“They can talk too, but they won’t.” *

Hello, remember me?  My blogging mojo has been on strike for a while now, but I’ve resolved to resuscitate this dying art – in fact, I’ve so resolved many times over recent months, but I’ve always been stalled by the lack of anything to actually write about.  Unlike more prolifically creative bloggers, I find it hard to just start writing without a topic, or a story, or both.  But this evening both landed in my lap.  I said to Z: “You should blog about that.”  She said: “No, you should.”  So here goes.

If you’ve visited the Zeddary, you may recall that between the dining room and the hall there’s a window.  It was actually part of the original Tudor fabric of the house, formerly an external window up in the roof space somewhere, which had been bricked up for many years.  It had been reinstalled where it is now, years ago, as part of a major extension/refurbishment.  It serves no particular function, apart from being beautiful and entertaining the cat.

Eloise Cat loves ducking through this internal window, flaunting her prowess at avoiding any delicate objects that might be stood on the sill.  Usually this isn’t a problem, but a while ago we put up a pair of heavy curtains on the hall side, to prevent her doing this when we were away and triggering the burglar alarm.  They’d been left closed last time, though they didn’t need to be.

This evening, as we were eating our dinner, Eloise Cat decided to investigate the corner cupboard where the best glasses and crockery are kept.  The door was open a crack, but she obviously couldn’t get in there.  But she was amusing herself, and us, by trying.

I remarked that we should open those curtains.  “She used to love going through there, and now she can’t.”

Eloise Cat turned away from the corner cupboard and looked at me.  “You reckon?” she said.

*A quote from Clive James, originally about dingos.

Zebra crossing (April 85)

Not long ago, there was a notice at each end of the zebra crossing between London Bridge Walk and the station forecourt, improvised on blackboards, which said “DANGER – CROSSING OUT OF ORDER”.  A friend enlightened me as to how a zebra crossing could be out of order: one of the belisha beacons had been knocked over by an errant vehicle.  Apparently this means that the crossing is a legal nonentity.  Drivers can mow you down on it with at least some impunity.

Incidentally, did you know that the belisha beacon was named after the transport minister who introduced it in 1934?  His name was Leslie Hore-Belisha.  So it could equally have been called the Hore beacon, but I imagine this was rejected on the grounds of ambiguity.

Rough woodland (April 1985)

“A Rothschild once remarked that no garden, however humble, should lack less than 2 ½ acres of rough woodland.”

This is the funniest thing in a stunningly ill-written review of some book or other about gardens.  Its major virtue is that of being the first sentence.

Taking the opposite of ‘no garden’ to be ‘every garden’, and of ‘lack’ to be ‘have’, the corollary of this statement is that every garden should have less than 2 ½ acres of rough woodland.  The reviewer is right in suggesting, later in the review, that some gardens fail this rigorous test; but mine, I am proud to say, is not one of them.  Its acreage of rough woodland is indeed considerably less than this stipulated maximum.

What would be interesting, and therefore not supplied by either A. Rothschild or the reviewer, would be the required ratio between rough woodland and other things, such as smooth woodland.  Imagine, for example, that this might be one unit of rough woodland to five of the other sorts of land, and that your tiny garden measures 10ʹ x 15ʹ.  You are thus allowed 30 square feet, or 6ʹ x 5ʹ, of rough woodland.  Clearly the trees would have to be bonsais; but what would make it rough?  I can only imagine an undergrowth of rather tatty aubrietia.  

Of Mastodons, Eels, Kittens and other people

Apologies to my regular readers in Ukraine, Russia, China, Romania and Indonesia, to whom this post will mean very little.  Also to my three or four readers in this country, who might be too young or old to share my nostalgia.  I hope everyone else enjoys it.

I’ve just finished reading the two Arthur Ransome books Z gave me for Christmas.  These are ‘We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea’ and ‘Secret Water’ (both of which are set, or in the case of WDMTGTS, start and finish in East Anglia, which presumably explains why she found them, in almost certainly the same 1950s editions that I’d read the first time around, in a local bookshop.)

My parents – my mother to be precise, because my father wasn’t a great reader; actually you can leave out the ‘great’ – dutifully supplied us kids with age-appropriate reading.  I don’t remember the full range, but it boiled down to two varieties: numerous variants on Enid Blyton’s single imaginative product; and Swallows and Amazons.

Although Z and I had shared our recollected love of these books, I was slightly nervous about returning to that world after an absence of at least sixty years – that world wouldn’t have changed, but I probably had. 

