Not Writing White

On the shelves of my trusty local Oxfam, I recently found an anthology called Heaven On Earth. Compiled by Wendy Cope, this is a collection of '101 Happy Poems'. They range across time from ancient China to the present day, with a weighting towards the contemporary. Some poems are familiar, others obscure, some not obviously happy, but all work towards Cope's stated aim of disproving the received wisdom that 'happiness writes white', that the emotion cannot convincingly be conveyed in the written word.
Naturally Richard Wilbur - a poet who (in Randall Jarrell's words) 'sees, and shows, the bright  underside of every dark thing' - is represented in Heaven On Earth, with 'April 5, 1974'. As the long remainder of winter stretches before us, Russian cold heads our way and spring seems impossibly far off, it's one to lift the heart and remind us that the great transformation will surely come, hopefully before Wilbur's date. It also has a quite wonderful ending...

April 5, 1974

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream,
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter's giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

Wrinkles and Boredom

If you've ever wondered why, after too long in the bath, your fingers and toes get wrinkly, our friends in the white coats have come up with an explanation. Stories like this (and they come up often enough, heaven knows)  begin from the assumption that whatever is, is - or has been at some past time - evolutionarily adaptive. The scientist's job, then, is simply to construct a plausible narrative that 'explains' how evolution brought it about. Isn't this all rather circular?
This story, on the other hand, doesn't invoke evolution, even though it plausibly could - surely human life was for the most part interminably boring until, in very recent times, we developed the means to distract ourselves around the clock. Maybe sheer tedium was the engine of human evolution? I remember my own childhood as a landscape containing great stagnant lagoons of boredom, and I think being bored for much of the time probably did me more good than harm, making me develop my 'inner resources'. We probably could all do with more empty space in our mental lives - but I hope employers don't take this story seriously and start inflicting more workplace tedium on us in the hope of reaping creative rewards. It certainly wouldn't work in my case - when I'm staring into the middle distance, the last thing I'm thinking about it work.

Very Small and Fast

I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's amazing what you see if you keep your eyes peeled...
There I was yesterday evening, strolling through the expensive back streets of Kensington on my way to the underground railway (150 years old today), when I saw, scampering towards me on the nearside of the pavement, in the lee of the garden walls, something very small and fast. At first I thought it must be a House Mouse, but it was too small even for that - really tiny - and it looked too pointy at the face end. As it hurried towards me and took a sharp left turn into the safety of a garden, I concluded it must have been a Common Shrew. The last time I saw one of those was back in the days when we had a cat - the late Scruffy - who liked to present rodent tributes to her owners, in the form of dead mice and shrews. The Common Shrew is indeed common, in all manner of leafy sheltered habitats,  but rarely seen. What mine was doing hurtling along a Kensington street I have no idea - unless the unseasonably mild weather had turned its mind to thoughts of love...

Whiff Whaff's Coming Home

If you caught any of the TV coverage of the Olympic table tennis, you'll know that the game has become so blisteringly fast and fiendish that the action is little more than a blur, rallies are over in the blink of an eye, and as a result it's a pretty useless spectator sport. Now - in another piece of news to delight retroprogressives - sports promoter Barry Hearn aims to rescue table tennis from itself by going back 30 years to reinvent the much more watchable and involving ping pong. This is the game most of us remember from our younger days, when our desperate quest to meet the opposite sex led us to hang around in youth clubs, where ping-pong was one of the few entertainments on offer. Played with a sandpaper-covered bat, ping-pong was - and is and will again be - a slower and more elegant game than modern table tennis, the old-fangled bats offering much less scope for power play and spectacular spin than today's dimpled sponge jobs. Long and (fairly) exciting rallies - even between mediocre players - were the result, a game that was fun to play and to watch.
Table tennis - like so much else in life - has fallen victim to the fatal concept of Progress. This pernicious notion used even to infect the world of classical music - until the period instrument revival demonstrated that composers of earlier centuries weren't blindly groping their way towards the blazing sound of the Berlin Philharmonic circa 1960, and that the music they wrote sounds far better on the instruments it was written for. One can only hope that a period sports revival might now be on the way, with (for example)  lawn tennis reverting to wooden racquets and gut strings and regaining its erstwhile elegance. The ping-pong revival might be just the start. Boris was surely right when he gave his pre-Olympic rallying cry of 'Ping-pong's coming home!' Whiff whaff - the precursor to ping-pong, played with books and a golf ball or cigar box lids and champagne corks - surely cannot be far behind.

Reasons to Be Cheerful. 6.

