Every Story Matters?

 The monstrous waste of time and money that calls itself The Covid-19 Inquiry is telling us, in a big publicity campaign, that 'Every Story Matters'. Now is our chance to tell them all about our experiences of living under the Covid terror. Well, I don't suppose mine is the kind of story they want to hear: decided early on against the mRNA 'vaccines', lived as near normally as possible, observing the restrictions minimally or not at all, looked on in horror as our basic freedoms were confiscated, came through unscathed (if I had Covid at any point, it was so mild I didn't notice – unlike all my fully vaccinated friends and relations). However, I decided to register my experiences with the Inquiry, if only to represent the control group in the great experiment that was performed on us all in the Covid years. The questionnaire is quite easy to navigate and gives enough space and options for the inquiry to glean some real information (if that is actually the aim), but the best thing about it is that it asks what lessons should be learned from the authorities' handling of the pandemic. Lessons, eh? I went for something like this: that lockdowns are hugely counter-productive in every way and should never be tried again, that vaccines should be fully tested and proven to be effective, that there should be mandatory reporting of all ill effects thereof and drug companies should never be granted legal immunity, that our civil liberties should never be suspended again on such an unprecedented scale, that there should be no censorship of scientific opinions that happen to oppose The Narrative, that schools in particular should never have been closed... That sort of thing. I can't be the only one to have reached similar conclusions – can I?

Sullivan's Travels

 Last night I watched Preston Sturges's classic comedy Sullivan's Travels (1941) – for the second time, but the first was quite some while ago. I had forgotten just what a captivating screen presence Veronica Lake was in her prime, and how brilliantly she performed with Joel McCrae here, despite the fact that he, like most others in the business, found her extremely difficult to work with. After Sullivan, McCrae refused to ever work with her again, and Sturges, it is said, had to be physically restrained when Lake sprang it on him, as filming began, that she was six months pregnant. This caused wardrobe some problems, but the film was in the can after just two months: Hollywood worked fast in those days, and spoke fast, and routinely brought films in at 90 tightly scripted and edited minutes. Veronica Lake's problems were mostly down to her growing addiction to alcohol, which was to finish her career prematurely and lead her to a sadly early death at just 50. None of this could be guessed from her sparkling, sexually alluring presence and spot-on performance in Sullivan's Travels. 
  The film takes its title from Gulliver's Travels, but as satire it is mild stuff, aimed only at Hollywood and its strange ways. In the end, in fact, Hollywood values triumph, when movie director Sullivan, having set out to experience the life of the poor and oppressed and make a social-realist epic dramatising the struggle between Capital and Labour, realises in the end that, as he says in the last lines of the film, 'There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.' Which is exactly what his Hollywood bosses had been telling him all along as they tried to talk him out of his big ideas. 
  The film Sullivan wanted to make was going to be called O Brother, Where Art Thou? and we are left to imagine what a dreary conscience-wringer it would have been. When O Brother did take on existence it was nearly 60 years later, in the form of the Coen brothers' brilliant comedy with (great) music, set in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and featuring one of George Clooney's best performances. The film has some affinities with Sullivan's Travels, but the Coens' main inspiration was in fact Homer's Odyssey. So there you have it – an impressive genealogy: Homer and Swift ultimately yielding two brilliant Hollywood comedies. 

Another Oasis

 In this week's Spectator, Charles Moore describes a strangely heartening visit to a branch of the Nationwide Building Society, where most of the customers presenting themselves were elderly and in some way or another bewildered by the complexities of modern banking. 'All,' writes Moore, 'were treated with respect and patience, lightened by unintrusive backchat. The atmosphere was peaceful and trusting...' This reminded me that I had written recently about such 'oases in an unhuman world'. My particular focus was on mobile phone shops, but what I did not mention was that my local bank branch is, incredible as it might seem, another such oasis.
  From sheer inertia, I have been with the same bank all my banking life – the one that likes to assure me that a kindly black horse has been with me every step of my life's journey. Until now my experiences with said bank have been variable, sometimes downright infuriating: on one occasion I was so bombarded with letters and phone calls urging me to come in and discuss my account with the branch manager that I eventually succumbed, assuming, reasonably enough, that they might have something useful to tell me. Having turned up at the appointed time and place, I was then told that the manager was at another branch nearby, to which, already far from gruntled, I made my way, only to be greeted by a twerp in a suit who clearly had no idea who I was or why I was there, and who greeted me with 'How are we today?' (yes, 'we'...) and 'What can I do for you?' By the time I left, I'm pretty sure he was reaching for the panic button. 
  But to my point. My present branch of this same bank could hardly be more different, with an atmosphere very much like that described by Moore. I've been in and out of this branch many a time, mostly to make payments to various 'trades' (having bought a house that turned out to be a capacious money pit), and have got to know most of the staff, who also know me and greet me cordially each time, with inquiries about progress on the house or observations based on my most recent employment (writing about TV). Though the pace is leisurely – precisely because of all that patience and respect and cordiality – it is actually a pleasure now to go to the bank, and I am more than ever resistant to the idea of switching to online banking. Where a bank has an actual branch, manned and open, banking is a human business. No doubt at head office they don't care about such things and think only of the bottom line, but I do hope that at least there will be no more branches closed. If the banks have got enough money for those glossy commercials – not to mention the huge profits they reap year after year – they surely have enough to do a little good in the world. In fact they owe it to us bewildered oldsters who have been giving them our money all our lives.

