Evidence

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

This is Chomsky’s famous example of a sentence that, though grammatically perfect, is devoid of meaning.   T S Eliot is also entitled to say ‘I think we are in rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones’, for the same reason: English is being used in both cases at one remove from pure meaning.  Chomsky is demonstrating the divorce between structure and content; whilst Eliot is showing us that meaning can be made to sit some way behind both.  It’s the distinction between the two functions of language: to communicate, and to convey.

Which brings me to the point: should Abu Qatada be deported to Jordan?  The arguments hinge around the use of the word ‘evidence’, and in this case, we can home in on Chomsky rather than Eliot, communicate rather than convey, because, for once, a word means something that (granted the nuances of differing legal systems) can be agreed upon to mean one thing: evidence is information or allegation that can be presented in a court of law and demonstrated to be true.

In this case (and any other), it would be for the court to establish both of these criteria.  So, in this country, we are told that he can’t be tried because the ‘evidence’ against him cannot be exposed to public view for fear of prejudicing the safety or viability of the source.  Fine.  By definition, that’s not evidence, because you’re not prepared to disclose it in court.  So there’s no case.  Similarly, in Jordan, by the same test, if ‘evidence’ has been gleaned by means accepted to be illegal, again, there is no evidence.

I personally couldn’t care less whether this bloke is renditioned to Jordan, stuck back to rot in a British gaol, tried, convicted or acquitted in either place, or set free to roam the world, pathetic but harmless as a stinking Lazarus.  I do care about my language though.

Incidentally, colourless green ideas don’t sleep furiously; and we are indeed in rats’ alley, but haven’t lost our bones.

Definitions

Bonus (n):  Something good or desirable gained or given with something else; an extra payment for reaching specified targets or at special times of the year; a bribe.

Bribe (n):  Something offered to someone to influence their judgement unduly or to persuade them to behave in a certain way; spoil, booty.

Booty (n): Spoil taken in war or by force; plunder.

Plunder (vt): To carry off the goods or possessions of by force.

Spoil (vt): To mar; to impair; to make useless; to treat over-indulgently.

Indulgent (adj): Ready to gratify the wishes of others; compliant; not severe.

Severe (adj): Conforming to a rigorous standard; hard to endure.

Gratification (n): A recompense, tip or bribe.

Recompense (n): Reward.

Reward (n): That which is given in return for good (or sometimes evil).

All drawn, selectively, from The Chambers Dictionary, 2003

Rescue

The following is reconstructed  from first-, second- and third-hand reports during and after the event, so I can’t vouch for the details.  But it seems it went roughly like this:

Just to recap, a lot of snow fell over the Peak District last weekend as people were trying to make their way to Buxton for the wedding.  I was lucky, or skilful, or both, enough to get across from the M6, via England’s most dangerous road, ahead of the worst of it.  Others were less so.

The bridegroom’s uncle R and his family had driven up from Brighton.  They hit the High Peak at about six, two hours later than me.  By then the snow must have been four or five inches deep on the road, and staying frozen as it settled.  As R described it, 4x4s were struggling.  A Jaguar didn’t stand a chance.  I don’t know anything about his snow-driving skills or experience (I learnt mine on Italian mountain passes back in the sixties), but in the event it was the car that let them down.  For some reason, the transmission locked itself in ‘park’ and refused to let go.

The groom’s brother (who I’ll have to call E because  he’s actually another R) volunteered to go and fetch them.  It seems that a decision was reached, up in that icy wasteland, that R and S would stay with the car and await the rescue services, while E ferried the two kids back down to Buxton.  Probably a bad decision with hindsight, they should all have gone.  A good decision, however, made twenty four hours earlier, now emerged:  the daughter, L, had taken it upon herself to load some blankets and sleeping bags into the car – ‘Just in case,’ as she put it later.  Wise girl.

By now, the snowplough had been through, and the road would probably have been passable, if the car had been capable of movement.  R and S wrapped up and waited.  At one point, she had to get out for a pee – ‘That slowed some of the passing cars down,’ she told us next day, ‘but they didn’t offer us a lift.’  After about an hour, the rescue man turned up.  (To be slightly fair, he’d probably been quite busy.)  He took a look at the shift lever, went off to his vehicle and returned with a screwdriver, which he proceeded to apply to something invisible to the non-technical naked eye.  It didn’t work.

