho Plus after I left that age...”

I hadn't reread it in forty years, but still vividly remembered parts of it. I was particularly fond of a scene in which the protagonist attempts to solve the oral hygiene problems of Trach, a vegetarian dinosaur diplomat. He tries cleaning Trach's teeth of food debris by filling his mouth with a quick setting foam. I couldn't remember exact words, but even in paraphrase memory it remained hilarious. At Ray's suggestion, I obtained and read a copy of the novel today and refreshed my memory. Here is the foam tooth cleaning snippet; it still makes me laugh just as much at fifty nine as it did when I was nineteen:

The cast seemed to have set somewhat more securely than anticipated. Dillingham took his little prosthodontic mallet and tapped at the mass, finally dislodging it. "See all that green stuff embedded in it?" he asked the dinosaur, pointing. "That's the left-over greenchomp, all yanked out at once."

Trach pointed in turn. "See those little white bits also embedded? Those are teeth."

---

• Piers Anthony, Prostho plus. 1971, London: Gollancz. 0575006463.

Dear Diary...

The UK's BBC Radio 4 is currently airing a series in which various celebrities read from, and discuss, their teenage diaries. It's an amusing and sometimes insightful listen ... though my principal feeling is of astonishment at the fact of such teenaged journal keeping diligence.

I had a diary every year from as far back as I can remember, and was always very interested in the information which they contained, but contributed little to them of my own. None from my own teens survive, so far as I know, but if they did they would make for thin and unimpressive reading.

One diary, from a little earlier than my teens, did surface recently ... and illustrates the point. There are only four entries, all of them in the first two pages. Here is what one ten year old thought worth recording of his life, in early 1963, in the Pictorial Young Australian Chamber of Commerce Diary:

1st January : Stayed up to see new year in

2nd January : Overslept

6th January : Bad rash

8th January : Didn't feel well at first but OK now.

I don't, somehow, expect the BBC to call me any time soon...

Caughtship

In her "Courtship" post, two days ago, Julie Heywood quoted the following from Michael Podro:

“What is required, someone might answer today, for the alien spectator to have a serious involvement with the art of a culture which he did not share, is a preparedness to learn — a preparedness to exercise a sensitivity which his own immediate culture did not demand or make possible, so that he felt his own beliefs and imagination under pressure. Other people’s beliefs do not have to be genuine alternatives for us, that is, they do not have to be part of a way of life or belief system that we may really adopt, for us to be exercised and involved by them or by the art embedded in them.”

I said at the time that I was going to steal that paragraph for use in a lecture today. I duly did so: it was printed on a postcard (with, of course, full attribution) which I gave to each person in the audience they entered, before I began.

One woman, as she left, paused before me with shining eyes and intellectual excitement written across her face. “I don't know what your lecture was about”, she said, “but this... [waving the postcard] ... I thought: oh, yes!”

Weighting around

Sign in a clinic:

“Please weight here until called for your wait check.”

Today

Picture at left (click for larger view) shows Midge and three friends enjoying a certain wedding which has dominated the news today.

Midge, though an anti-monarchist, bears the couple no ill will and wishes them all happiness as human beings.

Midge's three friends say they liked Kate's frock.

Midge would nevertheless have liked to see occasional news coverage relating to other, less urgent matters. Such as, for example, carnage in Misrata, lethal repression in Deraa, loss of life in the storm stuck south eastern US states, a café bomb in Marakech, an imminent referendum in the UK, the Irish economy...

Eletelephony

Continuing my occasional habit of inflicting childhood poetic memories on innocent readers, here is one which I remember with particular affection. It was introduced to my class by Ian Murray, grade 6 teacher at Elizabeth Grove Primary School in 1964.

Whatever else may have been good or bad about Australian primary education at that time, the teachers I encountered at Elizabeth Grove Primary had a knack for choosing poetry which would arouse my love of the form. There is a direct line (an elephone line, perhaps) of development from poems like this (and these) in my late primary years to my later embracing of Milton's Paradise lost, Dante's Divina commedia, T S Eliot's Four quartets, Muriel Rukayser's Speed of darkness, Elizabeth Browning's Aurora Leigh, Frank Jones' Everything is like fire...

Here you go ... Laura E Richards' Eletelephony

Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant -
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone -
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I've got it right.)
Howe'er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee -
(I think I'd better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)

It's possible that the last two lines are apocryphal. The version shown at The literature network lacks them. Other on line versions include them, or something like them, though some omit other lines. Ray Girvan would get to the bottom of it and track down the definitive version; so, if I were the respectable academic I pretend to be, would I; but my affection is for the version I remember, so let it stand.

(The spell checker has had a ball with this post, let me tell you.)