Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Sitting on Alma Cogan
Halfway through my alfresco lunch on a sunny bench in Holland Park, I was delighted to discover that I was sitting on Alma Cogan. Well, to be precise, a memorial bench to the fondly remembered Fifties chanteuse. 'In loving memory of Alma Cogan,' the inscription read. 'The songs. The joy. The laughter.' Indeed. When I'm dead, I wouldn't mind being a park bench. 'Nige. The songs. The joy. The laughter'...
It's The Society, Stupid
Returning from Oxfordshire last night (I'd been away on family business - apologies for blog absence), I slumped in front of the TV news, dazed with fatigue, and - well, maybe I was hallucinating, maybe my brain had seized up, but, vaguely watching David Cameron, in his shirtsleeves, on the Cameron Unplugged live tour or whatever it is, I got an impression that he was talking something like sense and that he seemed at last to have some kind of 'vision'. The gist of it is, I think, that it's no longer the economy - that's just a matter of management - it's the society, stupid. This is going to be where politics happens now, and it won't be a matter of the state pumping in money and controlling every thing, to the point where nothing happens, but of those already doing good work being helped, encouraged and left to get on with it. Maybe I'm reading too much into this - it was way down the bulletin, drowned out by a busy news day - and maybe I've taken leave of my senses - but it might just be that the Tories are beginning to 'get it'. On the other hand, they probably won't be able to do anything about it. And my normal blanket cynicism about the whole of British politics will no doubt kick back in, once I get over the journey from Oxfordshire...
Monday, 2 June 2008
Ma, I've Written A Misery Memoir
I was walking down the high street earlier (face to the open sky the passing deluge) when I was brought to a halt by a poster advertising a book called 'Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes'. At first, not unreasonbly, I took this for a marketing spoof -along the lines of Nathan Barley's Wasp T12 Speechtool ('It's well weapon') - but no, it turned out to be entirely authentic and, indeed, on sale and doing well in Sainsburys. It is a 'misery memoir' of a grim Irish childhood by one Martha Long, and has a companion volume, 'Ma, I'm Locked Up in the Madhouse' (I'm not making that up either).
I suppose, as popular literary genres go, these misery memoirs are quite healthy, showing, as they do, that our individual fates are not socially determined and that the most extreme adversity can be overcome. They are, perhaps, a secular equivalent of those religious tracts ('A Brand From the Burning' etc) whose huge popularity in the 19th century now mystifies us. The continuing vogue for 'Ma, He Sold Me...' and the like certainly seems healthier and more easily understandable than the popularity of those ultra-grisly tales of sadistic serial killers and forensic scientists which, to judge by the book display in Sainsburys, are bigger than misery memoirs. Typically written by women, are these, I wonder, the modern equivalent of the whodunits of the golden age (also written mostly by women)? If so, it shows how far popular taste has sunk. Not that we should be surprised at that...
I suppose, as popular literary genres go, these misery memoirs are quite healthy, showing, as they do, that our individual fates are not socially determined and that the most extreme adversity can be overcome. They are, perhaps, a secular equivalent of those religious tracts ('A Brand From the Burning' etc) whose huge popularity in the 19th century now mystifies us. The continuing vogue for 'Ma, He Sold Me...' and the like certainly seems healthier and more easily understandable than the popularity of those ultra-grisly tales of sadistic serial killers and forensic scientists which, to judge by the book display in Sainsburys, are bigger than misery memoirs. Typically written by women, are these, I wonder, the modern equivalent of the whodunits of the golden age (also written mostly by women)? If so, it shows how far popular taste has sunk. Not that we should be surprised at that...
Don't Need A Weatherman...
Regulars will know that weather is one of my obsessions - how could it be otherwise? I'm English. We have an awful lot of weather here, and little else we care to talk about. Yesterday I heard an interesting letter on Radio 4's Feedback, from a man who finds himself increasingly unable to follow the radio weather forecasts. I raised a silent cheer - how often I have done my best to listen intently to the morning forecast, only to emerge from the experience with no clear picture at all of what the weather is going to be like where I live. This correspondent nailed the chief reason - that these forecasts present the weather as an unfolding narrative of what is happening across the country, whereas all most listeners want to know is how the weather's going to be where they live. What he didn't mention was that, partly because of this narrative approach, the forecasts tend to begin with Scotland and Northern Ireland, so, by the time the unfolding drama has reached the places where most people (and overwhelmingly most Radio 4 listeners) live, they'll have completely lost the thread.
Often, though, by missing the weather forecast we're not missing much - indeed we might be positively misled by it. The Met Office claims what looks like a quite impressive level of accuracy. However, these figures are achieved after taking several stabs at getting it right in the course of a day. And 80 percent might look good, but I believe that if every day you issued the forecast 'Tomorrow's weather will be much the same as today's', you'd be right about 70 percent of the time.
I think it'll brighten up yet.
Often, though, by missing the weather forecast we're not missing much - indeed we might be positively misled by it. The Met Office claims what looks like a quite impressive level of accuracy. However, these figures are achieved after taking several stabs at getting it right in the course of a day. And 80 percent might look good, but I believe that if every day you issued the forecast 'Tomorrow's weather will be much the same as today's', you'd be right about 70 percent of the time.
I think it'll brighten up yet.