‘Have to call technical support,’ he announced.  This took some time, after which he returned with a bigger screwdriver.  That didn’t work either.  Rescue man announced that there was nothing more he could do, and prepared to leave.

‘Well, can you drop us off in Buxton?’ asked R.  ‘Please?’  Rescue man shook his head and said – and this is a verbatim quote – ‘No.’  And drove off.

They got there in the end, of course  – because E, another true hero, went out again – again!  There were complications even at this stage, but I lost track.  The wedding was attended by R and S, who both eventually got thoroughly and appropriately … rescued, is that a useful new euphemism?   And the car got recovered and repaired on Monday, I’m told.  So it all ended well.  (Except for that rescue man, of course, who broke down on his way home and caught pneumonia … No, I made that bit up.)

White Wedding

The dress code, as some of you will know, was ‘Dress to Kill’.  I received much-welcomed advice, ranging from ‘full fig’, via ‘SAS uniform’, to ‘green loon pants and tie-dye T shirt’ – thank you all!  But in the end I decided my upstaging days were over, and settled for L’s advice: dark suit, blue shirt, polka-dot tie (white on darker blue as it turned out).  Boring; but most of the men of my generation went for white shirt and paisley tie, so I was actually quite outragous.  (And you haven’t seen my belt!)  There were in fact two kilts, both on men; I wondered, given the code, whether this was some kind of Scots Nat statement about Bannockburn.  They looked good on the dancefloor though.

I’d set out for Buxton about one o’clock on Saturday.  (The wedding, by the way, was on Sunday, the bride’s family being Jewish.)  Snow started around the M42, and was pretty significant once I turned off the M6 for Congleton and the A54 across the Peaks to Buxton.  This was once voted the most dangerous road in England.  It certainly looked that way on Saturday.  Apprehensive doesn’t begin to say it.  BMWs are not famed for their prowess in these conditions.  But the new ‘winter tyres’ proved their worth –  I found myself overtaking wheel-spinners up hills – so a heartfelt thanks to BMW for their brilliant £1,200 correction of their own design flaw!  It was five inches deep by the time I got there.

That evening, a few of us dined at a Thai round the corner from the hotel.  Most Thai restaurants rightly pride themselves on their presentational skills, a meal being to them an aesthetic as well a culinary experience.  But they were completely upstaged by the vehicular cabaret taking place on the street outside, the high spot being a bus, at the third attempt, succeeding in skidding into the bollards lining the pavement.  We were concerned about R and S, whose Jag had conked out on that same road I had managed to transverse three hours earlier.  There’s another story there, which I’ll probably tell in the future; for now, suffice to say they made it in the end.

I won’t say too much about the actual wedding, because all weddings are alike whilst being uniquely different.  Also because this isn’t The Tatler (not that I know what a Tatler is).  It was in the hotel where I was staying.  They got married, beautifully; there was champagne (well, Prosecco actually) by the gallon; there were speeches, ranging from long and funny to short and, er, funny; delicious food, free bar, disco (my dancing days may be dwindling, or my ‘Get fit, Tim!’ days approaching); and an after-hours pay bar which went on a lot longer than I did.

Heroism In The Face Of Adversity Spot: I banged my wrist against something on Sunday morning after breakfast, resulting in a small wound which was bleeding, so I went to Reception to ask if they had a plaster.  The nice lady explained that they did, but weren’t allowed to give them out to guests (‘Health and Safety – you might be allergic to them’ – oh yes, that’s why I asked for one), but heroically gave me one anyway.

How to be a politician 2012

1. Think of something your advisors say people might believe.
2. Say it.
3. Say the opposite.
4. [optional step] Claim to have been quoted out of context.
5. Accuse your opponents of having said it first.
6. Accuse your opponents of having said the opposite first.
7. Think of the worst joke you can.
8. Say it.
9. Deny that it was a joke.
10. Deny that you said it.
11. [optional step] Claim to have been quoted out of context.
12. Wait until the last possible moment before press time.
13. Think of something else your advisors say people might believe.
14. Return to step 2.

