A Pudden's End

Reversing blogmeister Richard Madeley's recent nameshift to Uncle Dick, Flintshire Council has made this inspired move to put paid to 'immature comments'. That's bound to do the trick...

Busoni Plays!

I know I'm not alone in this neck of the blogscape in being a Busoni fan. He is, of course, widely regarded as a 'god of the piano', but, as he died in 1924, I'd taken it for granted that any surviving recordings, however much cleaned up and 'digitally remastered', would give little idea of his playing. What I'd reckoned without was the Duo-Art recording piano, an ultra-sophisticated reproducing piano that created rolls which, by a complex and painstaking process, recreated a performance with astonishing accuracy. When modern technology is applied to reproducing what is on those rolls and recording it, the result is very much like listening to a CD - but a CD recorded 80 years ago. A label called Grand Piano specialises in these recordings, and I have got my hands on a CD of Busoni playing Liszt, Chopin and his own mighty transcription of the Bach Chaconne. The Liszt is often breathtaking, Busoni going beyond mere virtuosity to create soundscapes that scarcely seem to belong to the piano at all - as he does from time to time with the Chopin, though he has an unusually robust approach there, reflecting his professed mixed feelings about the composer. As for the Chaconne, I guess it has to be respected as definitive, but I can't say it's my favourite performance. Anyway, if it's virtuosity you want, try this... It too is from a roll, though the YouTube commenters seem to have difficulty believing it - or that it's Busoni. Isn't it wonderful - and pleasingly retroprogressive - that such a 'primitive' technology, which crashed out of favour around 1930, should be able to deliver such results today?

Hunting of Snark

Snark - a kind of witlessly abusive non-comedy - seems to be a hot topic. This will surprise no one who spends much time navigating the blogscape, where snark can erupt in even the most civilised corners (I name no names). Now one David Denby has written a book about it, and defines it at rather gruelling length here. He was also on Radio 4 this morning, debating briefly with a vaguely pro-snark Toby Young. What strikes me about Denby's analysis, American-based as it is, is how, in political terms, it is the mirror image of the snark situation here. In the US, it seems, the snarking is coming from the Right, targeting the Left, whereas here the master snarkers are overwhelmingly of the Left - often, in the case of the kind of supposedly satirical wiseguys who populate the 'topical comedy panel shows', of the ultra-Left - and the snark bombs are being lobbed in a rightward direction, against anything that doesn't fit their lefter-than-left worldview (this is why a Labour government can be in the firing line too - it's not Left enough). Historically, I think British snarkism had its origin and seedbed in anti-Thatcherism, long ago reaching the point where mocking Lady T for being old and having had a stroke - and openly wishing her dead - would raise a comfortable laugh. Radio 4 itself is infected, with the likes of Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel snarking away all over the place. The News Quiz is almost unlistenable (post-Coren) for the prevalence of witless, entirely predictable leftist barbs. Happily the TV equivalent, Have I Got News For You, is pretty much a snark-free zone and is often quite funny. But the place to go for full-on snarky vileness is BBC2's Mock The Week - read this brilliant piece by Nick Cohen if you want to know the depths to which our homegrown snarkists can sink. It makes the situation in the US seem quite healthy by comparison.

A Masterclass in Identification

While I was out walking yesterday on the North Downs Way, above Denbies Vineyard outside Dorking (the wines are a bit grim, but it's nice to have it there - good old global warming eh?), a creature I had never before seen crossed my path. Literally, the path in question being the North Downs Way itself. About ten yards ahead of me, trotting across the path and disappearing into a burrow in the grassy bank went something sooty black from nose to tail, the shape and size of a large ferret. Despite having never seen such a thing before, it was the work of a moment for me to hazard an identification - could it be, I wondered, a... black ferret? This is how we naturalists work - impressive, isn't it? Sure enough, back home I discovered via the internet that ferrets can indeed be bred pure black. So this was presumably a captive-bred black ferret gone feral, or a descendant thereof - maybe there's a little colony of them. This one seemed sleek and well fed - rather handsome indeed. I loitered further along the path and was rewarded with a second look, as the ferret trotted back across the path (could this be classified as a reverse ferret?)...
Needless to add that I was on the lookout for late-flying butterflies, but, despite warm mellow sun, few were out. Speckled woods of course, the meeters and greeters of the butterfly kingdom, and whites and meadow browns feebly fluttering around, but other than that just one fast-flying peacock and a velvety red admiral nectaring on an early ivy flower. I imagine the excesses of last week's weather persuaded all but the hardiest butterflies to give up on the English summer. But it's not over yet...

