Free London walks

Timing is all.

I made the brilliant decision last night to stop off on the way home to do a little shopping in the centre of London.

Three and a half hours later, I got home, having walked nearly all of the way from Bond Street station to East Dulwich. (I did managed to find space on a bus from Elephant and Castle to Camberwell Green because, well, if you can’t find a bus at the Infanta, you’re really not trying very hard.)

And you know what? Despite all the rain, the overcrammed buses whizzing past bus stops, the fights at said bus stops, the umbrellas in the eye, the general lack of information and the many pinstriped fools acting as though the sky had fallen in because they couldn’t find a taxi to hail, despite all that, it was rather enjoyable.

An unexpected opportunity for a long city walk, carving a route from North West to South East, having almost normal human contact with Londoners along the way.

It almost humanised the place, broke, for a while, its pretence of being an unnavigably complex automatised system.

The unexpected laughs, such as walking down the Strand past a hundred or so gridlocked black cabs in a row, didn’t hurt either.

Many declines, many falls

210 reasons proferred for the decline and fall of the Roman empire enumerated by Professor Alexander Demandt in his 1984 work, Der Falls Rom.

It’s tempting to select one’s favourites (’fear of life’, ‘culinary excess’, ‘bread and circuses’, ‘attacks by Germans’), but the 210 reasons are worth quoting in full:

Abolition of gods, abolition of rights, absence of character, absolutism, agrarian question, agrarian slavery, anarchy, anti-Germanism, apathy, aristocracy, asceticism, attacks by Germans, attacks by Huns, attacks by nomads on horseback.

Backwardness in science, bankruptcy, barbarization, bastardization, blockage of land by large landholders, blood poisoning, bolshevization, bread and circuses, bureaucracy, Byzantinism.

Capitalism, change of capitals, caste system, celibacy, centralization, childlessness, Christianity, citizenship (granting of), civil war, climatic deterioration, communism, complacency, concatenation of misfortunes, conservatism, corruption, cosmopolitanism, crisis of legitimacy, culinary excess, cultural neurosis.

Decentralization, decline of Nordic character, decline of the cities, decline of the Italic population, deforestation, degeneration, degeneration of intellect, demoralization, depletion of mineral resources, despotism, destruction of environment, destruction of peasantry, destruction of political process, destruction of Roman influence, devastation, differences in wealth, disarmament, disillusion with state, division of empire, division of labour.

Earthquakes, egoism, egoism of the state, emancipation of slaves, enervation, epidemics, equal rights (granting of), eradication of the best, escapism, ethnic dissolution, excessive aging of population, excessive civilization, excessive culture, excessive foreign infiltration, excessive freedom, excessive urbanization, expansion, exploitation.

Fear of life, female emancipation, feudalization, fiscalism, gladiatorial system, gluttony, gout, hedonism, Hellenization, heresy, homosexuality, hothouse culture, hubris, hyperthermia.

Immoderate greatness, imperialism, impotence, impoverishment, imprudent policy toward buffer states, inadequate educational system, indifference, individualism, indoctrination, inertia, inflation, intellectualism, integration (weakness of), irrationality, Jewish influence.

Lack of leadership, lack of male dignity, lack of military recruits, lack of orderly imperial succession, lack of qualified workers, lack of rainfall, lack of religiousness, lack of seriousness, large landed properties, lead-poisoning, lethargy, levelling (cultural), levelling (social), loss of army discipline, loss of authority, loss of energy, loss of instincts, loss of population, luxury.

Malaria, marriages of convenience, mercenary system, mercury damage, militarism, monetary economy, monetary greed, money (shortage of), moral decline, moral idealism, moral materialism, mystery religions, nationalism of Rome’s subjects, negative selection.

Orientalization, outflow of gold, over-refinement, pacifism, paralysis of will, paralysation, parasitism, particularism, pauperism, plagues, pleasure-seeking, plutocracy, polytheism, population pressure, precociousness, professional army, proletarization, prosperity, prostitution, psychoses, public baths.

Racial degeneration, racial discrimination, racial suicide, rationalism, refusal of military service, religious struggles and schisms, rentier mentality, resignation, restriction to profession, restriction to the land, rhetoric, rise of uneducated masses, romantic attitudes to peace, ruin of middle class, rule of the world.

Semi-education, sensuality, servility, sexuality, shamelessness, shifting of trade routes, slavery, Slavic attacks, socialism (of the state), social tensions, soil erosion, soil exhaustion, spiritual barbarism, stagnation, stoicism, stress, structural weakness, superstition.

Taxation, pressure of terrorism, tiredness of life, totalitarianism, treason, tristesse, two-front war, underdevelopment, useless diet, usurpation of all powers by the state, vaingloriousness, villa economy, vulgarization.

Parklife

The regular Sunday afternoon football used to be in Ruskin Park, down behind King’s College Hospital. It’s rather a nice park, with the grassy areas falling away to sunken gardens, a discreet bowling green, a playground for the kids, tennis courts, and a small strip of undefined grass where we held our scratch five-a-side games.

Earlier in the year, we found that the competition for that small patch of grass was getting too intense (it’s not easy kicking kids off ‘your’ pitch), so we upped sticks to Peckham Rye Common (literally: we have lovingly hand-crafted goals made out of plastic guttering). Being a common, it has more flat grass than we could possibly make use of, meaning that the pitch size has stealthily risen over the past few months.