Mouse tale

This was years ago.  I was getting the wellies out of the garage for a trip to the caravan.  We kept one set of industrial socks in the wellies in those days, another in the yomping boots.  This mouse had found a nice cosy nesting place, with a plentiful supply of bedding which only required a small amount of shredding, in one of V's Hunters.  I don't know which of us was more surprised, me or the mouse - I'll never forget the expression on its face.  It certainly had the quicker reactions, though.  V was in the kitchen doorway just in time to see it scuttle away under the cooker.

By the time we got to Wales, there'd been some embellishment.
"The place is infested with voles," our friends were informed. 
"Mice, I think," I added sotto voce.
"Voles!"  Her voice dropped.  "It was not a mouse.  It was a vole.  Wasn't it."

When we got back home, there were skirmishes.  I didn't really want to murder the poor little beasties, but I didn't particularly want them crapping underneath the cooker either.  I got some of those humane traps, the ones where the quarry crawls in after the bait and it tips up so it can't get out again, and bought peanut butter specially.  Friends were generous with advice.
"You need to take them quite a long way away.  They have a range of about a quarter of a mile, like wasps."
"Well, why don't the sodding wasps sting the sodding mice to death, or the sodding mice eat the sodding wasps?"  I enquired.  (We had wasps as well at the time.)

Eventually I came down one morning and one of the traps was clattering around.  Aha.  I put it in the boot (not the welly, silly, the car) and drove it up to Prospect Park.  I opened the trap and gave it a shake, and sure enough something dropped out and scarpered into the undergrowth.
What still preys on my mind (though not in my kitchen) is that, as I watched it run, it didn't seem to have a tail.  I hadn't even opened the drawer where I keep the carving knife.  I didn't look inside the trap either.  I threw it into the bushes after the vole and went home.

Something a bit fishy

About a year ago, I posted (here) what now looks like a fairly topical rant about bonuses - don't worry, I promised trivia and trivia you shall have. 

Sitemeter sometimes tells me that a visit to my blog is the result of a Google search, and sometimes tells me the search terms that resulted in the visit.  For example, if tomorrow someone were to google 'fishy', the current post would probably be somewhere around the two-million mark, *note to self: try it*, assuming that googlebot is keeping up.

I freely confess to checking my Sitemeter stats every day, in order to boost my self-esteem; and sometimes I'll click on the 'detail' box, just out of curiosity.  (That's how I know about the google thing.)

So this morning I noticed that somebody had googled 'undercooked shark steak' and come up with the aforementioned post.  A bell suddenly rang - this has happened before!  In fact, when I think about it, it's happened quite a few times before.  Probably a dozen or more since the original post.  I'd never thought anything of it until now (I tend not to remember that sort of stuff), but today the links clicked together in my brain. 

Someone out there (in the US, actually) either a) is a fan of my blog but hasn't managed to work out a more efficient way of accessing it than to google the title of an inconsequential post from a year ago, or b) has an intriguing fixation on how to cook fish badly.  Any other theories?  It doesn't bother me in the least, but as you know I like a puzzle.

Wimps

In 1911, a weak Liberal Government forced through the Parliament Act, which effectively disempowered the House of Lords from any lasting control over legislation.  They did this by packing the Lords with new peers who understood that they were for the sole purpose of ensuring their own disempowerment.  It worked.

In 2012, a weak (in perhaps a different sense) Coalition Government has proved itself incapable of preventing the Royal Bank of Scotland’s remuneration committee from awarding their CEO a million pound bonus for failing to meet any of his objectives.  Osborne and his poodles whinge that ‘we don’t wish to intervene in the day-to-day operations of the Bank’ – oh, for ***k’s sake, why not?  We’re not asking you to man the tills.  As majority shareholder, you (via your tame UKFI subsidiary), can surely pack the remuneration committee with your own appointees – just like Lloyd George and Asquith did to the Lords – on the understanding that they may NOT approve ANY bonuses whatsoever.  What’s stopping you, Government?

I know two possible  answers.  Either it’s because you’re still in thrall to those powers-that-were, you still believe that discredited claim that we have to ‘reward talent’ or it’ll go elsewhere (though we don’t hear so much of that nowadays, perhaps because Hester has just sacked most of those people); or, more likely, it’s because you’re a bunch of gutless wimps. 

Tomorrow, I promise some trivia.

