What To Say?

Here's a burning question, plucked hot and smoking from the seething cauldron of contemporary urban life. What do you say when someone you're passing on the street beams at you and declares, with every sign of conviction: 'Jesus loves you!'? It's just happened to me again (it's a not infrequent occurrence - maybe I look especially lovable-by-Jesus). This time I managed to exclaim 'Oh good!' There must be better responses...

So, Farewell Then...

As I feared, that Reason To Be Cheerful, the BBC's Sports Editor Mihir Bose, has given up the unequal struggle and resigned. It seems he's taken an awful lot of flack - presumably from people who care about sport, which I don't - and I'm sure he'll be glad to be out of the clutches of the BBC (what sane person wouldn't be?). I for one wish him well - and I shall truly miss him.

Pritchett on Chekhov - Nothing to Add

I've just read A Dreary Story - another stunningly good major Chekhov story which, like My Life, I'd somehow managed to miss (I sometimes wonder if I've read Chekhov at all...). I was going to post on A Dreary Story, but then I came across this and realised that there's really nothing to add. Pritchett even catches in a phrase the precise blend of qualities that give the story its uniquely unnerving tone - 'an unrepentant cold intellectual vivacity' indeed. Has any other writer had such a deep and sympathetic understanding of Chekhov and what makes him great?

Those Palm Court Days

For those of us nearing the end of our fifth decade in this whale of tears, it can sometimes seem that we were born into a different world, one now impossibly remote. Mention of my boyhood holidays with my grandmother in this post got me thinking about those distant days in the still genteel resorts of England. The entertainment on offer (apart from the odd exotic bird of passage like John Ogdon) represented the last gasp of the music hall, with mostly dire comedy and novelty acts interspersed with bad crooners trying to sound American. In those days resorts had bands in residence through the summer. In Scarborough, my grandmother would often doze in a deckchair to the strains of Max Jaffa and his Palm Court Orchestra (Jaffa's band included over the years the likes of Plum Wodehouse, Jack Lemon, Alfred Apple Jr, Clementine Churchill - and, in a disastrous late experimental phase, Don Cherry, Moby Grape and Tangerine dream - but I digress). Jaffa and his orchestra also had a regular, very popular show on the radio, which lasted into the 60s. By then, of course, the game was up - the pop-rock juggernaut was rolling - but the old ways hung on a surprisingly long time. Before the coming of Radio 1 (the pirate stations forcing the BBC's hand) there were precious few original recordings to be heard on the (legitimate) radio. If you were lucky, you might get a live performance, backed by the Northern Dance Orchestra; if you were less lucky, it would be an 'interpretation' by said NDO - a fine band, but they could not in any sense be said to rock (and their leader, Bernard Herrmann, was not THAT Bernard Herrmann, of Psycho fame). Once the BBC succumbed to rock, the whole world soon followed suit. For me, along with the music, adolescence struck, with its attendant horrors and follies. Those holidays were at an end, and so was that distant pre-pop world. What a long strange trip it's been, as Max Jaffa remarked (or was it Cherry Garcia?).

Uniterable

Like my new look? Actually, it's not me but this fine fellow. Burke's Peerage's judgement - "he seems only to have existed for the purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, as Sir Thomas Browne says, 'foully miscarry in the advantage of humanity, play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.'" - seems a little harsh, though life is indeed uniterable. You can understand the Pagets not being very keen on him, but the grand tradition of loony English aristos - in which Paget holds an honoured place - surely enhances the gaiety of the nation. And gaiety is something we could all do with - especially those of us who are at this moment wrestling with infuriatingly recalcitrant technology in steam-room temperatures...

'Reading' and Reading

We are told that the Man Booker Prize judges have, in less than seven months, 'read' 132 novels. Am I alone in finding it somewhat unlikely that these busy public figures have found time in their lives to read something like five novels a week? I don't think I'd be able to manage that even if I devoted every waking hour to it - and if I did, what would I have achieved, apart from a feat of endurance? I certainly wouldn't remember anything much (if anything at all) of the endless book blur whizzing past my tired eyes. I've written before about reading and forgetting - and this morning, on the radio, the excellent Craig Brown spoke with commendable candour on his own literary amnesia, freely admitting that he remembered only the odd snippet, if anything, of books he had read - and reviewed! - the previous week. The Booker pretence of having read and remembered such a ludicrous number of books (and it grows larger every year) gets more and more absurd. The truth is that the judges will have skimmed most of them, made up their minds pretty fast on which titles not to proceed with, maybe revisited a few in the course of the whittling down process. None of these novels will have been properly digested - still less enjoyed - in the way of a book read at leisure, at the reader's own speed. For this reason, no doubt, many a good title - one that demands to be properly, fully read - slips through the net, and many a less good one ends up on the shortlist. This is to say nothing of the vagaries of panel discussion, which can throw up the most unlikely winners. Never mind - at least this year Me Cheeta made the longlist. That's a book I'd recommend anyone to read. At leisure.

John Ogdon

While the Yard finds himself museless, me I find myself in the grip of a bastard 'summer cold'. But I don't complain. Yes I do...
Anyway, today is the 20th anniversary of the death of the prodigiously gifted pianist John Ogdon (and, oddly, the 12th anniversary of Sviatoslav Richter's death). I saw Ogdon twice in my life. The first time was on a boyhhood holiday with my brother and grandmother at some seaside resort (it might have been Folkestone, still at that time a genteel resort). My grandmother took us to a recital by Ogdon, who played the Moonlight sonata and I can't remember what else. I was duly impressed, but my grandmother - a woman whose cultural horizons were not of the broadest - was less convinced. 'He's good,' she opined, 'but he's not as good as Russ Conway, is he?' Many years later, I was at the launch of a book about children's radio when I noticed a plump, tweed-coated, bear-like man with a shock of curly grey hair wandering vaguely around the edges of the crowd looking bewildered. With a shock, I realised that it was Ogdon - a fact confirmed when a Radio 3 music producer pounced on him and swept him away. This must have been shortly before his death.
Here's a snatch of Ogdon in his prime, playing the Hammerklavier.