An unexpected advantage of the move is that on Sunday afternoons, the Common is bursting with people looking to join in a kickaround. If we’re short of numbers there are usually a couple of lads standing behind a goal, looking wistful and trying to catch someone’s eye. We’ve had all sorts join in, from ball-hogging fancy dans to enthusiastic 12 year olds who get under everyone’s feet.

Last Sunday there were seven of us. Nearby, three toned looking lads in black singlet tops had just finished a park-style kickaround, and had sat down to enjoy the sun. We asked if they were interested in making up the numbers. They were.

In the way of these things, it was half-time before we got beyond names. The lads turned out to be three-fifths of a ‘male vocal pop group’. In other words, a boy band.

They have been holed up in a house together in South London while they record their first tracks for release in the New Year. This week we may get the full hand as they all seemed keen to take an occasional break from recording.

And how did they perform? As you’d expect, the footwork was good, but there wasn’t much of a creative spark, and little cutting edge.

llly communication

It’s a sorry thing to say, but very few objects in my home give me a pure aesthetic thrill. One that does, that rustles up a tickle of joy every time I see it simply by virtue of its haecitas, is my Illy coffee tin.

Its smoothness, its elegant buffed metal sheen, the discreet Illy logo and deliberately constrained text, all say (sotto voce) “style”. It perches in the fridge, untainted by the usual detritus of leftovers and speculative ingredients cluttered around it. It looks, in short, just as an Italian tin of coffee should.

The real pleasure only starts, though, when you take it out of the fridge. The coated metal is cool, but not painfully so. This is the first delight. The second is that as it is exposed to the warmer air of the room it gains a featherlight condensation, the gentlest acknowledgement of its chill freshness. The third, oh rapture, is removing the lid.

The lid is deep, nearly an inch. And it unscrews. Unscrewing a deep metal lid could be excruciating. Just thinking of two rough planes of metal scraping over each other makes my back teeth ache. But the design of the tin is so artful that all that is required is the fingers rested around the lid and a soft half turn. There. Even as I catch the first mouthful of the aroma, already I’m looking forward to putting the lid back on.

The perfection of this simplest of objects drives me mad. I imagine convocations of Italian tin designers arguing late into the night over the precise size of the lid, the length of the movement, the size of the tin itself, so that it may sit exactly in the curl of the hand. They repair to the bar, remove their jackets (this is serious stuff), furiously point to the photographs of Futurist or Roman objects (depending on inclination) they have brought to add weight to their case for a lid taller than a thumbwidth, or text only in the bottom half. In a corner, the Illy semiologist furiously strikes through any text not considered absolutely necessary for the communication of the soul of a coffee tin. Late that night, someone steals back to the office with the perfect design. The rest continue to argue, about everything and nothing.

Some weeks later they reconvene at the same table in the same bar. There is a loud discussion of the merits of the new figure-hugging Italian football team shirt before someone, apologetically, turns to the matter at hand. Each tries to stifle the tension he is feeling, but under each open collar an adam’s apple bobs uncertainly.

The prototype tin is produced from a white cardboard box and placed on the table. It is beautiful. At first nobody dares touch it. They even look at it only glancingly, for fear. Finally, soaking up the deference of the others, the alpha designer leans forward, and exercising the absolute minimum of movement, grazes the lid open with the palm of his hand.

There is applause, laughter; there are hugs; more wine is ordered. It will be a long while before each of them saunters home in the warm night air to his apartment, jacket slung over shoulder, proud of his part in the achievement.

I know it can’t possibly have been like that, but for the pleasure that tin gives me, I hope it was.

Sick of it

The worst of London:

Midday. The sun has been pulsing down all morning. Everything is making everything else hot.

A spotless BMW pulls over to the side of the road. The chauffeur gets out and bustles round to the left rear door. After opening it, he stands there protectively, managing his face so as not to show disgust.

A woman’s hand reaches down from the car. A jewelled bracelet slides down her wrist. Her expensive nails scratch against the pavement as she tries to steady herself. The heat from the paving slab must be burning her hand. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed. She starts to vomit in the gutter.

As I walk past, she raises her head to catch her breath. I already knew how she would look: nostrils fluttering, eyes wide with kohl and coke.

She goes back to being sick as a dog.

Saaf ov tha rivva

It’s such a pleasure to arrive home to my busy corner of South-East London in the evening. Work is in a dismally genteel portion of North London that would love to be Hampstead but doesn’t quite know how to go about it. I don’t know what Sigmund saw in it.

But once I’m south of the river it’s a different story. After the train has negotiated the shabbily trendy Peckham Rye it heads off down a secondary line, and quickly ducks into terraces of trees. Soon enough, I’m walking down the main road.

Just time to nip into the DIY shop before it closes. Then see what the local flowerselling mogul has left at the end of the day (irises yesterday). These days he’s so busy running his floral empire that he only comes out front to provide change in notes from the branch-thick roll kept in his market man’s apron. With his open-neck shirt neatly tucked into belted trousers, he’s old school South London and no mistake.

This time a young girl (a niece?) serves. We manage the whole transaction with the few consonants expressed coming entirely from my side of the counter. Being younger, she modulates “Alright?” to “Ao’ai-ai-ai?” in proper Estuary fashion (my wilds-of-Essex upbringing gives me a more clipped version: “A’righ?”).