I’m not writing critical reviews of these marvellous books (oh, oops, I just did), nor will I spoil them with summaries of the plots (though I could quite easily: bunch of kids are placed in unintended peril by their remarkably self- and child-indulgent parents, survive imaginary and real threats by a combination of good luck, rapidly acquired skills and quite implausible grown-upness) or textual analysis (they do talk a bit quaint like, innit?)  Instead here’s a quick breakdown of the main characters and, most importantly, two words each on what they gave me all those years ago.

The Swallows: John (practical, anxious); Susan (elder sister); Titty (mischievous fantasist), Roger (word-playing joker).

The Amazons: Nancy (intoxicated challenger); Peggy (invisible make-weight).

Almost everything else has vanished, if it ever existed; but they haven’t changed, and nor have I.

Instruments of Tortuous Delight

I seem to be being drawn towards musical participations of various sorts, some more likely than others.  I’m not the musician I once was, due to lack of practice, in turn due to a combination of physical difficulty (my right arm doesn’t strum very well any more, and certainly can’t fingerpick), distraction (so much else going on in my life), and indolence.  I have five guitars – I had a picture of them all, but can’t find it and certainly lack the energy to recreate it – only two of which (the acoustic and, inevitably, my beloved Telecaster) I ever pick up nowadays.  Shame, really.

So I’ve gathered together all the other musical instruments I possess (with one exception, a mouth organ which I suspect is lurking inside one of the guitar cases).  Here they are.

Half of them, as you’ll see, are percussion.   The others are my old school recorder (which I can still tootle a bit); a mandolin that belonged to Viv, who never played it  (it needs restoration, really – the lack of tuning pegs, which doesn’t really show in the picture, makes it, erm, untunable); a duck, given to me as a birthday present by my brother: it took me ages to realise that you had to put your fingers on some holes and blow into its backside, whereupon it would emit up to, ooh, at least a pentatonic scale; and some little bells, which fall on the boundary but which I’ll count as not percussion, because you can do things with them other than shake and bang.  (I realise I’m on, ah, shaky ground here, categorically.)

I love percussion.  I have a great sense of rhythm, which sometimes even makes its way down the ever-lengthening neural pathways to my hands and feet.  I could have been a drummer, if I’d had the energy. 

My best ever percussion instrument was a Fiat 850 van we used to hire when Bessie, our Transit, was on one of her frequent rest cures.  But that’s another story. 

Here’s a useful thing

I used that blog title, or something like it, several years ago for a post about my pineapple slicer, which is a marvellous piece of technological design that exactly conforms to the cliché ‘fit for purpose’.  Or ‘does what it says on the tin’, or box in this case.  A box which says ‘pineapple slicer’ and contains a device that slices pineapples is a good box.

This morning’s discovery didn’t come in a box, and didn’t have an obvious purpose, though I didn’t know that at the time of its discovery.  I have a drawer in the table beside me which I think of as my ‘useful stuff’ drawer.  It’s full of stuff, some of which I use.  To be more precise (or rather, less imprecise), there is an assortment of pens; two or three old notebooks (kept because they possibly contain information that might prove useful at some point – indeed, one of them did just yesterday, reminding me of the HTML needed to embed a link in a blog comment…); a refill for my Cross pen; a device for fixing studs to golf shoes; a calculator; several pairs of defunct spectacles; a bumper sticker for Fender amps; a magnifying glass (4” diameter); much else.

The other day, I needed a rubber (that’s an eraser, for any Transatlantic readers) to facilitate my new passion for Sudoku, instilled in me by the awesome Z.  She can do it all in her head, but as a novice I need to write the candidate numbers in the cells, so a rubber is essential.  Eventually, I found one, which I’ve been using to varying effect, but it was a bit of a delve.  So this morning I decided that drawer needed a good seeing-to.

It still does, because one if the very first things I uncovered was this:

I inherited this curious little object from a distant relative-by-marriage about twenty years ago when his wife died and the family home in Narberth was cleared out.  Ivor was a taciturn Welshman whom I hardly knew but liked, perhaps, better than those closer to him.  When I was first introduced to him, in 1988, by his niece (later my wife), who had obviously had previous relationships, he was politely non-committal, but I later learned that his considered opinion consisted of a sniff and the words ‘Not bad.  Better than the last one, anyway’, which I took as unconditional approval. 

I knew that he repaired watches, whether as a hobby or a profession I never learnt.  So I’d always assumed that this tiny magnifying glass was a tool of that trade, though I couldn’t work out how it would be used in practice.  I stuck the picture on Facebook this morning, and was advised by my several expert friends there that it is, in fact, to quote Mike, ‘an inch glass, for a material worker to count the number of threads per inch in woven material’.  It should contain an insert in the base for calibration purposes, which is obviously long lost. 

