Lockdown Bulletin No. 3

Well here we all still are. Not much wiser about how to get things back to normal - apart from the charmless libertarian Toby Young in the new online magazine The Critic, rather wetly echoed in Australia by Adam Creighton in the Australian. They seem certain that shutdown measures are too extreme. The claim is that there will be just as many deaths caused by unemployment as might be by COVID19 and therefore straight after Easter we should all just go back to the way things were before.

Yes, the suggestion is that in 10 days time, just as - in the United Kingdom at least, I fear - hospitals will be entering exceptionally dark times, everyone should just forget about the chance of getting ill and dying, get up as if nothing is happening and hop on the tube and go back to work. You'll probably be fine, is the argument - well most of you, although it's impossible to say which ones won't be. Toby Young ended his article with the claim that he was actually suffering from the coronavirus infection while writing and was happy to become collateral damage, provided the economy could be put back on track, which I think he thought was a marvellous flourish but of course actually entirely undermined his argument since, if he has actually contracted the illness, he is arguing from a perspective utterly unlike that of the person who has not yet been attacked. That is, he knows that he is either a) going to die, in which case, from his point of view removing all restrictions won't matter or b) going to survive, in which case he will have immunity and will be fine if all restrictions are removed

I'm astonished by the number of otherwise sane people who argue that these proposals need consideration. To me, the suggestion that government should stand idly by while, in very short order large numbers die from a previously unknown disease is ludicrous. Few people have much faith in the political system anyway but, were politicians to shrug and adopt a laissez faire approach to this epidemic, on the grounds that the economy is paramount, what little trust that remains would evaporate. Patience is needed. Within a couple of months I suspect something will be sorted out - my imagination conjures up a tedious and unremitting rigmarole of testing, which will lead to certificates for those who have immunity and return to normal life, limited mixing for those without (complete with yet more admonitions about handwashing) and isolation for those who turn out to be carrying the virus, plus tracing of all those with whom they've been in contact (the tests involved must not be made in China; I'm hoping their manufacture, administration and analysis will provide plenty of jobs for those made unemployed by the current lockdown, they will all pay taxes and everything will be just fine on the finance front [Pollyanna is my middle name, although I do recognise that the people involved in the bureaucracy attached to this system will almost certainly be more obstructive and maddening than I can imagine.])

It's all too hard, it's costing a lot of money and, look, sure some people die, but, guess what, we all die some time, that is what the Toby-Young-and-cohort proposition boils down to. I imagine given half a chance they would argue that the asbestos industry really ought to have kept going as it's such a useful substance and not that many people suffer agonising death as a result of it. Creighton does drag in the tobacco industry, arguing that the Australian government countenances 12,000 deaths per year from smoking. The things you can do with statistics - leaving aside all the other arguments wrapped up in that claim, they don't all die at once, bringing down the hospital system with them, as has happened in Italy and Spain with the influx of people suffering from the extreme version of this new disease.

But I must admit that in Britain the government has done a pretty good job of squandering public faith all by itself, thanks to its breathtakingly incompetent scientific advisers, with their babble about "modelling" and "behavioural science" and apparent lack of any commonsense.. Watching University Challenge the other evening, I saw the look on the face of a spectacled member of the Durham University team when faced with a tricky question, and I thought, yes, I think that was probably, for rather too long a time, the reaction of Sir Patrick Vallance; Professor Whitty; the maddening Dr Jenny Harries - who insisted one day that mass gatherings were safe as houses and, without a hint of an apology, insisted the next time she emerged that none of us should ever see each other again; and Dr Graham Medley, the one who was wishing for "a nice big epidemic" when confronted with the imminent question of what to do about this new virus:

I kept wondering as I saw the group of government science advisors wheeled out on a nightly basis, how so many highly qualified, supposedly clever people could have failed so spectacularly to see that something pretty dreadful was hurtling toward the nation? How could they have not learned anything from the methods being used in Singapore or Taiwan or even South Korea to contain this new, highly infectious threat?