Everybody agrees

 The last refuge of the modern-day scoundrel is to establish the ground on indisputable quicksand.  I want to build a conservatory, or concrete over my front garden?  The last thing I want is people wondering why.  If they’re allowed to stray in that direction, I’ll never win.  So what I do is divert the argument into process rather than substance.  If I can achieve that – get them fighting over what might be the best way to solve my problem, rather than wondering what exactly that problem was in the first place – then I’ve won.  So establishing at (or ideally before) the outset, as a sine qua non, that ‘everybody agrees that I need more living/parking space’ is critical.

We can see this strategy unfolding by the day in several areas: HS2 and Boris Island, for instance.  As far as I can tell, nobody, but nobody, has questioned that there are problems, because ‘everybody agrees’ that we have to shorten journey times between London and Birmingham by however many minutes, or pump more and more air passengers through Britain on their way to somewhere else – because otherwise, well, that’d be a bad thing.

 ‘Our future success as a competitive nation depends on it’ is about the most cogent argument I’ve yet heard for these or many other similar proposals.  Nobody seems to be asking ‘hang on, before we even start talking, let’s see some numbers’.  By which I don’t mean fatuous made-up so-called benefit figures, I mean the simple ‘opportunity cost’ question: what will be lost if we don’t do this?  What will be lost, and by whom, and when and where, precisely?  It shouldn’t be that hard to work out.  After all, airport expansion projects have been proposed and rejected for decades.  The projected benefits must have been quantified at the time, and the actuals are obviously available.  But this has never, ever been checked after the money’s not been spent – nor, for that matter, does the converse get checked: what, for example, was the original business case for Concorde?

I think the promoters of projects of this kind should be made to put their money on the table.  If HS2 is going to produce net benefits of £1.80 for every £1.00 spent, then let’s see you commit (in the form of promissory notes, escrow accounts, whatever) £0.80, to be cashed in, one way or the other, when judgement day comes.  Any takers?  Thought not.

I may have strayed off the point a bit.  I apologise, I just needed a rant, any old rant.  And I was distracted by Victoria Coren on HIGNFY.

Linear verbiage

Roaring with pain sorry, pouring with rain; abject crossword débâcle; ironing (almost) done; batch of fridge soup made; not sleepy, ain’t no place I’m going to …  So I decided to measure my books.

The methodology was quite simple.  Most of them are arranged like this on shelves, so ‘Σ shelf length times number of shelves’ gives total yardage of books, by spine. 

Approximations had to be made for this kind of situation:

And after some deliberation I decided to include the antiquarian department, out of respect:

The final outcome is that I possess approximately 28 yards of books.  I have no idea what this means.  I probably need to calculate the corresponding weight and word count for the data to become in any way meaningful.  Plus, I suppose, some form of quality weighting: maybe I can estimate how many times each book has been read, or the probability of it being read again.  But that will have to wait for another wet day, or month.

I left out certain reference volumes, including cookery books.  I have also omitted the new Kindle, for two obvious reasons.  One being the difficulty of assigning a spine thickness to an e-book; the other that there aren’t actually any books in there yet.  This is because I don’t really know what to do with the thing.  I doubt if I’ll let it supplant ‘real’ books entirely, or even in large part, so I have to find a selective rôle for it.  I don’t often go on extended holidays any more, at least not the kind that contain wide open reading spaces.  (I get too much of that at home.)  I daresay it will come in useful once my arms become too weak to hold up a weighty tome, or my eyes demand magnification of 8-point text; but neither of these has happened yet (as at 3.50 p.m. today), and I’ll probably have lost the ability to work technology by the time they do.

RIP

Etta James – Try A Little Tenderness

Short stories

I've started a new blog. 

http://tim-timsshortstories.blogspot.com/

Diaries

I spend a lot of time finding things other than those I’m looking for.  So it was that, yesterday afternoon, I discovered that from 1959 to 1962, I had kept a diary.  I’d pretty much forgotten this.  It came about, I now remembered, because late in 1958, my father, who could be quite inscrutable, casually handed me one, with the words “Thought you might want one of these”.  It was a palm-sized week-to-view, published, I found, by The General Electric Co. Ltd. Of England, obviously a free handout at his work.  Each day’s space was about three inches by one. 