So I’ve learnt something not very useful, but nonetheless fascinating, today.  Not, as you might suppose, the original purpose of this piece of early 20^th century fit-for-purpose technology; but that people were expected to use it as the tool of their living.  Not all day long, I don’t suppose; but still.  I can’t imagine that.  Or perhaps I can, but I’m not straying into that territory this evening.

And the drawer, of course, remains un-decluttered and full of useful stuff.

Tim is all over the place

I’m in the business of filling in time, which is not the same as wasting it.  I never waste the stuff, whatever appearances may suggest: there’s always an outcome of some kind, however inconsequential or trivial it might appear to uninformed outside observers.  For example, writing that last sentence filled in several minutes, which obviously weren’t wasted, otherwise I’d have deleted it, wouldn’t I?

So it was that this evening I found myself browsing through some old notebooks.  This was very interesting.  I discovered, for example, that in 1983 I went through a demented phase of serving up Chinese banquets: to whom, or why, I have no idea.  Here’s the list of ingredients for one such (provide your own punctuation* if you will):

Walnuts sesame seeds star anise mooli yellow bean sauce squid red pepper mangetout oyster sauce dry sherry mushrooms water chestnuts spring onions (lots!) beef chicken breast aubergine watercress pork eggs lapsang tea

I also, some years earlier, apparently became briefly obsessed with reading the Chambers Dictionary, from which I noted several definitions that amused or intrigued me.  Here’s just one:

Musique Concrète: a kind of mid-20 C music, made up of odds and ends of recorded sound variously handled.

Well, that was fun!  And the plumber’s coming in the morning to fit my new taps.  Isn’t life joyous?

*My fingers typed ‘punchuation, which I rather like.

Cutaway lugs

A chance encounter with a Claud Butler bike has untapped a torrent of memories.

I learned to ride a bike when I was about nine (which was rather late for me).  I have no memory of the bike on which this took place, but I do remember the process.  My father insistently taught me, and I doggedly refused to be taught, until one day when I was on my own I got onto the thing, in the back garden, and taught myself.  After that there was no stopping me.

For my twelfth birthday I was given a proper bike, or at least my parents’ notion of proper.  (They were overprotective of me, I now know.)  There was some subterfuge involving, I think, a cricket bat, which somehow couldn’t be unwrapped until I’d been taken down to the garden shed under some pretext, there to be unveiled this gorgeous Raleigh, in a colour I’d now call magenta but then saw as very displayable red.

It wasn’t, of course, my dreambike.  That would have entailed full drop bars, alloy rims, 10-speed Derailleur gears, many other features I can’t remember:  all mounted on a Claud Butler racing frame with, crucially, cutaway lugs.  These latter were supposedly designed to reduce weight, which was ridiculous – they were an early manifestation of teenage designer bling, and hence heavenly.

I didn’t have any of that.  My bike had semi-drops, chrome-plated  rims which rusted if not oiled weekly, a sprung saddle, three-speed Sturmey-Archer, old lady mudguards and, most dreadfully, a chain guard, in matching colour trim!  But it was still near the top of the local game, and I loved it.

Customisation rapidly followed, of course.  The chain guard was the first to go.  I can’t remember the other tweaks I snuck in behind my parents’ backs.  I do remember the parentally approved water bottles, and can still taste an aluminium-tinged warm sip through a plastic straw.  We discussed the feasibility of taking a hacksaw to those clunky lugs to make them look like cutaways; even, I think, drawing fantasy designs. 

It was never going to be the racing bike I craved.  But I can remember, quite vividly, the short and long expeditions it carried me on.  That was my first taste of real freedom, granted me, intentionally or not, I’ll never know, by my parents. 

I’ve no idea what happened to the bike.  

 

Guitar Heroes

As I’ve decided to become a musician again, my darling 50-year-old Fender Telecaster has gone into guitar hospital to have its innards fixed.  The outside, at least the cosmetic as opposed to functional parts, is beyond salvation, its battle scars and makeovers being part of its life story, not to be resprayed or botoxed over.  (This is starting to sound a bit self-referential, but.)  But it does have to do its job, and plugging it into an amp does need to result in more than electronic crackles.

Anyway, in preparation for that, I’d been picking it up and picking a bit.  Which has led me to ponder on the guitar players I most wish I’d been, or at least wish I could play like.  So here are three:

Scotty Moore.  When Elvis walked into Sam Phillips’ studio that fateful day in 1954, Sam rapidly put together a scratch studio group to back him.  Scotty was the lynchpin, and produced some great country-tinged fingerpicking licks that, to this day, I find it hard to unravel. 