Then I remembered talking to a friend of my mother's, a farmer, who has recently got to know his new neighbour, a smallholder who works as a civil servant in Canberra and knows nothing about being on the land. My mother's friend was late to meet us because he'd been helping out his neighbour who had got himself in a muddle with his livestock. My mother asked her friend what the neighbour was like. "He's clever", he told her, "he's got about five degrees, so he's very clever." My mother's friend paused, "He's so clever he's stupid, I think", he eventually said.

Five degrees, terribly clever - so clever, they're stupid; yes, there's a lot of that about.

Lockdown Bulletin - Cooking Notes

Now that being anywhere near strangers feels as dangerous as hanging about beside a radioactive reactor rod, I'm being very careful with food, using every last scrap of even the most unappetising objects I find skulking in the refridgerator. I don't want to go to the shop again, unless I absolutely have to.

But I'm also trying to cook nice food.

Which calls for some adaptations and compromises.

To give an idea of what I'm talking about, last night I spotted some large, unprepossessing carrots hiding up the back of the vegetable drawer. I think at the time that I bought them the phrase 'social distancing' was one that I had not yet ever heard - yes, that old.

I took them out, remembering a recipe I'd seen in a weekend paper for carrots cooked in ginger. I hunted the recipe down. It called for finger thin baby carrots. Never mind, same diff. It called for ginger infused cider. Well I had some fresh ginger but cider ...

I crawled under the hall table where we keep wine and after a bit I found a small bottle of Tokaji somebody very kindly gave us in 2009 or '10. The cork had begun to crumble. Ideal.

I followed most of the rest of the recipe's instructions, (more or less, honouring it in spirit if not in whatever).  And believe it or not, they were the most delicious carrots either of us have ever eaten. And I'd never have cooked them, if I hadn't been in this peculiar, somewhat anxious situation. Which may mean there are if not silver linings at least shiny tin foil or copper bottomed ones?

The only problem is, having not actually followed a recipe and not having access to a constant supply of small bottles of Tokaji with rotting corks, will I ever be able to make them again?

Holed Up in Hungary - Lockdown Bulletin No. 2

I woke early and thought it might be a good time to go down to the shop as nobody would be there. I was wrong and as I rushed about, heart pounding, fearful that the air was full of flying virus, grabbing paprika flavoured crisps, sour cream, a packet of tea and some eggs, forgetting what I really wanted - wine - all the people around me grew ever more sensationally dangerous, in my mind.

And all the time my face kept begging my hands to touch it. But I'm pleased to report that my hands steadfastly refused. My face was left disappointed. Why the hell is it so demanding?

Back at home, I continued to plough my way through my two Hungarian textbooks. I’ll describe them another day as they are quite amusing, each in their own way. For now, the interesting thing I've noticed is how even the vocabulary you look up while reading articles in other languages will inevitably reflect the nature of the times you’re in. Thus it is only now that I have discovered the words for sneeze; intensive care; and curfew in French, the word for corpse in Italian and the word for recuperation in German. Over the years until now, I've never felt the need for any of these and I'm extremely sorry I do now.

Some people are saying that our heightened awareness of death is giving us all a new pleasure in life. No. Wrong.

On the Twitter and poetry - well sort of poetry - front, here is a refashioned parody of Hungarian Rhapsody, a song by the band called Queen. You have to know the tune to read it with any pleasure. It has a rude bit in it (everything has a rude bit in it these days, sadly), but it is quite clever - and I'm definitely interested in creative things coming from this vile Chinese virus. The writer goes by the Twitter name of @danajaybein:

I've lost my mind.

I wrote Coronavirus Rhapsody:

Is this a sore throat?

Is this just allergies?

Caught in a lockdown

No escape from reality.