Keith Waterhouse

The coverage of the death, the other day, of Keith Waterhouse has been astonishing, with long, gushing obits and features appearing everywhere - here's one of the briefer, more measured ones - and the news of his death high up on the broadcast media's agenda too. It's hard to think of another living writer who would have such a send-off (Jeff always excepted hem hem) - but then, as all the obits point out, Waterhouse was the last of his kind. Certainly such a career would be wellnigh impossible now, with the West End theatre largely given over to pop-based musicals, established novelists driven into self-publishing and making no money, the newsprint media facing an uncertain future, and the kind of whimsical, curmudgeonly, humorously indignant column he wrote now seeming like a survivor from another age. Billy Liar I enjoyed hugely as a teenager - to the point of repeating chunks of it in dialogue with a friend - but I don't suppose I'll ever revisit it. Of the later novels, I recall a strange, dark affair called Jubb, about some kind of sexual fetishist (of obvious appeal to my dirty teenage mind); a clever one called Office Life which minutely describes the work of a company whose business, it turns out, is simply keeping itself working - it produces nothing and does nothing beyond its own circular routines (prophetic?); and one called Thinks, which takes place entirely in the mind of an extremely angry man. For all his famous professionalism, Waterhouse's column was never the same after he left the Mirror. On the plus side, Auberon Waugh thought highly of him - and, when Waterhouse was asked which was the most important and inspiring book in his life, he replied The Card by Alan Bennett. This was about as determinedly unfashionable an answer as could be given, but, if you think about it, Waterhouse was about as near as we've had in recent decades to an Arnold Bennett - popular, prolific, high-living, professional, commonsensical - and with a reputation destined to nosedive after death. Still, it's been good to see a writer - any writer (Jeff always excepted) - attract such adulation, such affection, and so many apparently heartfelt tributes.

An Invaluable Public Service

From some superstition or scruple, I can never bring myself to use those automated self-service points in supermarkets, the ones that let you buy your stuff without running the many and various risks of interaction with a human being. Just now, however, idly looking around while I queued for a human in Marks & Spencers on Kensington High Street, I noticed that their self-service points offer instructions in the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Polish and, er, Welsh. Now, I'm no statistician, but I wouldn't mind betting that there's not a single Welsh monoglot in the Royal Borough, or the whole of London, or England (or, come to that, Wales - but,to quote Father Jack, 'that would be an ecumenical matter').

On Falling

Change in the weather, as His Bobness has remarked, is known to be extreme... On Tuesday morning I stood at my station in warm sunlight watching a nectaring Painted Lady as it methodically quartered a spray of Buddleia. Yesterday morning I stood there under an umbrella in cool wind and spattering rain. And last night, walking home, umbrella up against sheeting rain and gusting wind, I somehow misjudged a kerb, stumbled and - uhoh here I go - fell full length on the hard wet pavement. 'Are you all right?' the lady in front inquired anxiously from under her umbrella. 'Oh yes, fine' I lied, leaping to my feet as if on springs, propelled by sheer embarrassment. Resuming the dignity of the vertical, I strode off manfully as if nothing had happened, only later discovering that I was bleeding from most knuckles, had barked one elbow and fetched one knee a painful whack which is giving me gyp even as I write...
Of course, the strange thing is not that we fall down once in a while but that we manage to remain vertical and bipedal so much of the time, strutting around as if it's the easiest thing in the world and gravity was finally overcome. In reality it's a difficult and thoroughly unnatural way to proceed, and gravity - as falling over reminds us - is an irresistibly potent force. Our upright gait has gifted us the pains of childbirth, the thousand and one things that can go wrong with our backs and leg joints, and the oversized brains that, combined with a lofty viewpoint above the earth, has given us ideas above our station and caused no end of mischief. It was all, surely, a terrible mistake...