'It all fits brilliantly'

 This morning's blindfold poetry selection turned out to be this, from the selected poems of Constantin Cavafy: 

                      In a Township of Asia Minor

The news about the outcome of the sea-battle at Actium
was of course unexpected.
But there's no need for us to draft a new proclamation.
The name's the only thing that has to be changed.
There, in the concluding lines, instead of: "Having freed the Romans
from Octavius, that disaster,
that parody of a Caesar,"
we'll substitute: "Having freed the Romans
from Antony, that disaster,..."
The whole text fits very nicely.

"To the most glorious victor,
matchless in his military ventures,
prodigious in his political operations,
on whose behalf the township ardently wished
for Antony's triumph,..."
here, as we said, the substitution: "for Octavius Caesar's triumph,
regarding it as Zeus' finest gift—
to this mighty protector of the Greeks,
who graciously honors Greek customs,
who is beloved in every Greek domain,
who clearly deserves exalted praise,
and whose exploits should be recorded at length
in the Greek language, in both verse and prose,
in the Greek language, the vehicle of fame,"
et cetera, et cetera. It all fits brilliantly.

'A liturgy demands a language that is different from everyday speech...'

 In the church of St Thomas a Becket in Lewes, I happened upon this notice, which seems to me to offer a very good account of the special potency of the Book of Common Prayer, and why it should continue in use. 

The Subtitled Sublime

 The Ode to Joy that ends Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been with me all my musically aware life, ever since I first heard it in primary school music class (those were the days – sound musical education in every state school). The Classics for Pleasure double album of the Ninth was the first LP I ever owned, back in the olden days when affordable albums (still expensive by today's standards) were quite a novelty. It was Carl Schuricht conducting the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra – not that I cared who it was: the music simply overwhelmed me, swept me away, especially the choral finale, that Ode to Joy. I never bothered about the words, which I couldn't make out and were clearly in a language I didn't understand – fine by me. What mattered was that glorious music, the sheer genius of the vast musical world that Beethoven builds from what is on the face of it a pretty banal melody (hence its adoption as the EU's anthem). Last night's televised Prom ended with Beethoven's Ninth, and the BBC had decided to subtitle the choral finale with an English translation of the Ode to Joy (written, as all the world knows, by Schiller). I do wish they hadn't: the words, at least in this translation, were of the most flatulent banality – all about universal love and brotherhood, and God somewhere above the starry canopy – and only detracted from the glory of the music. But if subtitles are going to be used for choral music, why not do so more generally? It might be genuinely useful, as the words are often impossible to make out and brief subtitles might help. However, if they're going to do it, they might at least take care to make them accurate: the subtitles to the Ode to Joy last night referred more than once to a God who 'swells' above the starry canopy. A disturbing image. 

In Which Ivy's Sisters Teach Jonathan Miller Nothing

 Yesterday, for some reason, I was reading about Jonathan Miller – 'theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and physician', as Wikipedia describes this man of many parts. He was also that rare thing in this country, a 'public intellectual', and, with his massive self-satisfaction and total conviction of his own superior wisdom, a living illustration of why we like to keep them very thin on the ground. 
  Anyway, I was interested to read that, at one point in his boyhood, Miller was taught by two sisters of Ivy Compton-Burnett (a persistent presence in this blog). Young Jonathan, a somewhat difficult lad (or precocious brat, according to viewpoint), spent much of his early life cannoning from school to school, when not enjoying sessions with the  psychiatrist Leopold Stein, in which, by Miller's account, the two 'simply conversed about philosophy and Hughlings Jackson's early neurological theories'. As you do. He encountered the two Compton-Burnett sisters at a Rudolf Steiner school at King's Langley in Hertfordshire (since closed). The sisters were Juliet and Vera, who had survived the high death toll and psychic carnage of Compton-Burnett family life and found refuge in theosophy and the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, turning the house they shared with the pianist Myra Hess in St John's Wood into an 'art house' filled (as Ivy's biographer Hilary Spurling puts it) 'with music, painting, modelling, eurhythmics, all activities that Ivy flatly deplored'. Later they took up residence in Berkhamstead and, while living there, became involved with the school at King's Langley. Miller claimed that during his time with them he 'never learnt anything at all'. For achieving that all but impossible outcome, the Compton-Burnett sisters surely deserve a small accolade.