I must have been fairly suggestible and literal-minded, because I immediately concluded that I should use this gift to record my day-to-day life, rather than to note forthcoming events and appointments, which was probably my father’s intent.  It obviously didn’t occur to me that perhaps a larger format might have been more appropriate for this purpose.  I just started writing things down, within each day’s little box, as they happened.  There was no room for reflection or introspection, except in the sparsest form. 

Well, you can guess how I spent my afternoon yesterday.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to quote extensively – that will have to wait for when my archives are donated to the nation after my passing.  Nor am I going to draw any profound life lessons from the contents, except, perhaps, to note that I seemingly found it difficult to distinguish one girl from another on a weekly basis (apart from two or three, who seem to recur at varying intervals over the whole four years).

Oh, all right.  At random [there is a ‘notes’ box at the end of each week]:

‘Sunday 13 March 1960: Read morn.  Rolled lawn, 5/-.  Group practice after at Tony’s.  Not much good.  Vic didn’t turn up.  La Fiesta [local coffee bar] eve.  Saw Bobbie.  Walk with her.  Cliffs.  Wow!  Back to La F then home.

NOTES: I think I’ll go out with her.’

And, by contrast:

‘Wednesday 4 October 1961: Did nothing all day and eve.’

But here’s the important bit.  After I went to University in Leeds in 1960, I began to go to the pictures quite frequently.  There was a fleapit across the road from the digs in Harehills, and students could get in cheap to the city centre cinemas in the afternoon (ninepence, I think).  And I tended to note the films I saw in the diary.  This isn’t by any means the full list, but I think it’s quite interesting.

Psycho

The Greengage Summer

L’Avventura

Taste of Fear

The Guns of Navarone

East of Eden

La Dolce Vita

Spartacus

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

The Innocents

A Kind of Loving

Last Year at Marienbad

West Side Story

Fall of the House of Usher

The Alamo 

By the way, can you spot the odd one out?

How to tame your human

Be a bird.  Robin is best.  If you can’t manage that, try blackbird, or any kind of finch or tit.  Avoid magpie, jay and pigeon (disguising yourself as a dove doesn’t work).  If you find yourself lumbered with being any kind of raptor, gull or duck, forget it, you’re on the wrong career path.

Find a suitable human.  Your parents will probably have done this already.  The human will have a garden, a good nature, and a bird table.  Learn to exploit these assets.

Learn your human’s behaviour patterns.  They are often very predictable, and with practice you can influence them to your advantage.  Observe the times at which the human tends to go into the garden, and try to be seen eating the last few seeds on the table at around those times.  Organise yourselves into tidy queues, by species, making sure that this is noticed.  The human will stand there for several minutes, watching you and possibly going ‘aaaw’.   At this point, fly away.  Usually, the human will go into the house, emerging with a bag of seeds.

If that doesn’t work, perch on a nearby branch and fix the human with that cold, unblinking stare that says ‘I am the descendant of dinosaurs.  I will be here when you are a faint trace in the planet’s memory.  Obey me.’  That should do the trick.

If you are lucky enough to be a robin, you can exploit the human by being cute, like human babies.  Humans are very susceptible to emotional manipulation.

If all that fails, go down the chimney and peck the bastard’s eyes out.

The Rock’n’Roll Years

Part two in an occasional series

The idea that boys like us could actually do it ourselves never occurred to me, until we heard Lonnie Donegan, Johnnie Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys, the Vipers, Nancy Whiskey.  I was given the washboard, and begged my mother for thimbles (the washboard itself acquired from a long gone ironmongers in Southbourne Grove).  Skiffle groups erupted all over the place.  But soon after I’d been issued with my washboard, and the other guys had bullied guitars out of their parents, frustration started to set in.  ‘I can do that’, I thought.  My parents got me a guitar.  The first thing I found out was that, once having managed to tune the thing, if you played the bottom three strings in succession, they spelled out the first three notes of ‘When I Fall In Love’.  So I hunted around till I found the fourth note, then the whole tune. I got a chord book and learned, in about three weeks, how to play four string majors and join them together into as near as I could get to what I was hearing on those relatively accessible skiffle records. 