Retroprogressives will rejoice at the news that, for the sixth year running, sales of supposedly obsolescent vinyl records have risen (though shellac, alas, remains static). At the same time, the market in 'physical CDs' continues to decline sharply, along with sales of video games (whatever they are), and generalist record shops seem doomed to total extinction, with only a few specialist outlets thriving - often riding the resurgent vinyl wave.
It's easy to succumb to false nostalgia when looking back at those golden days when every town had at least one record shop, its racks groaning with desirable vinyl. The fact is that, outside the big cities and university towns, most record shops were dreadful, your chances of finding anything that wasn't in the 'charts' was slim, the Classical section was little more than an afterthought, and you'd almost certainly have to put in an order and wait weeks to get anything worth having. I remember being obliged to put in a special order for Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, for heaven's sake! Most of the coolest music was only available on import, and could only be found in those rare gems of record shops that we now recall  precisely because they were so rare and so good to find.
Mainstream record shops deserved to fail, and the only surprise about it was that it took so long. We now have the internet, enabling us to buy at the touch of a button the kind of things we'd once have had to spend years tracking down and would probably never find. And the range available is simply staggering. Who needs record shops - except of course for the tactile joy of handling vinyl?

Mr Jerrold and Mr Caudle

Born on this day in 1803 was Douglas William Jerrold, one of those industrious Victorians writers who seem never to have slept. He was a successful dramatist (his first staged piece written when he was 14), a hugely prolific critic and journalist, a famous conversationist and wit, friend of Dickens, founder-editor of half a dozen magazines and a mainstay of the early Punch. It was there that he published the work for which he is still (just) remembered - that gem of Victorian comedy, Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures. These are verbatim accounts, written from memory (as a kind of bitterwseet memorial) by the widowed Mr Caudle, of a series of withering monologues delivered by his wife as the hapless Mr C climbed into bed in hope of sleep - only to be reminded of some indiscretion that would surely bring about in due course the fall of the house of Caudle. A naturally generous and convivial type, Mr C (pictured with a friend at his club, The Skylarks) is sometimes a little the worse for wear when he comes to bed, and knows what he must expect. On other occasions, though, it is some insignificant and barely noticed lapse that has set Mrs Caudle's dark imaginings to work, and he must be forcibly reminded of the inevitable consequences. Here, for example, has has thoughtlessly lent an umbrella. Oh dear...


'BAH! That's the third umbrella gone since Christmas.

"What were you to do?

"Why, let him go home in the rain, to be sure. I'm very certain there was nothing about him that could spoil. Take cold, indeed! He doesn't look like one of the sort to take cold. Besides, he'd have better taken cold than take our only umbrella. Do you hear the rain, Mr. Caudle? I say, do you hear the rain? And as I'm alive, if it isn't St. Swithin's day! Do you hear it against the windows? Nonsense; you don't impose upon me. You can't be asleep with such a shower as that! Do you hear it, I say? Oh, you do hear it! Well, that's a pretty flood, I think, to last for six weeks; and no stirring all the time out of the house. Pooh! don't think me a fool, Mr. Caudle. Don't insult me. He return the umbrella! Anybody would think you were born yesterday. As if anybody ever did return an umbrella! There—do you hear it! Worse and worse! Cats and dogs, and for six weeks, always six weeks. And no umbrella!

"I should like to know how the children are to go to school tomorrow? They sha'n't go through such weather, I'm determined. No: they shall stop at home and never learn anything—the blessed creatures!—sooner than go and get wet. And when they grow up, I wonder who they'll have to thank for knowing nothing—who, indeed, but their father? People who can't feel for their own children ought never to be fathers.

"But I know why you lent the umbrella. Oh, yes; I know very well. I was going out to tea at dear mother's to-morrow—you knew that; and you did it on purpose. Don't tell me; you hate me to go there, and take every mean advantage to hinder me. But don't you think it, Mr. Caudle. No, sir; if it comes down in buckets-full I'll go all the more. No: and I won't have a cab. Where do you think the money's to come from? You've got nice high notions at that club of yours. A cab, indeed! Cost me sixteenpence at least—sixteenpence! two-and-eightpence, for there's back again. Cabs, indeed! I should like to know who's to pay for 'em; I can't pay for 'em, and I'm sure you can't, if you go on as you do; throwing away your property, and beggaring your children—buying umbrellas!

"Do you hear the rain, Mr. Caudle? I say, do you hear it? But I don't care—I'll go to mother's to-morrow: I will; and what's more, I'll walk every step of the way,—and you know that will give me my death. Don't call me a foolish woman, it's you that's the foolish man. You know I can't wear clogs; and with no umbrella, the wet's sure to give me a cold—it always does. But what do you care for that? Nothing at all. I may be laid up for what you care, as I daresay I shall—and a pretty doctor's bill there'll be. I hope there will! It will teach you to lend your umbrellas again. I shouldn't wonder if I caught my death; yes: and that's what you lent the umbrella for. Of course!