But after the great RCA sell-out (Sam got, I think, $34,000 for the lot, artist and recordings; the illegal immigrant ‘Colonel Tom Parker’ got the right to squeeze every squeezable cent out of ‘his discovery’, slowly eroding and then destroying the talent in the process), the sound had to harden up, and Scotty jumped in with both hands.  But he was too much of a natural-born musician to treat this new-fangled rock’n’roll stuff as mere noise, as most people out of their teens did.

Take his solo on  'Too Much', from 1956.   He starts with four bars of a vicious chordal chromatic up-and-down run, as rock-n-roll as it comes, then wanders off into territory more usually inhabited, at the time, by West Coast cool jazz exponents like Stan Getz, before bringing it back down again with a snippet of that good ol’ country pickin’.   Sheer genius!  Scotty later claimed that the middle bit was an accident, as the song was in an unfamiliar key (B flat) and he’d got lost; but I don’t believe him.

Steve Cropper.  From somebody who was, I submit, the real and very present power behind the newly-ascended  King’s throne (imagine ‘Hound Dog’ without the guitar), to an equally powerful but much less evident contributor.   If you’ve heard anything by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, or any other Memphis soul masterpiece from the sixties, you’ve heard Steve, in his role as a member of Booker T and the MGs, the Stax house rhythm section.   I was going to use the word ‘minimalism’, but that’s not it; ‘precision’ is closer, or just plain ‘rightness’.  I’ve chosen, of course, 'Green Onions' – he only plays about ten notes, but they’re all the right ones, necessarily in the right order.

Link Wray.  Finally, a guitarist who, although he had a long, illustrious career as a master picker (I remember a long-ago documentary in which Link and Chet Atkins traded finger-style licks for several minutes, competing and laughing out loud at each other’s audacity), is remembered for just one ground-breaking single from 1958 – but what a single!  If you’ve seen ‘Pulp Fiction’ you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about: 'Rumble'.  It’s been said that without this record, the future of popular music would have been very different – no heavy metal, no punk – you may have your views on whether or not this would have been a good thing, but you can’t deny its power.  It hit me between the ears when I first heard it, and I still love it.

 

When I said I wish I could play like them, of course I can, at least some of the simpler stuff.  (I could teach anyone to play ‘Rumble’, even if they’d never touched a guitar in their life.)  What I really meant was: I wish I’d been there.  I wish I’d thought of it first! 

Can’t wait to get the Tele back…

P.S. I’ve no idea whether the Spotify links will work for you.

 

 

Old Books

What do you do with old books?  I don’t mean the fly-by-night paperbacks I haul in periodically from Waterstone’s, read once and then recycle via the bookbank up at the tip.  (Or not, sometimes they get kept, reread and, rarely, find their way into the permanent library.)  No, I’m talking about really old books.

About sixty of them have been furnishing my dining room for twenty years or more, in a bookcase next to the fireplace.  They range from assorted Prayer books and semi-religious tracts (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, anyone?), through an almost-complete set of Dickens reissues (Unwin editions, 1930s I’d guess), to worthy tomes like The Origin of Species, Macaulay’s Essays on English History, and The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle.  Plus a fair smattering of Victorian verse anthologies, several Works of Shakespeare, and a possibly earlyish edition of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.  They’re all fairly tatty, almost certainly financially worthless and, most importantly, with one or two exceptions have never been read by anyone still alive.

I’m getting rid of them because I don’t think books ought to furnish a room.  I’m going to go slightly metaphysical on you now.  Books have no intrinsic value.  Their only worth is in the thoughts they express.  In turn, this value is circumscribed by the quality of both the thoughts themselves and their expression in a particular book.  But above all, if I’m right here, that worth dissolves into nothingness unless the book gets read.  I’m not going to read any of these sixty or so books, and I can’t find a way of enabling or persuading anyone else to do so.  So in every sense, they’re worthless.  So they’re landfill.  Right?

And yet.  And yet, perhaps they do contain, at least some of them, an ineluctable value beyond the paper, the cardboard and the words within them, read or not.  I skim through the flyleafs (flyleaves?) and find inscriptions which seem to carry their own stories, ones that will never be told but just might still exist in a memory or an imagination.  Certainly in an imagination, in fact: I find myself creating their lives and relationships even as I transcribe them.

Poetical Works by Moore: “Caroline Matthias on her 13^th birthday from her affectionate cousin J M Laws.  Jan 1861”

The May-Flower by Harriet Beecher Stowe:  “R. A. Scammell.  A birthday gift from A.G.  Feb 10^th 1882”

The Poetical Works of William Collins  “Edward Geo. Browne  Presented to him on the 26^th May 1834 by his friend and tutor J. Blern(?) Anstis(?) with the sincerest wishes for his welfare.  St Helier Jersey”

And in one of the Shakespeares: “E L Rea ‘02”  That’s my grandfather.