Then, out to choose from the local foodstores. Certainly not the sleek and expensive deli: special occasions only. The famous specialist cheese shop will not be required tonight either (its tempting vegatable samosas will have sold out at lunchtime). The organic greengrocer is a popular choice for evening shopping, but tonight I’m visiting the Turkish ’supermarket’; at first glance it seems to be one of those London food stores where everything is squashy and dust-covered. Except that everything here — the boxes of vegetables outside, the cold counter full of home made mediterranean foods — is crisply wonderful.

Some Cyprus potatoes (from the north of the island, presumably), some salad, some Green & Black’s chocolate just in case, and home to forget that tomorrow I’ll have to head off to the barren steppes of the Finchley Road once again.

Solaris eclipse

I still haven’t seen the Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris. I did, however, finally set aside three hours over the weekend to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky version.

Tarkovsky’s 1972 film is typically stately and melancholic. It starts with weeds undulating slowly in a river. A horse wanders into a barn. Eventually Stanislaw Lem’s philosophically laden plot about the difficulty of communicating with a sentient planet starts its laborious exposition.

The film snaps into black and white as Kelvin, the protagonist, watches film of a troubled flight over the mystery planet. There is nothing but dense white mist filling every corner of the screen: no, wait, there is a flicker of something moving in a gap. It’s gone again, whatever it was.

Tarkovsky sublimely prefigures the journey to Solaris with a five minute sequence of cars winding through the tunnels and overpasses of a modern Russian city. This is big, confident, grown-up film-making, unafraid of becoming ridiculous. It’s saved from this by its mesmeric, shimmering, elegance.

Shortly after arriving at the lonely station above the planet (this is about an hour into the film, mind), Kelvin dares to stand with his face next to a porthole. The camera teasingly zooms into the blackness outside, then eases back again. Has something happened? It’s difficult to know.

Then, without warning, we’re back to the white mist. I strain to make out anything moving deep within it. Was that something? No, it was my shadow on the screen.

Hell, this is daring. The whiteness just goes on, unbroken. Unforgiving.

Then it goes black. And stays black.

It continues black for another minute.

Unless every review and listing of this film is in on some enormous practical joke specifically upon me, this blackness is not, I realise, part of Tarkovsky’s artistic vision.

In fact, the final two-thirds of the film is entirely missing from my tape. My lovingly produced British Film Institute video of this classic movie is a dud. Curse it. Curse it all. I am destined never to see this film; either version.

Although…

Although the Soderbergh version is now out on DVD, and I’ve seen a cheap one on sale on the market stalls down the end of my road of a Saturday. What are the odds of that being a dodgy, incomplete copy too?

Only one way to find out…

Roman à clef

What is a key?

There are certain parts of the country where you can still get by without using a key all day, but in London you need a employ a key every time you move between your house and the world.

At the moment, having tired of carrying a metal hedgehog around with me, I have cut my key-ring down to just the five small daggers. Two house keys, the car key, a key for my pedestal at work, and a squat key housed in black plastic, the function of which temporarily escapes me, but which is probably important. Furthermore, minor keyrings serve each of the doors at home. The French doors in the sitting room are particular culprits, needing six separate actions to lock and unlock.

How is it that I carry on this daily ritual of clanking and turning with almost no consciousness of its deep strangeness? How is that I carry around these things, these bolts of metal, with no measurable sense of burden?

After all, my keyring is one of only three things the location of which I am always sure; the others are my wallet and, these days, the vile mobile phone.

Yes, yes, of course in the future we shall all speak, friend, and enter, with our voice-recognition systems, our fingerprint scanners, our retinal checking heat-sensitive thumbprint-activated microchipped radioactive subdermal transponders. I have experience of these things. I carry a credit card that gets me into work when I wave it over the doorframe. It sits in my wallet and slowly zaps that other sort of key, my tube pass, so that for the last week of the month I have to call on the services of the Underground staff every time I reach the barriers. After being shown the pass, they reach for the only reliable solution; a metal key that unlocks the barrier and lets me through. So you see, I expect to be carrying these lumps of metal in my pocket long into the era of voiceprint analysis at the local bank.

But what, after all, is a key?

The OED has the primary meaning as a device to operate a lock. It also throws in about a dozen supplementary meanings for good measure.

A key is:
The legend to a map or illustration
The base note in a musical scale (’the key of C’)
The scale itself
An important position or item (’the key work of Goethe is Faust‘; the key dog in a pack)
The means of understanding an obscure or otherwise unknown knowledge (’the key to Britten’s music is the sea’; Casaubon’s The Key to All Mythologies inMiddlemarch)
The levers on a keyboard or wind instrument pressed to obtain a note
The element upon which all other rest or depend (a keystone)
The roughness of (for instance) a wall which enables the plaster to grip as it is applied

It was this last that got me thinking about keys in general. What on earth has the grip of plaster or paint got to do with unlocking doors?

I think - or at least it feels as though - it’s to do with the texture of the wall. This is perhaps easier to grasp now that we all know about the ways in which molecular structures interact. Think of those stick and ball models of proteins that clutter up the edges of science labs in schools. A portion of a complex protein, for example, will have a particular landscape, a particular pattern to its irregular shape. An enzyme that operates upon the protein latches onto it by virtue of containing the negative of that specific shape. It matches it, snugs up tight against the protein so that the strange music of the atoms can be played out through the bonds. It fits the way that, in Pangaea, north Africa fitted into the accomodating bosom of the Americas. The key is made to fit the lock. The rough edges shuffle up against their negatives and rest with a minimum of interstitial space.