Don’t touch your eyes

Just hand sanitize quicklyyyyy

I’m just a poor boy, no job security

Because of easy spread, even though

washed your hands, laying low

I look out the window, the curve doesn’t look flatter to me, to me

mama, just killed a man

i didn’t stay inside in bed

I walked by him, now he’s dead

mama, life was so much fun

but now I’ve caught this unforgiving plague

mama, oooooh

didn’t mean to make them die

if I’m not back to work this time tomorrow

carry on, carry on as if people didn’t matter

too late, my time has come

sends shivers down my spine

body’s aching all the time

goodbye everybody, I’ve got the flu

gotta leave you all behind and face the truth

mama, oooooh

I don’t wanna die

I sometimes wish I never went out at all

I see a little silhouette of a man

what a douche, what a douche

did he even wash his hands though

security is tightening 

very very frightening me

Gotta lay low (gotta lay low)

Gotta lay low (gotta lay low)

Gotta lay low masturbate

Masturbate O O O O

I’m just a poor boy, facing mortality

HE’S JUST A POOR BOY FACING MORTALITY

spare him his life from this monstrosity

Touch your face, wash your hands, will you wash your hands?

BISMILLAH NO WE WILL NOT WASH OUR HANDS! (WASH YOUR HANDS!)

BISMILLAH NO WE WILL NOT WASH  OUR HANDS! (WASH YOUR HANDS)

BISMILLAH WE WILL NOT WASH YOUR HANDS! (WASH YOUR HANDS!)

WASH YOUR HANDS! (never, never, never wash your hands oh oh oh oh oh oh oh)

No no no no no

Oh mama mia, mia (mama mia wash your hands!)

COVID-19 has a sickness put aside for me, for me

So you think you can stop me and just shake my hand? 

So you think we can hang out and not break our plans? 

Oh baby, can’t do this with me, baby,

Just gotta stay home, just gotta stay home with my fever

oooooh

Curving can get flatter

Anyone can see

Curving can get flatter

Curving can get flatter, you’ll see

Just look out your windows….

FLATTEN THE CURVE

Holed Up in Hungary: Lockdown Bulletin No. 1

Well, despite what they’ve been trying to make us believe, this new COVID virus thingy has taught us the truth: sixty is not the new forty, after all. In fact, sixty is the new ninety-seven, for sixty is now the age beyond which you don’t get treated in hospitals - at least not if they are besieged by patients suffering from the effects of the latest iteration of coronavirus. Which they soon will be, everywhere in the Western world.

Thank you, Mr Xi, thank you WHO, run by a notable alumnus of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Good to have international health in the hands of an adherent of a Marxist Leninist organisation.

This pandemic couldn’t be some kind of a deliberate plot, could it?

We will never know. But never mind - as Psalm 39 says:

“Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.”

In Hungary, we’re in shutdown, or lockdown or self-isolation or whatever the new term is. As long as I don’t remember why I rarely go out, I don’t mind, as it’s extremely nice in our flat, but what if it wasn’t? How is it for people cooped up in places they don’t much like?

These are the things I’ve been doing while “social distancing” (so modern - I've always hated modern, except in dentistry):

1. Reading the book I’ve been reading since October, about the English Civil War:

I bought it because at school I was taught nothing about this period in English history and I wanted to understand it. I have by no means finished it but I already think I understand why they don’t teach it much to schoolchildren - the war itself was scrappy and confusing and for long periods inconclusive and the causes of the war were strange religious obsessions and the very poor leadership of King Charles I, who appears to have been pretty imperceptive and indecisive. Furthermore, when he did actually make a decision, he almost invariably made the wrong one. At least that’s my impression so far.

2. Sewing: I hated China’s regime long before this latest proof of what a horror show it is came along. Therefore, I have been making my own clothes for years to avoid supporting the Chinese regime's economy. I haven’t yet succeeded in making my own iPhone, mind you, but I have resisted replacing my super battered one with a shiny new version:

Now I think about it though, (lot of time for thinking these days), I’d be willing to bet that most of the materials I’m using to make my own clothes were woven in China, so I’m probably achieving nothing, other than having unique (slightly peculiar) garments (at least currently [forever?] seen by none).

3. trying to learn Hungarian (I can almost understand a newspaper headline now, sometimes)

4. obsessively checking Twitter, hoping against hope that it will be flooded with joyous Tweets linking to announcements that the whole virus  problem has suddenly been solved and entirely swept away.