Caravan revisited, at last

As I hadn’t been able to go and shut down the caravan in the autumn, I'd entrusted the task to Joseph.  So I phoned him last week and left a message to make sure the various bits of plumbing would be on site for me to reinstall when I visited for the grand re-opening ceremony.  I’d planned an overnighter last Monday to do this, but this didn’t happen, mainly because of westerly gales, so there was a smidgeon of anxiety when we set out on Easter Saturday.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.  Good old Joseph had not only delivered the plumbing, he’d installed it too, almost certainly better than I’d have managed.  This man is a hero, as long as you keep on the right side of him.  I think I’ve written before about this – the caravan site is run as a benign, hands-off despotism, in which the rules often have to be uncovered by intuition rather than read from a lawbook.  Common sense usually prevails – for example, don’t fly kites, there are overhead power lines – but doesn’t necessarily suffice – always park across the slope, wheels turned uphill, because a car ran away and crashed into a van, about twenty years ago.

Bee had read a little item in the Telegraph (purely by chance, not her usual paper of choice) about standing stones in Mynydd Preseli, which was a good enough excuse to set off on Sunday to explore this wild piece of inland Pembrokeshire.  A quick map-skim revealed that the area is riddled with ancient monuments, including the birthplace of the Stonehenge bluestones, and sure enough we soon found Gors Fawr:

Not a hugely informative notice*, you’ll agree – if anyone knows the answer to the question, please do share it – and the stones themselves aren’t that impressive, but the setting more than makes up for that:

Our next find, however, after a fabulous fish’n’chip lunch in the garden of the Golden Lion pub at Newport, was the truly spectacular Pentre Ifan**:

It’s what remains of a prehistoric burial chamber, the covering earth having obviously long eroded away; but I couldn’t help imagining the delight of that ancient architect in achieving that exquisite tripodal balancing act.

Add in a re-(for me)-visit to one of my spiritual homes, Strumble Head:

All in all, a thoroughly rewarding day out.

Should've taken my shorts, though.

*You can find some more information, albeit mostly speculative, here.

**And here.

Five random notes

1. There was another gorgeous butterfly in the garden earlier, but it scarpered before I could get the camera. “Not ready for my close-up, Mr de Mille”, I heard it mutter as it fluttered away. Mostly black, with bright red flashes on its wingtips.  Any clues?
2. Back in May, I turned the central heating thermostat down to 18⁰C: it’s just clicked on (5.35 pm)!  Outside, it’s 15⁰, and hasn’t been much more all day.  How am I supposed to get those tomatoes ripened??
3. The letter ‘i’ on my keyboard is making an ominous clunky noise.  Could this be due to the residual presence of dried red wine? 
4. Rummaging through a drawer for an old butter knife, as one does, I came across the fork from a cutlery set I was given at my christening, back in 1942.  (The rest – knife, spoon? –  is lost; as is the butter knife.)  It’s solid silver, little lion on the back to prove it, and is engraved with my initials.  I found this quite moving for some reason.   I also discovered that, if you tap it on a hard surface, it plays a very interesting chord. 
5. Does anybody speak cat?  I can communicate with most dogs, but cats are mysterious.  I was sitting out under my bus shelter when a tabby who frequents the garden crept out of the shrubbery.  In the past, any friendly approach by me would be rebuffed with a startled stare and a dash back into the bushes – but this time it crept up, miaowing threateningly, came close enough to be briefly stroked, rolled over on its back and allowed its tummy to be tickled.  Then it jumped up and ran away like a scaredy-cat.  It might just be hungry, of course, but it’s not going to get fed around here.  Or it needs counselling.  Mysterious.      

*

Retail Entropy

Jackson’s, a legendary department store in the centre of Reading, finally closed down last Christmas Eve, after 140 years of selling school uniforms and sensible underwear and imitation Dresden knick-knacks, and of being as iconic a landmark in Reading as, say, Selfridge’s in Oxford Street or Lewis’s in Leeds.  Plans have just been unveiled to preserve the façade, whilst installing flats* and, yes, shops, behind it.

I think I shopped there three times.  Once for an unlined cream linen jacket (which I wore for many years) and a panama hat (I must have been going through some kind of Somerset Maugham phase), and twice for presents for elderly aunts.  Jackson’s was the go-to place for presents for elderly aunts.  So I can’t say I’ll miss it as a shop – but I think I will as a symbol.