When you apply plaster to a wall, somewhat counterintuitively, the rougher the surface, the less likely you are to end up with air trapped between plaster and wall. It is a key without a lock; or a lock that is made by the plaster itself oozing around the roughness of the wall, like plasticene curling around a Yale key that’s about to be slyly copied while you’re not looking.

So a key and a lock are yin and yang, male and female, positive and negative, opposites not attracting but gripping each other close.

But this much we already knew, or sensed, behind our everyday use of ‘key’. What about ‘key’ as in ‘important’? This doesn’t utilise anything of the male-femlae connector, this sense of snap-to-fit solidity. The key dog sets the behaviour of the rest of the pack. The keystone is not only the centre of the arch, it is the one which supports the rest - though remove any stone from a gothic arch and you’ll soon regret it (and every day I pass a rescued stone arch in a builder’s yard that has everything except the keystone, requiring only discreet support from a metal brace).

‘Key’ in this sense seems to mean ‘centre’, but I suspect that this is misleading. My guess is that ‘key’ here indicates the focus of the user; it’s where you interact with the object as a whole. The key dog in a pack is the only one you have to direct; the rest will follow. The key hill in a battle is the one you must control; the rest will fall to you as a result. The keystone (subtly different here) is the one that permits to finish the arch; it controls the distribution of weight across the rest, and it is this element of control, of interaction, that makes it appear ‘central’, but only in the sense of being in the middle of things, rather than necessarily in the middle of the thing, the object.

Now, with this sense of the key as a means of control, an interface, we can move quickly to the other meanings.

The keys on a piano interface between the musician and the strings. They transform one sort of action (the movement of fingers) into another (the hammering of the strings). The same idea applies for that other sort of keyboard, the one on which I am writing this. The key to a map performs a similar function of interfacing, of transforming one sort of symbol (for example, a cross on a map) into another (the word ‘Church’).

Naturally, the idea of a key as an interface also works for door keys. A lock is a device which effects a very simple form of access control. You interface with it using a key. I now realise that password interfaces on software, websites, ATMs are not just based on the metaphor of the key; they are analogues of it; they are keys.

Importantly, what the interface controls is the transition between the inside and the outside. This applies not just to keys that open houses, cases, cabinets, or files (affording you, on the outside, access to the interior contents), it also applies to keyboards (allowing you to interface with the machine inside, be it a church organ or a computer). Less obviously, it pertains with the key dog in a pack (allowing you to interface with the pack as a whole, through the influence of the key), the key objective in a battle (you interface with the battle as a whole through this one objective), and so on.

So, a key carries at least three senses which are strong enough to generate subsidiary meanings (that is to say, metaphorical keys which depend on widely-understood aspects of the semantic space of the word ‘key’). A key implies unlocking, it implies the central point of focus, it implies an interface between inside and outside. The ‘Key to All Mythologies’ would not only unlock all mythologies, it would provide the only way in to all mythologies, and it would operate as the interface between us (the outside world) and the inner world of mythology itself. At the other end of the scale, the roughness of the wall provides not only a negative for the positive of the plaster, it is the interface between wall and plaster. At the same time, it is the centre of the relationship, the sole point of rest between the two elements.

The relative weight of these three related elements is far from even; some senses of ‘key’ lean more heavily on one than another. This is nothing unusual. I can’t imagine how a semantic space could develop evenly in all directions, and I suspect that the resulting roughness in language, its uneven texture, is important in enabling it to cling stubbornly to the experiential world, giving meaning to real things rather than carefully demarcated abstract concepts.

Part of this roughness is the sense that there is more to be said about the word. I’m sure that there are elisions and collisions of meaning, over time, langugage and culture, that really ought to be acknowledged. I haven’t touched on the etymology or pronunciation of the word, which would inevitably bring in yet another sense of ‘key’.

A ‘key’ is also a low island or atoll, as in ‘Key West’ and of course ‘quay’. Whether it makes sense to think of a quay as an interface between land and sea, or as a crenellation on the edges of both, I don’t know. It would be interesting, as ever, to spend more time pursuing meanings. It would also, inevitably, end in confusion. Structures of meaning like this don’t have a keystone of irreducible truth holding them together; they hold only if you know when to stop building, when to stop adding weight to it. While building, though, it has been a pleasure to act, however spuriously, as an interface between us and the term itself; to be, for a little while, your key.

Ian T. Middle

Why do American authors so frequently use their middle initial in their names?

Unrelatedly, I’m impressed by the list of cities in which technical publisher O’Reilly is based:

Beijing · Cambridge · Farnham · Köln · Paris · Sebastopol · Taipei · Tokyo

Is there a name for this list of cities? I can’t believe that such a term-happy industry as publishing would let it go untaxonomised, but I’ve never heard it named.

In addition, a world-beating list suggests itself for some unimaginably fantastic and obscure publishing house:

Algiers · Bogotá · Chihuahua · Córdoba · Djibouti · Ephesus · Hammerfest · Hobart · Irkutsk · Jerusalem · Kingston · Kyoto · La Paz · Lerwick · Mecca · Milwaukee · Montevideo · Odessa · Port Moresby · Rangoon · Reykjavik · São Paulo · St Ives · Shangri-La · Sofia · Tripoli · Ur · Warsaw · Zanzibar

Now all I have to do is work out what they would publish.