"Nice clothes I shall get too, traipsing through weather like this. My gown and bonnet will be spoilt quite.

"Needn't I wear 'em then?

"Indeed, Mr. Caudle, I shall wear 'em. No, sir, I'm not going out a dowdy to please you or anybody else. Gracious knows! it isn't often that I step over the threshold; indeed, I might as well be a slave at once,—better, I should say. But when I do go out,—Mr. Caudle, I choose to go like a lady. Oh! that rain—if it isn't enough to break in the windows.

"Ugh! I do look forward with dread for to-morrow! How I am to go to mother's I'm sure I can't tell. But if I die I'll do it. No, sir; I won't borrow an umbrella. No; and you sha'n't buy one. Now, Mr. Caudle, only listen to this: if you bring home another umbrella, I'll throw it in the street. I'll have my own umbrella or none at all.

"Ha! and it was only last week I had a new nozzle put to that umbrella. I'm sure, if I'd have known as much as I do now, it might have gone without one for me. Paying for new nozzles, for other people to laugh at you. Oh, it's all very well for you—you can go to sleep. You've no thought of your poor patient wife, and your own dear children. You think of nothing but lending umbrellas!

"Men, indeed!—call themselves lords of the creation!—pretty lords, when they can't even take care of an umbrella!

"I know that walk to-morrow will be the death of me. But that's what you want—then you may go to your club and do as you like—and then, nicely my poor dear children will be used—but then, sir, then you'll be happy. Oh, don't tell me! I know you will. Else you'd never have lent the umbrella!

"You have to go on Thursday about that summons and, of course, you can't go. No, indeed, you don't go without the umbrella. You may lose the debt for what I care—it won't be so much as spoiling your clothes—better lose it: people deserve to lose debts who lend umbrellas!

"And I should like to know how I'm to go to mother's without the umbrella! Oh, don't tell me that I said I would go—that's nothing to do with it; nothing at all. She'll think I'm neglecting her, and the little money we were to have we sha'n't have at all—because we've no umbrella.

"The children, too! Dear things! They'll be sopping wet; for they sha'n't stop at home—they sha'n't lose their learning; it's all their father will leave 'em, I'm sure. But they shall go to school. Don't tell me I said they shouldn't: you are so aggravating, Caudle; you'd spoil the temper of an angel. They shall go to school; mark that. And if they get their deaths of cold, it's not my fault—I didn't lend the umbrella."

"At length," writes Caudle, "I fell asleep; and dreamt that the sky was turned into green calico, with whalebone ribs; that, in fact, the whole world turned round under a tremendous umbrella!"

Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures quite often turns up in bookshops in nice illustrated Victorian editions. It has also been reprinted in the excellent series of Prion Humour Classics, with an appreciative introduction by Peter Ackroyd, no less.

Fotherington-Thomas Lives!

Today's obituaries of the superb cricket commentator Christopher Martin-Jenkins have been full of accounts of the poor man's titanic struggles with modern technology. Here was a chap who was fully capable of mistaking his TV remote control for a mobile phone and trying to make calls on it. And he could never make head or tail of a computer, frequently mistaking the Delete and Send buttons, with catastrophic results. But, whatever the provocation offered by the high-tech world, CMJ was never heard to swear, making use instead of home-made oaths such as 'Fotherington-Thomas!'.
Yes, Fotherington-Thomas - literary offspring of Gussy Fink-Nottle and Madeleine Bassett - the 'gurl', 'wet' and 'utter weed' who skips his way through the pages of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's chronicles of prep-school life at St Custard's. The perfect foil to the self-consciously 'tuough' (but actually tender-hearted) Nigel Molesworth, Fotherington-Thomas is blithely unconcerned by the hostility of his fellows, and is in fact Molesworth's secret friend when the eyes of the tougher boys are off him. The two of them while away the time agreeably enough in and around the goal mouth during football matches, Fotherington-Thomas being the perpetual goalkeeper and Molesworth an idle full back. Oddly, for all his weedy wetness and 'Hullo clouds, hullo sky' catchphrase, Fotherington-Thomas was a fiend on the tennis court. Sadly, however, he did not distinguish himself on the cricket field... Anyway, it is good that the noble name of Fotherington-Thomas is yet alive, and as an inventive substitute for the F-word it has much to commend it.