A symbol of what?  Well, walk into T. P. Hughes, Pettits, or Ocky White’s, to take three examples I am (or was) familiar with, and you’ll be uniquely in Tenby, Wallingford or Haverfordwest: those shops are (or were**) intrinsic to the town where they were born and grew up.  Walk into John Lewis, Debenhams or House of Fraser, and you could be anywhere.  This is not to denigrate the big chains, just to say that something special is being lost.  Crankiness, quirkiness, localism, call it what you will.  I kind of wish I’d shopped in Jackson’s more.

In Bournemouth, where I was born and grew up, there were four big department stores, all very different.   Bobby’s turned into Debenhams, while Plummers also briefly became Debenhams (until Debenhams decided they couldn’t sustain two stores in the same town and closed it down).  The surviving Debenhams has recently been rebadged as ‘Bobby’s, though I doubt if the clock has been turned back to the fifties.  Brights is House of Fraser.  Only Beales survives.  The last time I was in there, ten years ago, it hadn’t changed much.  I bought a wallet, which I’m still using.

I was once told that you could identify a good town by the presence of a pet shop, an old-fashioned ironmongers’ and a second-hand bookshop.  Any candidates?

* Some of which will, apparently, be ‘affordable’, as opposed to the other sort – but that’s another debate.

** Ocky’s closed down in 2013.  I can’t say I regret the shop, only went there once, but I do rather regret the name.  

Influential Albums #3

The 5^th Dimension: The Magic Garden 1967

Here it is on Spotify: The Fifth Dimension – Magic Garden

Jimmy Webb is best known for his evocative songs for Glen Campbell – ‘Galveston’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ – and before that, the two albums with Richard Harris (cheekily recycling Rex Harrison) which yielded, amongst other lesser known chunks of grandiose kitsch, the seven minute soft green icing of ‘McArthur Park’.  Later, he’d pluck up the courage to sing with his own voice. (Check out ‘P. F. Sloan’, a loving tribute to an otherwise forgotten seventies non-iconic singer-songwriter, recently nicely covered by Rumer.)

Before any of that, though, he cut his teeth on two albums with the unlikely vehicle of this superficially manufactured vocal group (three guys, two girls, no stars).  The first contained the bouncy ‘Up, up and Away’ but was otherwise unmemorable.  The second was a masterpiece.

‘The Magic Garden’ is primarily a break-up album, in the form of a song cycle.  It’s framed by a ‘Prologue’ and an ‘Epilogue’, with the words “Have you tried love?”, which I remember thinking was a clever trick, spoofing some kind of soap powder advert.  In between, ten songs take you through the famous four stages of love – exhilaration (‘The Magic Garden’); doubt (‘Dreams/Pax/Nepenthe’*); resentment (‘The Worst That Could Happen’); and bitter resignation (‘Paper Cup’), with thematic links between tracks. 

There are a couple of anomalies – ‘Ticket to Ride’, although a stomping version, juts out a bit like a leftover from an earlier meal, and the coyly titled ‘The Girls’ Song’ is clearly a technical exercise in out-Burting Bacharach.  But these are minor blemishes – and they both fit into the story, actually.

And the sound!  Believe it or not, it was the first record I ever heard on stereo headphones.  Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps chemical enhancements played their part, but I had never heard music so deeply and widely before outside of a concert hall.  I like to think that it was mostly due to the sheer quality.  World-class production (the legendary Bones Howe) and performances (Hal Blaine’s ubiquitous West Coast ‘Wrecking Crew’), and of course the 5^th’s finely honed vocals.  Slap on the cans, press the pedal to the metal and catch track 7, ‘Requiem: 820 Latham’.**

 

Influential?  Well, it certainly was on me.  I spent the next twelve months trying to write Jimmy Webb songs – multi-structured, symphonically chordal, cryptically personal, cynically romantic.  I failed, of course, and no-one has ever heard them: but the attempt justified the failure.

 

 

*Jimmy could do cryptic titles with the best of them.

** Like I said.

Ceiling Space

Rereading ‘Master and Commander’, I came across the following phrase:

“Hanging tables appeared, dropping instantly from the beams …”

What a brilliant idea, I thought.  Although my dining room is certainly bigger than some, much of the floor is taken up with a large table which is used, usually, for no more than two hours per day.  If the table were suspended from the ceiling, the floor space could be put to all sorts of other purposes, such as, I don’t know – a dance floor?

It’s not a new idea of course.  Patrick O’Brian has rarely been faulted on historical accuracy through the twenty Aubrey-Maturin novels, so I’m certain this practice was commonplace in the eighteenth century Royal Navy, especially in a cramped misshapen little brig like the ‘Sophie’.  I first read this book in about 2004; but I realised today that the idea was by no means new to me even then.