Speak, memory

Lest we forget. From Plato’s Phaedrus:

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god,
whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him,
and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation
and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery
was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of
the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt
which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by
them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that
the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he
enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised
some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.
It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in
praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This,
said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories;
it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O
most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the
best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users
of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a
paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a
quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create
forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their
memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not
remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid
not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,
but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and
will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will
generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of
wisdom without the reality.

Moore magic

‘The basic thing to remember,’ growls Alan Moore ‘is that, eventually, I am always right’.

Alan Moore continues to be a great interviewee. On continuing to live quietly in Northampton:

‘Just sitting still in the 21st century is a very kinetic experience. Plus I’ve a certain kind of anonymity here. People treat me the way I was treated before I became famous — with complete contempt.’

Oh, and he doesn’t seem to mind that Hollywood regularly makes a complete Horlicks of his stories.

He came in through the bathroom window

When the tattooed biker climbed through our bedroom window late last night, we were all mightily relieved.

The problem had begun a short time earlier, when a guest was making to leave. She struggled with the Yale lock on the front door, and complained that she couldn’t open it. I gave it a try. The knob required no effort to turn, but it did nothing; it had become disconnected from the locking mechanism itself.

As I started to unscrew the lock from the door, I began to realise the extent of the problem. It wasn’t the security chain, or the second lock further down the door. The problem was getting at the broken lock in the first place.

The frame of the door has a ‘London bar’ - a long metal strip running vertically and over the lock, to prevent the frame splitting if the door is given a good hard kicking. (You can also have a ‘Birmingham bar’, which runs down the other side of the door, to prevent it from being kicked straight off its hinges.)

The London bar has the side-effect of almost completely encasing the port for the lock, meaning that I couldn’t even sneak a thin screwdriver in and force the lock back. The only alternative was removing the London bar entirely, which, as its only virtue is its strength, and the screws had been repeatedly painted over, was going to be a long job for which I was ill-equipped.

At this point, news was broken to the guest in question that there was no other way out. The front windows downstairs do not open. (This is London.) The garden backs only onto other gardens. (This is London.) There is no side door. (This is London.) Unfortunately, the only ladder on the premises is not long enough to reach from the first floor windows.

At this point, the more alert member of the household spotted a neighbour across the road, tinkering with one of his fat-pipe motorbikes in the darkness. With his shaven head, beard, leather jerkin and tattoos (’Millwall’, ‘Malice’), he is easy to identify.

He is, by trade, a locksmith.

A few minutes later, having fetched a more serious ladder and an extremely serious screwdriver set, he was up and in through the window. A few minutes after that (”About the time it’ll take you to make me a cuppa”) the lock was sprung and he was fixing the dodgy lump of metal that had been trapping us.

It was properly late by now, so there was just a short sit down, cup of tea and chat about the neighbourhood (the kid next door who rides into the road without looking; the scagheads who he has warned not to trouble "this turning"; the successful local campaign to oust some troublemakers down the road; the bloke down the other way who was ‘adulterated’ by his wife before dying of the beer). Then on his way, refusing all offers of payment, as I knew he would.

To me, this too is London. You take it as you find it.

Billy Bloke

I was twenty one years when I wrote this song
I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long
People ask when will you grow up to be a man
But all the girls I loved at school
are already pushing prams

Billy Bragg is, of course, has always been a romantic. It explains his union choruses as exactly as it explains his many, many forlorn love songs.

I love you
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint

He carried the tradition of political folk almost single-handed through the eighties in Britain. As such, it was no surprise that he was chosen by the estate of Woody Guthrie to set some of Guthrie’s many surviving lyrics to music:

And all creeds and kinds and colors
of us are blending
Till I suppose ten million years from now
we’ll all be just alike
Same color, same size, working together
And maybe we’ll have all of the fascists
out of the way by then
Maybe so.

Many people seem to have trouble with Bragg’s foghorn voice. As if singing were a prerequisite for songs. Besides, who else could have carried off this Woody Guthrie lyric so perfectly?:

She said it’s hard for me to see
how one little boy got so ugly
Yes, my little girly, that might be,
But there ain’t nobody that can sing like me

More than anything else, Billy Bragg carries with him a certain version of England that doesn’t get much of a shout most of the time, and a certain English vision of life:

The Polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away
Like the love that we spoke of forever
On St Swithin’s Day

Billy is finally planning an ‘Essential Bragg’ compilation, and your suggestions for his five or so finest tracks are being requested. As the man has spent years trying to get people to vote, it’s only fair to return the favour this once. My votes will be as above.

Rules for urban living

The rules for maintaining an urban residence are, I think, yet to be fully recorded. I thought it wise to make a start:

1. Your yoghurt should be live; your plaster should not.

Perfect pitch

If you think I’m crazy about Tuvan throat-singing, just try this.

Out in San Francisco lived a blues singer named Paul Pena, a man who had worked with greats like B.B. King and Muddy Waters. He had recorded an album in the seventies that failed to get a release, but a song from which had become a hit for the Steve Miller Band. In the way of all things blues, he was blind, unlucky, sickly and prone to depression.