On Twitter, (and off), I’ve been reading poetry. Today I came across this one from Cavafy (I chuck down his name here as if I have any real knowledge of who he was - Egyptian? Very actively gay? Enormously romantic view of young male beauty? Above all perceptive):

Finished

Deep in fear and in suspicion,
with flustered minds and terrified eyes,
we wear ourselves out figuring how
We might avoid the certain
danger that threatens us so terribly.
And yet we’re mistaken, that’s not it ahead:
the news was wrong
(or we didn’t hear it; or didn’t get it right).
But a disaster that we never imagined
suddenly, shatteringly, breaks upon us,
and unprepared - no time left now - we are swept away

A poem for our times or what?

I also read this story on Twitter. If laughter is the best medicine, I prescribe a read of it, as it made me laugh quite a lot:

Toxic Sliding

 The other day in London I got caught in the rain on Piccadilly and dashed into Waterstone's until it stopped. On the ground floor of the shop they have a display of new fiction and, reading the labels explaining the new novels available, I began to understand why I don't much like current fiction.

First we were offered "a devastating, darkly comic story of a woman's slide into depression":

Next came "a compelling tale of a woman's slide into madness":

While we stopped sliding after that, the fate of women in fiction continued to be pretty bleak:

More misery for women dominated the next tale:

While we were given a break from horrid things happening to women with the one after that, we were not allowed the company of anyone but terrible people for our reading pleasure:

Of course, if this is all terrific and, like the publishing industry, your idea of a good read is "difficulty" and "toxicity", the next one should fit the bill as well:

 Clearly, publishers would ask me: What's wrong with you, what else do you want to curl up with other than ghastliness really?  I would then feel feeble for wanting something enjoyable - which doesn't mean dumb, I loved Middlemarch, for instance, but I do admit that possibly the greatest example of a novel ever written (which leaves one wondering why most of her others are so BORING) might be too much to ask.

I left the shop puzzled once again by the world of contemporary publishing. Already I'd been baffled that a  novel that is several hundred pages long but made up of a single sentence in which the three words "the fact that" are repeated over and over and over again has been awarded prize after prize, even though it is unreadable for anyone who gets impatient with "the fact that". I'd been similarly confused that the work that won the Booker this year is introduced on Amazon as being "an unconventional novel in the sense that it doesn't have a plot".

I went home and read my friend Mark Griffith's blog (or weblog, as he insists on calling it) Other Languages, and there I found the following item, which at least gave me some insight into publishing, if not into whether or not there is a market for the stuff being printed and awarded prizes, or whether many people are buying books they hope they will like but in the end find disappointing and can't finish:


A few helpful remarks from publishers currently looking for fiction. Metaphorosis Books is issuing "a reprint anthology for Vegan science fiction and fantasy stories published in the previous year -- They want stories that happen to be vegan - no meat, no hunting, no horse-riding, no leather." The Were-Traveler wants "weird fiction where the setting is a carnival, theme park, circus or fair/festival. 'Clowns can be part of the story, but they don't have to be.'" Hybrid's 'Genderful' is a "furry fiction anthology in two parts which aims to explore how furry and gender interact. They want submissions that explore the implications of non-cisgender life within the context of furry."

One thing I do remember being told by someone who was involved in book production, in the year when Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was a bestseller: "There is a huge difference between a book that is a bestseller and a book that is widely read."

Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard's new play, Leopoldstadt is named after the area in Vienna where Jewish people new to the city usually first found residence and also where, I think, the Nazis first of all forced all Jewish children to go to school, regardless of how far away their house was from it, and eventually forced all Jewish people to live.

When the curtain goes up on the play, the audience is met with a scene that, intentionally or not, exactly mirrors the scene at the opening of the ballet The Nutcracker. It is a richly furnished, turn of the century, European sitting room, with an ornate chaise-longue centre stage, a mahogany dining table behind - which alternates with a piano in different scenes, I think, or possibly both are always onstage together (human visual memory, at least mine, is patchy) - and comfortable antique armchairs and side tables at each side.