And then, suddenly, it was 1956.  The 7 inch 45 was invented and we had to have, and got, our green and beige Ferguson record player with the lovely cream and maroon 4-speed Collaro ten-disc auto-changer (the Dansette scathingly rejected).  You could stack up ten 45s – your current top ten – then as the last one drops onto the pile, you take off the arm which had held the stack in place, and the top record plays over and over until you choose to stop it.  Brilliant!  The records themselves were designed for this purpose, with serrations around the outer edge of the label which stopped them skidding or damaging each other as they landed from the stack, like so many flying saucers.  Naturally, I had to own more than ten 45s.  Every penny of pocket money’s worth of 45s.  The exact chronology, obviously, is available elsewhere.  By now, you’d expect it to have turned into one amorphous blur, and to some extent it has, but I like to recall two overlapping phases.  First there was Bill Haley, with a few imitators like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.  Little Richard and Fats Domino crept in alongside.  And then Elvis came and hit us straight in the ears, guts and seething hormones. The rest followed.  My enduring, confused memory of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is hearing it late at night on some kind of radio in our holiday home in Pembrokeshire, presented by my sister as a secret thing that parents had to be protected from, weren’t permitted to share.  It was dark, mysterious, unattainable, addictive. 

I loved the sheer energy and meaninglessness of pure rock’n’roll.  By definition, you can’t analyse ‘Tutti Frutti’.   John Lennon said, years later, something like “There is nothing conceptually purer than ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’”.  He was right.  But I loved the slushy stuff too.  My heart still quivers when I listen to Elvis explaining why he’s ‘Playing For Keeps’, or the Everly Brothers’ complaining about ‘Crying In The Rain’.  Even ‘Susie Darling’ by the long-forgotten Robin Luke can catch me unawares.  Why is this?  I sometimes wonder.  The hormones that drove those emotions, all those years ago, have thankfully done their job and fallen back to where they belong; but they left the emotions behind them.

Next: Jazz

Thanks to Rog.  I feel an anthology coming on.

Detox? Bah, humbugs

Monday is officially the most depressing day of the year.  That's good news, of course, it can only get better.  (I'm pretty sure I blogged this identical point this time last year, and probably the year before, but hey, if I'm not allowed to repeat myself, well, I wouldn't be allowed to repeat myself, would I?)  But so-called 'detox' is not the solution.

A friend at work used to give up alcohol for the whole of January.  He was hell to be with, and tipped the first pint of February down with audible relish.  I remember him once saying "Welcome me back to the human race" as he did so.  And science states that so-called detox is a myth: abrupt changes to your body's expectations, as cultivated over eleven months, do more harm than good.  At least the science I read does.

And there are more pressing reasons to abstain from self-imposed abstention.  They come under the collective heading 'Christmas presents'.  Here are a couple:

And of course:

OK, not strictly humbugs; but there must be a hundred of them in there (it doesn't say on the packet), to be consumed by 3 April, when the best-before date starts to poison me.

And I haven't even started on the socks and the handkerchiefs.



Inspired? Moi?

As Z graciously remarked in a recent comment, we bloggers do indeed often inspire each other.  At least, that’s been my experience on the ‘income’ stream; I wouldn’t presume to claim any credit in the other direction.  But at the moment the inspiration-response bit of my brain has stopped, probably due to the onset of Seasonal Cantbearsed Disorder.  So here are just a few questions I most probably won’t be addressing over the coming days:

Is Twitter now the de facto medium of preference for public policy, social commentary, personal gratification and, erm, everything?  Am I right to be scared?

Is writing a Christmas present wish list of any use to anyone over ten?  I asked for a dressing gown and got a Kindle.  So other people are obviously better at writing my list than I am.

How many shirts do I need?  How many shirts have I got?  Why do I only like four of them?

As an Englishman living in England, should I be given a vote in the Scottish independence referendum, if any?  (West Lothian readers need not reply.)

Is there any obligation or expectation to blog even when you have nothing to say?

Why can’t I think of anything else I don’t want to write about?  Oh, hang on, I know this one …

Compare and Contrast

Churchill: "I apologise for the length of this memo.  I did not have time to make it shorter."

Diane Abbott: "Bit much to get into 140 characters."

Early Music

I had heard, loved, and even listened to music since my ears opened.  My father singing me to sleep with ‘A Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’; ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘My Darling Clementine’, even Leadbelly’s  ‘Good Night Irene’ – these melodies and lyrical stories plunged into my psyche at a very early age.  I think those songs will be my last memory traces to erase themselves.