In the eighties, he gave up his music to look after his sick wife. He spent his sleepless nights listening to shortwave radio, picking up stations from all round the world. Late one night he tuned into Radio Moscow and heard something extraordinary, something that haunted him.

He spent nearly eight years trying to find out what he had heard. Finally he discovered just what it was he had chanced upon: khoomeii, throat-singing from the Tuva province of Russia. The technique is one of a number used by Tuvan singers, and involves forming the mouth into two chambers so that two tones are produced simultaneously; a bass hum and a keening harmonic whistle that modulates high above. He located a CD of the music, and set about studying it.

At the same time, he attempted to learn as much of the Tuvan language as possible, so that he could understand what was being sung about. In the absence of a Tuvan-English dictionary, this meant translating through a Tuvan-Russian dictionary, then through a Russian-English one. For this he used an obsolete ‘Opticon’ scanner that turned the characters on the page into sensations he could interpret, meaning that Paul was effectively translating across four languages and two dimensions.

Khoomeii is only ever taught in Tuva by contact with a master. There are no instruction manuals, no courses. The technique is still only partially understood by musicologists. Paul Pena, left alone after the death of his wife, with a single recording for reference, taught himself.

In 1993 some Tuvan singers pitched up in San Francisco for the first time. Paul was ready, waiting backstage after the concert. He met Kongar-ol Ondar, a champion khoomei-singer, and gave him an impromptu performance of some Tuvan folk songs, in Tuvan.

Pena and Ondar became firm friends as a result of this extraordinary encounter, and Ondar invited him to take part in the next triennial throat-singing festival back in Tuva.

In 1995, Pena, nicknamed ‘Chershemjer’ (Earthquake) for his rumbling voice and quake-zone home, travelled out to compete in the week-long competition. He came back with two awards.

Since then, a certain recognition has followed. June 11th 1999 was ‘Paul Pena Day’ in San Francisco, and he has been made the city’s ‘Tuvan Blues Ambassador’. Even that lost 1973 album has finally been released. This being a bluesman, however, there is no happy ending. Pena is suffering from a very serious pancreatic illness, and is now forced to accept donations to pay his medical bills.

This story pushes so many of my buttons (as the marketeers would put it) that I can hardly believe that I hadn’t encountered it until now. As it is, I am now awaiting delivery of the album that Paul and Kongar-ol recorded together. Even better, it forms the soundtrack to a documentary recording Paul’s 1995 journey to Tuva and participation in the competition, ‘Genghis Blues’. You will not be surprised to hear that the documentary won a hatful of awards at film festivals, including the audience award at Sundance.

I am nervous of watching this film. I suspect that it can only break the perfection of the story, particularly its tremulous, precarious existence on the edge of my world. An acclaimed documentary is going to make it too real, too concrete, too particularised. As it stands there is a mythic quality to the story, a universality of human sentiment that exposure to a more faithful record of the events can only leave scratched and weatherworn.

I am nervous of watching this film, but I must watch it.

POSTSCRIPT: Paul Pena died on 1 October 2005.

Fantastic creatures

At the risk of appearing to spend my spare time gawping at newsagent windows, my local one has a new and mysterious card of the type written in red felt tip.

It advertises:

MERMAID
4 MEN AND WOMEN
RELAXING

I’m quietly pleased that my subculture slang awareness doesn’t extend far enough to understand this, but there’s definitely something fishy about it.

Diary of a Somebody

“Returning home, I chanced to bump into my friends Hermione and Ron. They seemed to find something unaccountably amusing, but refused to share the source of their laughter with me. Merely observing that this was the height of rudeness, I went on my way before saying anything I might later regret on cool reflection.

It was only when I had got home and was in the process of changing my tie that I realised it was now a kipper, soiling my shirt as it flapped about. It was no doubt the result of my miscast Pesca vivum spell. How annoying of my so-called friends not to bring it to my attention!”

 That’s right kids, the new Harry Pooter book is nearly with us.

Further covery

Now I look it up, Collins claims that cove probably derives from the Romany kova, meaning “thing, person”. I never would have guessed such a chappish word to be Romany in origin, but I like the generous latitude of meaning it implies.

Of course, the similarity of meaning to covey (a small group of people, by extension from a small number of grouse) is entirely accidental; one of those glancing blows of apparent meaning you get in a jackdaw language such as English.

Every time I see something like that I am reminded that the English ended up with Shakespeare as poet of the nation; verbose, eclectic, eccentric, syntactically obscure, coining more than the Royal Mint, and madly, intemperately punning.

Puns, let us not forget, only work if you have a lot of semantic variance spread over a small lexical space. Cove seems to be Romany, while covey comes from old French. Languages with fewer borrowed words obviously tend to have fewer opportunities for puns.

One upshot of this that pleases me: we should be looking forward to a whole new set of puns emerging based, particularly, on the increasingly visible Indian languages.

Until we do, keep taking the tablas.

A small inlet, often sheltered

It’s easy to forget how much time we straddle.

A post last week sent me on a small trip back in time to my childhood. The reminiscence continued last night over barbecued trout and new potatoes with Paul, who grew up about 15 miles away from where I did. Both of us shared some basic experiences of the rural areas we knew as kids disappearing in the intervening period.