To the left of the stage is a huge Christmas tree being decorated by the children of the house and their cousins, aided by various adults. It is a cosy scene of family jollity. There is much cheerful conversation in which we learn who everyone is - although you have to be quicker than me to catch all the names and work out how they relate to each other. There is a mathematician and a doctor called Ernst who, despite the name, I somehow got the wrong impression was Egyptian until very late in the play. There is a grandmother and her daughter, who may be married to the mathematician. The owner of the house is I think Hermann who has become a Christian as he has married a beautiful young Austrian Catholic. In case we are in any doubt about what the rest of the characters are, a small boy tries to put a star of David on the top of the tree and it is explained to him that that kind of star isn't used on this kind of tree.

A teenage girl who is visiting Vienna from the Ukraine confesses to her Christian aunt that a young Austrian officer has asked her to meet him tomorrow and she needs a chaperone. The aunt, slightly reluctantly, agrees to go along. The next thing we know the aunt and the Austrian officer are having it off, even though he is ghastly - and even though he was the one who started flirting with the aunt's niece; no explanation is given for his fickleness, beyond the overriding impression that he is an utter cad. In any case, the teenager goes back to the Ukraine, saddened.

What are we to make of the aunt's sudden fall into the arms of the Austrian cad? Nothing about her behaviour before or after suggests she is a philanderer - if that word can be applied to a woman - so what is going on? Is she a secret anti-semite who in her heart of hearts only really fancies Gentiles? Where does this plot twist fit psychologically?

Or are we supposed to ignore individual psychology in this play and accept that a plot development may be simply a useful cog in the machine of revealing anti-semitism? For the horrid Austrian cad then meets the adulterous Christian aunt's husband at a party and treats him with terrific snobbery, on account of his race, and insults the man's wife.  The husband challenges the young man to a duel and the young man has to spell out to him that the army does not allow its soldiers to accept duelling challenges from Jews. Thus, Stoppard establishes that there is institutional anti-semitism in turn of the century Vienna.

Time moves forward and insult is heaped on insult for our poor Jewish family. Tension mounts. There is quite a lot of talk about Dr Karl, which probably most audiences would not understand but I assume refers to Dr Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, who without any doubt used anti-semitism to his own political ends and who some regard as the inspiration for Hitler's anti-semitism. Eventually, the family is reduced to nothing and unimaginable cruelties are wreaked on them. A character supposed to be Tom Stoppard - but only if he were transformed into one of the wetter members of the Drones Club - comes back to Vienna, which he and his mother fled when he was a child. He is put back in touch with the past he has forgotten, which leads to some rather feeble tears of guilt. He asks about what happened to the people he now begins to vaguely remember and a shadowy tableau of that first scene appears. Each individual is named, and when their fate is inquired about the answers that come back are - "Dachau", "Theresienstadt", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz" ...

The horror I feel for what happened to families such as Stoppard's imaginary creation is enormous, but unfortunately that does not make this play any less disappointing. A play, particularly a Stoppard play, is not usually simply a history lesson*. What I was hoping for was some kind of dramatic evocation of the strange madness that erupted, an opportunity, via the alchemy of Stoppard's brilliant mix of ideas and penetrating understanding and the magic that is good theatre, to get a new perspective on the dread and terror and wild inhuman viciousness of the time and the strange forces that created evil. But what Stoppard has made is a very old-fashioned family drama in which the characters are one-dimensional - on the one hand, the Jewish family, who are without fault and entirely endearing, because, in order for us to feel bad about what happens to them they need to be absolutely blameless, rather than the usual complicated beings that real humans are, and, on the other the equally shallow baddies - the dastardly adulterous anti-semitic officer who comes across as a pantomime villain, and the Catholic wife ,who is simply mystifying; for one brief scene a raving sex fiend, for the rest characterised only by an eagerness to get all the traditions and practices of her new family right.

Because of this lack of any richness of characterisation, the play becomes a form of agitprop, or at least a form of panto. You feel as you watch that you should be shouting hurrah for the goodies and booing the baddies. What you miss is any attempt to penetrate the complexities of this terrible, strange period in which humans who'd grown up in one of the most civilised cities and civilised regimes that have ever existed - (mention is very briefly made of the Emperor Franz Joseph learning Hebrew and being entirely supportive of the Jewish people, but this glimpse of one of the many contradictory aspects of the situation vanishes in an instant) - transformed into baying monsters who victimised their Jewish neighbours with a brutality that is hard to contemplate.

