The Pasty War - It Had to Happen...

Just when you thought domestic politics couldn't get any more farcical, a full-scale pasty war breaks out, with our leaders and would-be leaders competing to be seen eating the most disgusting downmarket snacks they can find, from so-called 'Cornish pasties' to cheap sausage rolls. When the mysterious rash of pasty shops started spreading across London and elsewhere a few years ago, I knew there would be trouble - and now it's come... The principal mystery of the pasty shop plague remains, though - you never see anyone in them, even in these hard times, and yet they somehow stay in business. Perhaps the 'pasty tax' is a last desperate attempt to get rid of them - if so I back it wholeheartedly...

Surprise

A beautiful surprise in Holland Park earlier today - two Speckled Woods fight-dancing, rising and falling together gracefully in a perfect double helix. As they do. I think this is the earliest I've ever seen a Speckled Wood (though, amazingly, the first of this year was spotted on January 13th by someone in Cornwall). I've also seen Red Admirals, Brimstones, Small Whites and a fast-flying Peacock - and it's still only March. A good start, but this wonderful heatwave is expected to end any day now and the early flyers will go to ground...

Aah Schubert...

What with one thing and another - life, work, my late-Lent immersion in the St Matthew Passion - I haven't heard as much as I'd like of Radio 3's Spirit of Schubert season - his complete works across the entire schedule for eight and a half days. But it's been a joy to find Schubert there every time I tune to Radio 3, and once or twice I've fallen asleep to Schubert and woken in the morning to more Schubert, surely to the great benefit of my soul.
In my musically formative years, such a project would have seemed outlandish, as Schubert occupied a place a long way down the evolutionary ladder from the great, universally worshipped Beethoven. And, as it happened, when Radio 3 first scheduled a continuous broadcast of one composer's complete works, in 2005, it was Ludwig Van that they chose, launching (with some trepidation) the six-day Beethoven Experience. It proved an unexpectedly massive hit, emboldening Radio 3 to do it again in the same year, this time with Bach: A Bach Christmas filled ten days of the run-up to Christmas with the complete works of Bach. After that, in 2007, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky got the treatment. Then, belatedly, came Mozart, across the first ten days of 2011. And now we have the Spirit of Schubert, which comes to a glorious end on Saturday night with a concert of his last works, including the sublime C Major Quintet and B Flat Sonata...
The question is: Who should be next for this immersive, completist treatment? My own suggestion would be Purcell, who's been well served in the past by Radio 3 (especially in his anniversary years, with a Purcell Weekend in 2009) but he was certainly prolific enough - and great enough - to qualify, and his music is still too little known and appreciated (by me indeed, until quite recently). Any more ideas?

Hirst Has Jumped the Shark

Julian Spalding's long overdue attack on Damien Hirst is welcome, and is echoed by murmurs from the art market that also seem to suggest an almighty bubble is about to burst. As he says, if you bought a shark in a tank what you've got is a shark in a tank (albeit one with a fancy name) - and the conservation problems don't bear thinking about... I believe Spalding is wrong to finger Marcel Duchamp as being ultimately responsible for this kind of 'con art' or 'non art' - Duchamp was after all a real artist as well as a prankster. The man who, more than any other, paved the way for Hirst and his kind was Andy Warhol, a non-artist who turned 'art' into a blatantly money-making mass production business (though despite this, he and his people did produce some striking work, and it's hard not to like Warhol - just as it's hard not to loathe the loutish Hirst). Anyway, it's rather wonderful that the Hirst bubble is in danger of bursting just as Tate Modern launches its mighty blockbuster exhibition of.. Damien Hirst, backed by two Channel 4 documentaries, and no doubt a BBC Culture Show special and much puffery from our old friend Will Gompertz. Perhaps we should all go and see it, on the grounds that there will never be another, and we can tell our bemused grandchildren that we were there. They probably wouldn't believe us though.

Sleep Hygiene, Night Starvation

I had never heard the phrase 'sleep hygiene' before last night, when I heard it twice - once on the radio and once on TV - within ten minutes. It's got nothing to do with cleanliness but is about arranging matters so as to get a good night's sleep - saying no to that third espresso, drawing the curtains, turning off the light and the TV, that kind of thing. It reminded me of a phrase from the now distant past that I had all but forgotten - 'night starvation'. This non-existent condition was dreamt up in the 1930s to market Horlicks, a sweet malty milk drink that is still available in various forms today. The notion of 'night starvation' caught on, and was still going strong in my childhood. I remember ads in the women's magazines that made up rather too much of my boyhood reading in which a worried housewife, who, despite sleeping well, was feeling tired all the time, consulted her doctor about it. This reassuring figure, in a pinstripe suit, would remove his glasses and suggest that 'You may be suffering from night starvation'. To remedy this, he would recommend - you guessed? - Horlicks. They don't make them like that any more (they're not allowed to) - but why did the notion of 'night starvation' take such a hold? I fancy it was because it sounded faintly alarming (and yet easily remedied), and because in those days of non-stop eating, it seemed barely credible that the human frame could survive the hours between the late supper and the cooked breakfast without further nourishment.

Sensational Reader Offer

The endless coverage of the latest spot of Tory fund-raising bother over the weekend has given me an idea...

I'm sure you will appreciate that running Nigeness doesn't come cheap (you wouldn't believe the amount of fuel the legendary NigeCorp turbine hall alone consumes). Now you, dear reader, can help to keep Nigeness humming along at the top of its game [You call this the top? - Ed.] by making a donation, large or small (cash only please, for administrative reasons). Here's how it will work:

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Again

I see my epoch-making post on Hoffnung has sprung back to life again over on the Dabbler.