Meanwhile...

Over on the Pooky website (fine lighting for the quality), I take a tour of Knebworth House.
Here's the link...

Birthday

Born on this day in 1862 was the great French composer Claude Debussy.
Here is Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing Reflets dans l'Eau, from the first volume of Images. Enjoy.

Glottal Stops and Attitude

Wherever I go, there seems to be one question on everyone's lips these days: What on earth has happened to Radio 4? Why is so much of its output becoming simply unlistenable? Including (or perhaps especially) the Today programme.
  I was having dinner with B last night, and it was only a matter of minutes before the subject came up. We agreed, I think, that elements long present in Radio 4's output (and that of the BBC in general) had now reached critical mass, a tipping point or whatever metaphor you like, with the result that a network that had once been at least listenable, and often enjoyable and rewarding, nearly all the time had suddenly become something that is all too frequently unendurable. Those long present elements are the kind of things Mrs N likes to call 'cultural Marxism' – an unexamined, cost-free mix of moral relativism and hostility/indifference to traditional institutions, along with the relentless pushing of an agenda of 'diversity', 'inclusivity', intersectional feminism (don't ask) and multiculturalism. Lately on Radio 4, the most conspicuous symptom has been an apparent drive to foist female presenters – and ideally all-female line-ups – on as many programmes as possible (and if the women are from ethnic minorities and/or don't speak RP, so much the better). There are, of course, many excellent women broadcasters, including some of my own radio favourites, but they owe their success to their excellence, not their sex. Once you embark on what is in effect ideological quota-filling, quality will inevitably suffer. For evidence of how dire the effects can be, I would refer you to the two recent series mentioned here... If the aim had been to prove that women aren't funny, they could hardly have done a better job.
  The metropolitan 'liberal' bias of the BBC – so deep-seated and all-pervasive that the BBC itself genuinely cannot perceive it – used to be something that we could put up with and easily discount. But now, as it takes on more and more of the trappings of cultural Marxism, it has spread out from its traditional strongholds – notably Woman's Hour (the continuation of the Guardian women's page by other means), topical 'comedy' and arts programmes – to encompass more and more programmes, thereby making more and more of Radio 4 unlistenable. Everywhere there are glottal stops, attitude and reflex leftism (Trump evil, all migrants good, Brexit bad, 'Europe' good, socialism moral, conservatism immoral, etc, etc.). As Jeremy Corbyn says on that brilliant Private Eye cover, 'Enough already.'
  However, all is not lost: though much is taken, much abides. Radio 4 still has some very good programmes, and continues to come up with things that are well worth hearing. Just this morning, I was listening to Reflections, in which Peter Hennessy encourages politicians to look back over their careers and reflect thereon. This can be pretty tedious stuff, but today it was Iain Duncan Smith, a man fatally lacking in charisma but one of the more decent and thoughtful politicians of recent times (and one with an interesting back story). When the conversation got round (inevitably) to Brexit, he told of meeting with a group of EU ambassadors and presenting them with a thought experiment. Could you not, he asked, entertain the notion of 'British exceptionalism'? To the bemused ambassadors, he elucidated: Britain, because of its very different history and its island status, has never felt the same way about the EU as they have, and has never made an easy fit with it or been fully committed to it. We, for example, don't feel that we owe the postwar decades of peace and prosperity to the EU (in its various incarnations), nor have we had any reason to. Still less do we feel the need for 'ever closer union'. Could the EU not recognise that we are not just another member state, one whose departure will open the floodgates for the rest; the rest will have as many reasons to stay in after Brexit as before. We have always stood apart, we are not representative but exceptional. Surely we could be accommodated in such a way as to recognise that fact and enable us to live with the EU as a friendly, co-operative but independent neighour?
  A stunned silence fell. All were aghast.
  Finally one of the ambassadors spoke up. 'Only a British citizen could say that,' be declared. Which rather made IDS's point.

Stragglers

On the happy day when I retired (a little over three years ago now) I had a list of things I was going to do with the new-found leisure I was fondly expecting to enjoy. Some of them I have managed, including, I'm happy to say, 'get more sleep'. However, 'stare vacantly into the middle distance' is one that I've not often achieved – in fact I probably did more of that in my working years, from sheer exhaustion / boredom. Retirement has turned out to be pretty much as busy as work was, just busy in wholly different ways, mostly familial, domestic and hedonic (under which title I include research for my book). Which is all by way of explaining why this blog tends to fall silent more often now than in my hard-pressed working days. 
  Never mind. Today I can report that, happily, the swifts have not left after all – or not all of them. Though their screams – the true sound of summer – are no longer to be heard, there are still stragglers up there. I saw one over the garden on Monday, then another over the road the next day – and today, sitting in the garden after (granddaughter) Summer's birthday party, I looked up and saw another – then another, and another, three flying together, lazily circling while drifting generally southward, to Africa. Come to think, I might well have been staring vacantly into the middle distance when I saw them – but upwards, at the sky.