The fields across which I used to walk the dog, tractor ruts to the top of your boots, are now housing estates leading down to a marina where several million pounds worth of yachts now sit flatly, the waves being completely stilled by the cunning design of the outlet to the river.

I remember the first supermarket in the area opening up: a twenty minute drive to a great aircraft hangar of a building. Whenever I return home, walking down the High Street, I can recall the sequence of the shops put out of business by that supermarket.

Baker, butcher, greengrocer, dry goods, chemist, stationers.

The sugary smell of the chemist; all those sweets it used to sell to mothers trying to keep the kids quiet as they trailed round the shops in the same order each day. The fact that buying even bread would involve having a couple of conversations. Being sent down the road with a pound note to buy fags.

Sweet Jesus, I’m turning into Alan Bennett.

My eye alighted this morning on the word ‘cove’ in its secondary meaning of man or fellow. I can’t have heard this usage in nearly twenty years, not since, as a kid, the examining doctor told me I was “a fair-skinned sort of a cove” and I should be careful in the sun.

Doctors, my doctor friends always tell me, live in a different world. I suspect that they can afford to live in the past. I don’t necessarily mean that detrimentally; I mean that their profession affords continuity, a firmer grip on the time that has been traversed.

Almost nothing I do professionally or socially would have been the same twenty years ago. Buying fresh bread, hot out of the oven, now appears as a luxurious exercise only possible in expensive delis or 24 hour shops with pretensions above their station. It’s difficult to believe that it was only 25 years ago that most mornings would involve someone coming back from the bakery, the bread warming their hands.

Who's your daddy?

You learn not to read the cards in the windows of local newsagents.

Barely a mile from my home, in the riotously expensive Dulwich Village, the cards advertise unwanted pine cupboards, school runs, piano lessons, properties to let in Tuscany, language lessons for the kids on vac.

My local newsagents cover French only. There are plenty of TVs on offer, but no videos. In the Village any of the elegant cards advertising massage will specify ‘Women only’. I infer that the ‘Male massage’ offered in my neck of the woods is far from analogous.

I have spotted a new, professionally printed card in a couple of windows. It stands out among the felt-tipped index cards so much that I stopped to look:

Are you the father?

Don't get caught out.

Take our reliable paternity test. 

 Never forget there’s money in knowing for sure.

Unrelatedly, I think, they restarted milk float deliveries in our area a couple of years ago.

Storm in the Barbican

(First posted 27/05/2003)

Regular readers will be thrilled, no doubt, to learn that I spent yesterday evening watching Tuva’s own Yat-kha perform their live soundtrack to Storm over Asia.

Yat-kha were a three-piece on this occasion. Band leader Albert Kuvezin sat hunched up on the right, bringing thunder with his electric guitar and buzzing, subterranean bass growl. On the left, Radik Tiuliush added the scraping, whinnying noise of the igil (a form of two-stringed cello) and khoomei, the throat-singing I’ve gone on about so much. In the centre, pony-tail and beard clearly visible against the screen just behind him, Evginiy Tkachev looked reassuringly like a grizzled rock drummer, all bare arms and sproutings of hair, while covering percussion of all sorts.

Between the three of them, Yat-kha simply rocked the Barbican. I don’t mean that they blasted away for two solid hours. Far from it. For most of the film, Kuvezin’s folkish guitar doodling led the band gently from scene to scene, responding to the early Soviet propaganda-sized emoting up on screen, but saving the most eloquent passages for the long, slow shots of the Tuvan landscape, all empty plains and brutally rugged hills.

The igil turns out to be particularly good at imitating the sounds of a horse and of a hard wind whipping through a yurt. I doubt that this is coincidence.

The singing can also sound like the wind, or a ceremonial horn, or, frankly, nothing you’ve ever heard before. It was wisely kept to an elegant minimum in the first half, which for the most part told the story of a young herdsman’s misfortune in having a prize fur stolen at market by a rich English trader, then how he falls in with the local Soviet partisans.

The second, wilder, half of the film tells how he is captured by the occupying English, is sentenced to be killed, but survives to be identified (mistakenly) as a legitimate descendent of Genghis Khan. The English then attempt to set him up as a puppet ruler, only for him to finally escape and rally the Tuvan cause against the oppressors.

This rather ripe plot clearly caused political problems; the film was butchered by the Soviet censors, and the quality of image is awful in places where it has had to be reconstructed. Nevertheless, it’s a fine example of high Soviet film-making, with some blaring whip-cutting and sophisticated montage. Early on, as the herdsman leaves his yurt, unaware that he will never return, the hut slowly fades out of existence behind him, communicating his final leaving of home in the most concise manner possible.

There are two absolutely stand-out scenes in the film. The first records a Buddhist ceremonial dance. This starts with Yat-kha mimicking the horns and cymbals of the monks, then slowly builds through a stately procession to a whirligig masked stomp. It’s probably of some ethnographic interest, but in the film serves mainly as a foretaste of the storm to come.

The storm, which has been building with careful slowness through the film, finally arrives in its final couple of minutes, when the herdsman makes a leaping escape from the English encampment. Soldiers are sent rushing after him as he makes off on horseback. Yat-kha are racing, too, by this point. The herdsman screams vengeance on the thieves who have stolen his country, the intertitles flashing in and out of picture as he glares out of the screen at the audience. The soldiers are closing in.