Sad to say, Leopoldstadt is not brilliant as a piece of transfiguring drama, although perhaps, if you knew nothing at all about what had gone on in Vienna, it might be a place to start to learn the rudimentary facts.* I may have been expecting too much; perhaps it is impossible ever to arrive at any kind of comprehension of the unimaginable events of the period after the Anschluss in Austria; certainly, Leopoldstadt only describes what happened. Maybe, if you don't already know anything about the subject, it may be a place to start.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Another thing one usually expects from Stoppard is comedy but, there is only one laugh in the play -  a misunderstanding in which a man who introduces himself as a doctor is taken to be the doctor come to perform the ritual circumcision on a baby, when in fact he is a lawyer come with some papers for the head of the house - practically anyone with a university degree tends to call themselves "Herr Doktor" in Vienna. Anyway, the baby's mother, who is pretty reluctant to let her child be tampered with, comes in and asks him if he needs any equipment. She doesn't know that he isn't who she thinks he is, nor that he has just been given a cigar by her father. Therefore, when he tells her that he could find a cigar cutter useful but, if she doesn't have one, it's fine, because he can always bite the end off with her teeth, she runs away screaming.


* If you then want to learn more about what happened to Jewish people living in Vienna, I would recommend a superb memoir called Last Waltz in Vienna by George Clare, which deals much more subtly and interestingly with the whole subject.

Soap Bubble

I sometimes wonder what I might have achieved if I hadn't wasted so much of my time thinking about the soap-opera existences of people I do not know - or perhaps that should be "the existences of people I do not know, whose lives I transform into soap opera in my head".

My most recent lapse has been the hours I have spent reading with embarrassing avidity everything that has appeared related to the announcement by Meghan Markle and the person formerly - and strictly speaking still, until April, I think (??) - known as Prince Harry - (and why did his parents choose to give him a shortened name anyway? Is that where his problems started? But I digress) - that they were going to "step back" from the duties that being a member of Britain's royal family entails.

I won't go into my particular take on that ongoing saga. Were I halfway sensible, I know I wouldn't even have a take, let alone allow my mind to be filled with speculative thoughts and theories about the episode and what its effect will be on the couple involved. 

But I am not halfway sensible and I have allowed myself to become intensely preoccupied with this story - and with countless other similar ones that have equally little bearing on my own life, beyond the curiosity they arouse in me. 

Perhaps it is my love of fiction that makes me so interested - the people involved are real, but I can view them as if they were characters in a - not very good - novel. I can speculate about their motives and about human behaviour in general, extrapolating from the tales of foolishness and emotional intemperance I read about them. And perhaps it is this process that Muriel Spark is trying to evoke when she has fiction and reality blurring in Loitering with Intent and other novels (it was a recurring theme or motif for her); perhaps her aim was to demonstrate that each individual's reality is really a fiction composed within their own minds, that no one is to another anything but a fiction.

Be that as it may, my fascination with the soap opera side of other people's lives started a long long time ago. I realised just how long ago recently, when I read in the newspaper, in the context of some kind of television dramatisation of the episode, that the Profumo Affair happened in 1963. Which means that my prurient interest in sensationalism goes all the way back to that year, even though I was only six years old at the time.

My family still lived in a street that ran between the King's Road and the Fulham Road in London then. If you turned left at the Fulham Road end, you very quickly arrived at what was still called St Stephen's Hospital, although it has since been robbed of its saintliness and renamed Chelsea & Westminster. 

My brother and I would pass that hospital regularly on our companionable wanderings around the city, and, despite being so young, in August 1963 I knew that there was something very exciting called the Profumo affair going on and that in St Stephen’s there lay a man called Stephen Ward* who was somehow involved in this Profumo thing and who had tried to kill himself - and I somehow got hold of the idea and have hung onto it ever since that he took deadly nightshade, which particularly fascinated me as there was a patch of deadly nightshade that I saw on walks at the place in the country where we spent our weekends. 