In the kitchen of the house, 37 Watcombe Road, where I spent the first eleven years of my life, there was a thing called the clothes rail.  It consisted of, I think, five long wooden slats, held together by two cast iron davits, lowered and hoisted via a system of pulleys and ropes which were secured to a cleat on the wall.  The rail would be lowered, loaded with damp washing, and hauled back up to ceiling level for it to dry.  (If the clothes ended up smelling a bit of fried fish or boiled cabbage, that didn’t matter much in the 1940s.)

The kitchen of my present house must have had one of these devices too at some time, because its cleat is still there, just by the hall door.  I hang spare keys on it nowadays.

Superstition

Were all pavements actually paved back in the 1950s?  Or were they tarmacked?

(Sorry, I’ve just been away for a few minutes to see if spellcheck has the spelling of ‘tarmacked’ right.  It doesn’t look right.  But it is.)

(I’ve been away for longer than that, I know; this is mainly because too much of my time over recent weeks has been about boring medical stuff, which I really don’t want to impose on you.)

My reason for asking is that I was reminded the other day of the rule that it’s unlucky to step on the cracks between the paving stones, because you’ll fall down them into hell or something.   I was taught this, aged about eight, by another boy when we were walking home from school; I can picture the moment, so that suburban side street in Bournemouth must have had slabs, not tar.

My real reason for remembering all that is my reaction.  I wasn’t a rebellious child in any overt way whatsoever; but I did like to harbour satisfying little mutinies in my head, possibly to be deployed at a later opportune moment.  (I still do that.)  So eight-year-old me decided, there and then in Watcombe Road, to step on every pavement crack I could manage.  I was reminded the other day that I still do that, I still step on the cracks. 

That led me to remember my grandmother, who had a superstition for every occasion.  I’ve googled, and she had all the usual ones – black cats, ladders, crack’d mirrors and so on – but also one or two entirely of her own.  (Quite probably of her own making.)  Because she died before I’d learnt the importance of remembering trivial detail, I can only recall one of these, but it’s worth passing on:

“If you see an ambulance, you must touch your lapel until you see a dog.”

I don’t actually obey that one anymore, but can anyone top it?  I’d hate to think I was ignorantly putting myself at risk.

Hobby (Part I)

‘A favourite pursuit followed as an amusement.’

If I accept this dictionary definition, then I’ve had, and have, dozens of hobbies.  But the definition is far too loose, and misses the crucial element of a true hobby, which is obsession.  In my sense, I’ve only ever had the one, which was – guess what – stamp collecting.

My parents had no experience of bringing up a boy, and my father probably had few memories of his own upbringing, which in any case would have been very different, in the 1920s, to mine in the 1950s.  He certainly had evolved his own set of hobbies by the time I was eight or nine  – woodworking, gardening, fiddling with electrical stuff  – but I’m sure he didn’t think of these as hobbies: they were just the fabric of his life, things ‘done’ rather than ‘followed’.

I was a compliant child until I reached puberty, and took a natural interest in whatever was placed in front of me, so when it was suggested that I might like to take up stamp collecting, I just went along with it.  The idea was prompted by the fact that a particular aunt, Maud maybe, had ‘collected stamps’ and decreed, as late Victorian aunts did, that Timothy might like to inherit her collection and make something more of it.  My mother (who was in charge but also in awe) had no choice but to pass this early bequest on to me; I had a look, saw an opportunity for some sorting and classification*, and got stuck in.

Aunt Maud’s stamp collection was, I rapidly saw, a chaotic mess.  It seemed reasonable to try and make sense of this, so I did, sorting by country, then (having acquired a Stanley Gibbons catalogue) by date, issue, colour variations, perforations …  After a few months, I decided to specialise in what was then called ‘British Empire’.  In 1953, I was gifted a full set of mint Coronation stamps, from every Colony and Dominion.  But what I craved was a Penny Black.  I saved up pocket money for months, and finally went to the stamp shop in Boscombe and bought one, with a rather unusual red revenue postmark, for £2.

 

Part II will follow tomorrow.

 

* Perhaps my only true enduring hobby.

Black Spiderman

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. 

King-In-Waiting (maybe), bored out of his head by hyperactive underemployment, employs black spider to write irascible scrawls to anonymised government functionaries, believed to include ministers of the (yes!) Crown, about topics of personal interest, including (we may assume, since we can’t know): the number of motorcycle outriders needed to bring Windsor town centre to a standstill whenever he wants to visit mummy; the brand of nail scissors being used to manicure the lawns at Highgrove; or his Toothbrush-Batman’s* complaints about the difficulty of squeezing these new-fangled plastic tubes from the bottom up, the old lead ones were so much better.  There may be others.