There was a room at the back of the house, beyond the kitchen and the pantry, presumably originally the maid’s quarters.  It immediately became the Den, and the exclusive territory of we three kids and our musical resources – the monolithic oaken radiogram with its fretworked loudspeaker grill, huge piles of 78s of all diameters, inherited and later acquired, and constantly replenished supplies of gramophone needles.  We spent hours sifting through those mysterious, fragile black circles, with their spiral groove etched into their surface in their brown paper sleeves, randomly prospecting for aural gold.  A record would be put on, briefly assessed, then rejected.  Or, occasionally, set aside into the pile that needed revisiting.  Perhaps one in twenty would make it all the way through to the ‘Favourites’, then to be played to destruction forever, or at least for a week.  I’d love to know what those favourites were. 

Of course, there was also the heavy Sunday lunchtime stodge pudding of ‘Two Way Family Favourites’ on the Light Programme.  ‘Children’s Favourites’, with Uncle Mac, was another.  I may kill myself next time ‘I’m a Pink Toothbrush’ or ‘The Happy Wanderer’ slides uninvited into my ears.  But, there were some goodies even in those arid swamps, or soggy deserts.  Even now, I wouldn’t mind listening attentively to ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’.  And I adored ‘The Drinking Song’.

When I was about thirteen, there was one huge breakthrough: we were allowed to save up and buy our own records!  The significance of this can’t be overstated.  Suddenly, music wasn’t just something that was done to you: you could, within the restrictive boundaries of parental approval and cash, exercise some control, get what you felt, in that instant, you wanted, needed.  How did we know, in the instant, what we wanted?  What told us so undeniably what we needed?  There must have some very special force at play.  Because, back in those 78rpm days, we couldn’t be selective – we had nothing to select from.  But somehow we did.  ‘Chain Gang’ by Jimmy Young, ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford, ‘Kisses Sweeter than Wine’ by Jimmie Rodgers.  I have no idea how, but I knew I had to get ‘Zambezi’ by Lou Busch on the purple-centred Capitol label, rush it home and play this fragile 78 rpm single spiral over and over again on the radiogram.

Thus began my love affair with records.  They combined so much art within the single artefact: the simple physical beauty of that perfect disc, with its cryptic centre label which seemed to hold depths of arcane information (what did ‘ffrr’ mean? what was the Capitol Tower? what did all those strange numbers mean?), the music it magically contained; and, dimly, the notion that perhaps here was a new art form in which sounds with no counterpart anywhere else could be contrived, constructed and preserved, like pieces of sculpture, within that black shiny squiggly ineluctable groove.

And then it was time for rock’n’roll.  But that’s another story.

Christmas Card Audit 2011

Snow/Snowmen/Snowflakes:           12

Santas/Reindeer:                               9

Animals/Birds:                                  7

 (of which Robins:                            4)

Landscapes:                                      7

Boats:                                                3

Nativities/Wise Men/Angels:           3

Christmas trees/Baubles:                  3

Comical:                                           1

Puddings:                                          1

Twelve Days:                                    0

Special categories:

Homemade:                                      4

Cards with glued-on glitter:             5

Ecards:                                             1

Wonderfully weird:                          3

No Awards this year, apart from Best Card, which I have already announced.

Although this important data-gathering exercise has been conducted for several years now, this is only the second time the results have been scientifically recorded.  Meaningful statistical trends cannot therefore yet be discerned.  A more formal methodology will, if feasible, be employed in the future, enabling the presentation of the data in the form of graphs, pie charts and year-on-year percentile variances.  However, some early indicators are worth noting:

·         It was necessary to include three new categories: Puddings, Boats, and most significantly, Landscapes.  This may be ascribable to inconsistencies in the categorisation procedures, whereby items now recorded as ‘Landscapes’ or ‘Boats’ were previously placed under other headings; in fact this is almost certainly the case.  The same cannot however be said of ‘Puddings.

·         There is a marked decline in the incidence of Glued-on Glitter.  This may reflect economic circumstances, but is more likely to be a consequence of an increased perception that the damned stuff comes off on your fingers whenever you touch the things.

·         Robins have doubled in quantity, possibly due to the mild weather.