Then, without warning he is accompanied by a raging Mongol horde. The wind is roaring across the plains, pummelling the soldiers, sending them tumbling backwards, tearing up trees, covering the land with seas of debris. By this stage, the band on stage are sounding like a horde themselves. It’s impossible to tell where all the sound is coming from, whether it’s from an instrument or those extraordinary voices. This bone-humming music, these cthonic harmonies from deep within this eternally stamped-upon people. After all the art, the careful guarding of folk tradition, the slow, slow horsetrot of nearly two hours of film, for a couple of minutes the Tuvans remember Genghis Khan and roar.

Combinatory reading

I’ve realised something extraordinary about the way I read.

Or, perhaps, I’ve had an extraordinary realisation about the way I read.

I tend to read two dissimilar books in parallel, and sense for links. I’m not consciously comparing them. Were they to be too alike in subject matter or attitude, I doubt I’d find the obscure thrill of pattern recognition. I’m think I’m seeking for ways in which they can unexpectedly (and, certainly, unintendedly) combine to suggest something strictly outside the scope of either of them (a bit like a third mind I suppose).

I always imagine that I have several books on the go at once. Thinking about it more critically, that’s not actually the case. I have several books started at the same time, but I will tend to finish two close together. I will finish the rest later, usually in combination with other books that I’ve started to replace the two I’ve just finished.

Perhaps I’m casting around for two books that will resonate together, sampling several until I find two that I suspect will offer something. Perhaps also I’m less interested in really reading the two books in question: I’m behaving like anoverinterpreter, using the books for my own mental hobbyhorses rather than accepting their own narrative flow like a good reader.

At the moment I’m rereading Yates’ The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Ageand have as my light bedside read J.C. Cannell’s The Secrets of Houdini. Now both of these are subjects I have time for and these are both classic works in their respective fields. I started the Yates because I really wanted to read The Art of Memory and wanted to refresh my own memory first. I chose the book on Houdini because I wanted something light and put-downable to read before sleeping.

But I was already reading a light bedtime book - one of the Ian Rankin novels. For some reason I set it aside and got on with the Houdini book. It was only when I got to the inevitable and substantial section on Houdini’s long war on Spiritualism that I started to see parallels with Yates’ subject matter.

In brief, Yates spends a deal of time defending the Elizabethan magician Dr Dee against charges of being a demonologist. She does this by attempting to put him in the context of a Renaissance tradition of Christian Cabalists stretching back via Agrippa to Reuchlin, Pico and ultimately Raymond Lull. She explicitly compares the campaign to discredit Dee with the labelling of Cornelius Agrippa as a black magician (he is generally agreed to have served as a model for Faust).

This is all a long way from Houdini, who was an autodidactic Jewish stage magician and, of course, one of the most physically astonishing men who ever lived. And yet Houdini, in his early penurious years, used to conduct seances and perform the very mediumistic tricks he later condemned and exploded as the work of charlatans. And, ironically, it was in his later years, when he was expending tremendous efforts to expose mediums wherever he went, that Spiritualists like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became convinced that Houdini must be a medium himself.

It’s an amusing story, and has been told several times in recent years in book and film, but am I mad to see a connection here with the way that heterodox protoscientific neo-Platonists like Agrippa and Dee were persistently labelled by outsiders as ‘black magicians’? Those looking in from the outside are happy to attribute more power than even the most self-aggrandising magician (oafs like Crowley excepted) would ever claim.

I know this doesn’t sound clear. The connection is raw and unworked in my mind. Perhaps that’s why it excited, set my scalp tingling. I’m not sure I’ve even captured it at all; it appears different when set down (as is usually the case). I need to reread, rethink, rework, before deciding if it’s something or nothing. But it’s a process I know. It’s just that I’d never before nailed down how that processstarts.

No damn good

It upsets me what it takes to upset me.

It seems to require, more than anything else, an artistic juxtaposition. Understand what I mean here by ‘artistic’. I don’t mean an aesthetically pleasingjuxtaposition. Far from it. I mean the sort of juxtaposition an artist would make. I’m afraid that plain old suffering isn’t enough to provoke a reaction. It has to be set off alongside something else, an ironic comment, an oxymoron, to hit home.

I was walking this afternoon through London Bridge station. As so often, an Eastern European looking woman was sitting mournfully by a wall. She had two red-faced, listless children with her. The younger sat up looking at nothing much. The older was laid out across her lap, motionless.

I’m reconstructing this scene because I wasn’t really looking. I was happily walking home, listening to some music, thinking about my Friday night. I, along with everyone else, pretended not to see the sorry scene.

I turned the corner into the new underground concourse in the station, where there is now a selection of small shops selling fruit, smoothies, coffee and the like. Two of the stalls were offering free samples to passing commuters.

I swung from blind happiness to almost incandescent, unfocused rage within a second, almost before I had a chance to think about it. What stays with me now is that I didn’t react to the woman and her children, or if I did, I filed it in that self-deceptive category city people create which says ‘You never know with these people.’ I didn’t react to the free food either, which is not nearly so shameful. I reacted purely and precisely to the physical proximity of the two images compared to the moral distance between them.

Thinking about it, maybe I did react along aesthetic lines. I can’t see any way of denying it.

Worse, to my shame, by the time I got back to where the woman and her kids were sitting, they were in the process of being moved along by station staff.