All smacks of National Security to me.  But no, I stand corrected by no less a personage than the attorney general.  (Who, as a minister of the Crown, will one day report indirectly to aforesaid King-In-Waiting.  Maybe.)  No, the problem is as follows. 

The monarch is constitutionally obliged to be politically neutral.  The black spider letters, if published, would incontrovertibly demonstrate that the heir to the throne is no such thing.  Which we already know to be true.  Therefore, they can’t be published, otherwise we would all start believing what we already know to be true.   

Have I got it right?  I have, haven’t I?

What I tell you three times is true.

* See what I did there?

Visible Means of Support

On the Antiques Roadshow, someone had a collection of walking sticks.  They all seemed to be quite valuable, so I dashed out to the hall to check the two I have.  I’m fairly sure they are both worthless in money, but they’ve made me wonder, as seems to happen quite often recently about things, where they came from and what they might really be worth, in history.

 

The one on the right, I suspect, belonged to my maternal grandfather, Esmond Lloyd Rae.  I remember quite a lot about him, but mostly dating from his latter days when he was stroke- and bedridden, blind, and I had to kiss his stubbly cheek goodnight in his smelly room.  In earlier years he was a jolly music-loving toper who grew raspberries and kept chickens; and he played the violin well, I was often told.  I don’t think I ever heard him play, although can one ever be sure about that kind of thing? – when was the first time you ever heard the sound of a violin? 

That walking stick, with its cool black ebony finish and the firmly functional no-nonsense knob at the top, looks to me exactly like the kind of accessory a proud Yorkshireman called Esmond would brandish on a youthful promenade in Wakefield.  So that’s the imaginary story I’m assigning to that one.

 

The one on the left intrigues me more.  The handle is carved ivory, and looks as though it’s been well-caressed.  (The carvings round the top are quite worn.)   More importantly, although you can’t see it in the photo, the ferrule bears the inscription ‘F G L’.  Knowing what I do of my family history, the ‘F’ must stand for Frank, and the ‘L’ for Large; but what about the ‘G’?  It could only be George, couldn’t it?  But there isn’t a Frank George Large in the family tree my sister compiled, which took that side back to at least 1840. 

And off goes my imagination again.  I want to see Frank George, in the early 19^th century, switching this walking stick around, sauntering along the towpath at Lechlade, just for show.  And I want to know what he was thinking about.

I never will, obviously, so I’ll have to make it up.  Meanwhile, I’ve just recently spotted someone else’s collection of shooting sticks … 

Influential Albums #1

A few days ago, Martin issued the challenge, and I always accept challenges.  Applying a few criteria – I have to own them, they have to have influenced music in general, and they have to have influenced me – here’s the first.  (Probably the first of two.)

Vanilla Fudge: Vanilla Fudge (Atco 7567-90390-2)  1967

The Fudge were later, in my view wrongly, branded as the fathers of heavy metal.  Although some of their later efforts could justify this categorisation, this first album certainly doesn’t.  If it can be classified at all, it would be as the bridge between psychedelia and prog rock.  Except that it’s a covers album.  Although plagiarism was rife, neither of those genres was noted for consciously choosing other people’s material over their own – egomania was a driving force behind most late sixties music, but Vanilla Fudge weren’t interested in that.  They were interested in drama and emotion.

The track list starts with ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ends with ‘Eleanor Rigby’ (with a sneaky little cross-reference right at the end), but touches a good few non-Beatles bases in between.  Curtis Mayfield, the Zombies, Motown …  These basic pop songs are extended (some might say bloated, but I disagree) into eight minute Wagnerian epics, slowed right down and embellished with classical quotes, melodic squibs, and tantalising links between songs, of which there are just seven.  (Consider that earlier that year, ‘Pepper’ had been regarded as revolutionary in containing only eleven as against the industry-standard twelve.)

The album was produced by Shadow Morton, who’d previously given us the Shangri-Las’ musical  novellas (‘Leader of the Pack’, ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’).  As far as I can tell, it was recorded live, that is with no instrumental overdubs (though some of the vocals probably were added later), on four-track.  Shadow rightly judged that studio trickery wasn’t necessary or appropriate, because he was working with consummate musicianship.  

Just listen, if you can (it’s on Spotify).  You will hear the best bubbling, gurgling Hammond organ sweeps and swishes ever; high tuneful virtuoso bass lines to make a Macca swoon; vibrato-laden angelic four part harmonies; some genuinely moving moments as well as some still challenging noise … and above all, sheer smile-triggering entertainment!  Play it LOUD!