The King

It was on this day in 1977 that Elvis Presley died. I remember getting off the train to work the following morning (the news reached the UK overnight) and seeing that someone had already scrawled, high up on a wall opposite the station, the words 'Are you lonesome tonight?'
  As music star deaths go, Elvis's was more unglamorous than most, and less premature (he was 42). His best work was surely behind him – and so much of the material he had recorded (not to mention the films he made) had anyway been unworthy of him. Compared to the loss, much earlier in their lives and  careers, of two other Seventies casualties, Gram Parsons and Tim Buckley, Elvis's death did not deprive the world of much musical potential. Who knows where either of those two might have taken their music if they had lived?
  However, with all that said, Elvis Presley's death felt like a great blow and a palpable loss. For a few years, Elvis simply was rock 'n' roll, and even to the end and in spite of everything, he had an aura, a magic, an almost numinous quality about him, something that singled him out from all others (and was strangely blended with an almost childlike vulnerability). Perhaps the best musical tribute paid to him – one that capture that strange and special aura – is Gillian Welch's beautiful Elvis Presley Blues (a song that links him with the American folk hero John Henry). The King is dead, long live the King.

Ain't It Grand...

Among Radio 4's more annoying features – which currently include a jaw-droppingly infantile 'history' series, with 'jokes', called Did the Victorians Ruin the World?, and the least funny topical comedy ever broadcast (and God knows it's got a lot of competition), Where's the F in News – where was I? Oh yes, and then there's the habit of larding every factual programme with snatches of music, or even a 'music bed', to the point where some become unlistenable: I recently had to turn off a perfectly decent programme on economics because the accompanying music was, as Danny Dyer would say, 'doin' me 'ead in'.
  The use of music is usually either crassly literal or entirely irrelevant – but sometimes something turns up that catches the ear, in a good way. It happened the other day with a programme about undertakers, which kept giving us snatches of a wonderfully macabre song called Ain't It Grand to Be Bloomin' Well Dead, which I knew only by title and had never heard. Sung in a broad old-fashioned cockney accent, with a sneer in every verse, it's a little gem of black, cynical, deeply misanthropic comedy. Looking it up, I discovered that it's a traditional song of obscure origin, and was popularised by the man singing it on Radio 4 – Leslie Sarony! Yes, Leslie Sarony, the jolly songster who gave us such jaunty classics as Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors and I Lift Up My Finger (And I Say Tweet Tweet), not to mention Jollity Farm. And here's something for fact fans: Sarony, who was also an actor and busy to the end of his long life, played Uncle Stavely in the final series of Peter Tinniswood's fondly remembered I Didn't Know You Cared. 'I heard that! Pardon?'

Auberon Waugh, Novelist: 2

A day devoted to wrestling with technology – fending off an online scam bombardment and trying to get my new printer working. After an hour and ten minutes on the phone with a helpful, if sometimes bemused, operative, I do at least have a working printer. Long may it last (and thereby buck my past record with printers).
  On the upside, my spirits were lifted by the sight of a belated swift circling desultorily over the garden – just when I thought I'd seen my last of the year.
  But to the matter in hand: the novels of Auberon Waugh. I have now read his second, Path of Dalliance, published in 1963. A kind of modern picaresque, it's a less ambitious affair than his debut, The Foxglove Saga – looser, more relaxed, even a little baggy (it could have shed thirty or forty pages). But it's every bit as funny – which is rather the point with comic novels, though sometimes you'd never know it – and it's written throughout in Waugh's beautifully managed prose, with never a dead sentence.
  Like The Foxglove Saga, Path of Dalliance begins at Cleeve, the Catholic school, whence it follows several ex-pupils out into the world – chief among them, Jamey Sligger, an ineffectual, slightly priggish (but in practice often amoral) young innocent who hasn't much of a clue about the outside world. He is off to Godolphin Hall, a highly exclusive Oxford college where he is to share rooms with his rich Cleeve friend Guy Frazer-Robinson. Jamey finds Oxford life as bewildering as everything else, and blunders through it in much the same way as he will blunder (after his inevitable sending down) through his first foray into the world of work – as a journalist, for heaven's sake.
  Waugh's satirising of student life at Oxford – the endless talking (in lieu of doing), the intrigues and snobbery, the posing, the casual cruelty, the abortive love affairs and, in particular, the mad world of student activism – is spot-on. It's striking how little the idiocies of the student left have changed in the half century since Path of Dalliance. though perhaps their methods are rather less insanely devious than the futile plots hatched by the activists of yesteryear. The fellow students who cross Jamey's path are a mixture of university types and more convincingly drawn individuals – and the latter category also includes Mrs Price-Williams, principal of St Rachel's, and her husband, a philosophy don with infantile urges. Later there is some satirising of the modern art market which is rather more, er, broad brush, but Waugh's picture of life in newspaper journalism in the days when the print unions still ruled is much more successful.
 As he blunders through Oxford, and for some while after, Jamey remains under the influence of Cleeve, sending regular reports to one of the Brothers – and of his monstrous, endlessly embarrassing mother, who is perhaps the strongest character in the book. By the end of the story Jamey is, perhaps, beginning to break free and grow up, but you wouldn't want to bet on it. Path of Dalliance ends back at Cleeve with a reunion of old boys and others. It's a satisfying and immensely enjoyable read, and surely deserves to be reprinted. My copy was reissued by Robin Clark, along with the other novels, in the Eighties – and that was a long time ago.