Free At Last
June 2nd this year is also Tax Freedom Day, the day on which we start earning money for ourselves, as against giving it all to that nice Gordon Brown. Surprisingly, it's a day earlier than last year - though, if government borrowing is factored in, the real date is June 14th. In America this year, Tax Freedom Day falls on April 23rd - which is about where it was in the early 60s in the UK. And it would have been earlier still back in 1953 when the Queen was crowned.
As I've remarked before, working nearly half the year for The Man compares very unfavourably with the feudal system. That's progress.
As I've remarked before, working nearly half the year for The Man compares very unfavourably with the feudal system. That's progress.
A Flagrant Breach of the Guidelines
June 2nd. In 1953, this was Coronation Day - and the day on which I discovered the delights of alcohol. I was 3 at the time, and we were all at the Coronation Day party next door, where the flash so-and-sos had that precious rarity, a TV set. While no one was looking, I reached up to the table and took a swig of champagne. And it was good.
This would, of course, have been a flagrant breach of Ed Balls's eminently sensible guidelines advising parents on booze for the babbies. Clearly my parents should have been made to sign parenting contracts and attend a re-education course, at the very least. As for me, it's no wonder I went to the dogs and became a persistent possessor of alcohol. I blame the parents.
Sadly, as it turned out, scarcely a drop of alcohol passed my lips for years after that heady introduction. Like many youngsters of the time, I benefited from a widespread parental misconception that cider is non-alcoholic, but, unlike today's yoof, I wasn't far short of legal age before I got going with 'real' drinking.
Now we live in different times, a different world - one in which the epic, religio-magical, millennium-old Coronation ceremony that was enacted on that day in 1953 could surely never be repeated. Heaven knows that they'll come up with if Chazza becomes King...
This would, of course, have been a flagrant breach of Ed Balls's eminently sensible guidelines advising parents on booze for the babbies. Clearly my parents should have been made to sign parenting contracts and attend a re-education course, at the very least. As for me, it's no wonder I went to the dogs and became a persistent possessor of alcohol. I blame the parents.
Sadly, as it turned out, scarcely a drop of alcohol passed my lips for years after that heady introduction. Like many youngsters of the time, I benefited from a widespread parental misconception that cider is non-alcoholic, but, unlike today's yoof, I wasn't far short of legal age before I got going with 'real' drinking.
Now we live in different times, a different world - one in which the epic, religio-magical, millennium-old Coronation ceremony that was enacted on that day in 1953 could surely never be repeated. Heaven knows that they'll come up with if Chazza becomes King...
Sunday, 1 June 2008
News on the Doorstep
It isn't often - especially down in the suburban demi-paradise I call home - that news happens on your doorstep. Least of an appalling story like that which unfolded on Friday night and Saturday morning. The news began trickling in early in the morning, until it became the lead item on the morning bulletins: Two young children stabbed to death, a baby fighting for life, both parents in custody. As the initial shock wore off, one reached for the lazy assumption that this must have happened at the 'rough end' of town - the badlands (not that bad at all, really) to the North - but no, at the newsagents I learned where it had happened. It was within a (very nearly literal) stone's throw of my own house.
Turning the corner at the end of my road, I found all the accessories of a modern news 'incident' - the big vans with tall aerials, the cameras and fuzzed-up mikes, the mooching hacks and technicians with their styrofoam coffees and their professional ennui. And there, just over the road, taped off, guarded by a pair of coppers, was the house where it had happened. An ordinary, unimposing, bow-windowed detached house from, I'd guess, the 1920s - last-gasp Arts & Crafts, the front as bland as any other, with its whitewashed pebbledash and plastic windows, but some quite nice detailing surviving on the side elevations. I must have walked past it thousands of times over the years, and often, in an absent-minded way, registered the tiniest pang of aesthetic pleasure at those details. Now here it was again, this half-noticed building, isolated and starkly transformed into a 'house of horrors'. And horrors, unimaginable horrors, were indeed enacted there, behind those blank net curtains - blank but for, at the upstairs window, on the sill, a row of little plastic flower arrangements in tiny pots...
As the news developed in the course of the day, one reached again for the lazy assumptions - husband discovers wife has strayed, kills her children in his fury - and once again they were wrong. This is the latest. In the end, it appears, this may be another dreadful case of a mother sliding into such a well of unimaginable despair that there seems only one kindness she can do her children. . And, as ever, no one knew.
Turning the corner at the end of my road, I found all the accessories of a modern news 'incident' - the big vans with tall aerials, the cameras and fuzzed-up mikes, the mooching hacks and technicians with their styrofoam coffees and their professional ennui. And there, just over the road, taped off, guarded by a pair of coppers, was the house where it had happened. An ordinary, unimposing, bow-windowed detached house from, I'd guess, the 1920s - last-gasp Arts & Crafts, the front as bland as any other, with its whitewashed pebbledash and plastic windows, but some quite nice detailing surviving on the side elevations. I must have walked past it thousands of times over the years, and often, in an absent-minded way, registered the tiniest pang of aesthetic pleasure at those details. Now here it was again, this half-noticed building, isolated and starkly transformed into a 'house of horrors'. And horrors, unimaginable horrors, were indeed enacted there, behind those blank net curtains - blank but for, at the upstairs window, on the sill, a row of little plastic flower arrangements in tiny pots...
As the news developed in the course of the day, one reached again for the lazy assumptions - husband discovers wife has strayed, kills her children in his fury - and once again they were wrong. This is the latest. In the end, it appears, this may be another dreadful case of a mother sliding into such a well of unimaginable despair that there seems only one kindness she can do her children. . And, as ever, no one knew.
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