I passed the hospital most of the days that Ward lay there hovering between life and death, (have I got this right - I remember believing he was there for three or four days), and I think it must have been then that this awful taste for the melodramatic took hold of me. For, although it was the sixties already, it was not yet by any means "the Sixties". London, including Chelsea, was not yet swinging or particularly exciting. This strange scandal that was all the grown ups could talk about was a spark of fascinating mystery in a rather dull existence.

Since then there hasn't been a story of romance and drug taking, of high life and misery, of ambition smashed by peccadilloes that hasn’t instantly grabbed my attention and sent me off into days of fervent interest. I was/am capable of the kind of solid concentration when reading about such topics that I only dream of when knuckling down to sensible, constructive endeavours, tasks that need doing and so forth and so on. The truth is feverish fascination with the tawdry and trivial has, since 1963, been one of my  besetting sins.

Although I don't know anyone else who admits to a preoccupation with all this nonsense, I try to comfort myself that there must be others out there who do share my shameful passion, because all the newsprint expended on such subjects cannot be intended only for me.

If I am the lone audience though, I thank all gossip columnists, royal correspondents and other purveyors of pages of nonessential social speculation for their efforts. I consume every word with guilty joy.

*Stephen Ward is or was usually described as a "society osteopath", which always amused me, even as a small child.

A Change for the Better

The last time I was in Parliament Square, I had a very unpleasant experience and so I was a little afraid to go back. But today I did and this is the sight that met my eyes:

It's an improvement.

Battered Penguin - Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

Loitering with Intent is, like much of Muriel Spark's work, very readable and amusing, despite being complex and not easy to understand.  Extracts from Cardinal Newman and Benvenuto Cellini's memoirs are interwoven through the narrative, which is a novel, although its narrator, a novelist, claims it is an autobiography.

The book opens with the phrase, "One day in the middle of the twentieth century." The narrator, Fleur Talbot, tells us this day "was the last day of a whole chunk of my life, but I didn't know that at the time" ,and explains that she was sitting in an old graveyard which she observes, puzzlingly, "had not yet been demolished", suggesting we are in a world that is not quite our own. She is approached by a policeman who "only wanted to know what I was doing", although "plainly he didn't like to ask", which is confusing - did he ask, or does the narrator simply know that that is what he wants? As the novel progresses, this question becomes less and less easy to answer; the lines between fiction and reality become increasingly blurred; finally, looking back at that opening page, it is hard to know whether the policeman stepped out of fiction and into the reality of Fleur's day or stepped from that reality and into fiction.

In other words a major theme of the novel is an examination of what exactly fiction is. In that context, Spark's narrator tells us a lot about writing and being a writer. "I talk very little" she explains to her new employer, "although I listened a lot", she adds in a kind of aside to us, continuing  "I have always been on the listen-in for ... phrases."

"Contradictions in human character" she goes on " are one of its most consistent notes ... Since the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events, I might as well remark here that to make a character ring true it needs must be in some way contradictory."

It becomes clear as Fleur and her friend discuss the novel she is writing during the period in which this novel (autobiography?) is set that Fleur sees a clear distinction between fictional characters and reality. When her friend declares that one of Fleur's characters is "a personification of evil", Fleur retorts, "Marjorie is only words", adding for our benefit, "I knew I wasn't helping the reader to know whose side they were supposed to be on. I simply felt compelled to go on with my story without indicating what the reader should think...I wasn't writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder, as indeed they did to myself as I was composing them."  Paradoxically, when Fleur tells her friend that she cannot explain why she is concerned about the activities of certain people in their own real lives until she has written more of her novel - "It's the only way I can come to a conclusion about what's going on ... I have to work it out through my creativity" - she seems to be indicating that for her reality does not really exist until she has written about it.

Adding to the confusion, the characters and events in the novel Fleur is writing increasingly become the characters and events in her own life - in that order: that is, she invents and then the invention comes out of the fiction and into reality. "What is truth", Fleur asks at one point, and the reader - this one anyway - becomes less and less clear what the answer is as the book goes on.

Never mind, there is much rather heartless humour in the novel and many vivid and marvellous characters, above all Lady Edwina, "a tall, thin and extremely aged woman with a glittering appearance, largely conveyed by her many strings of pearls on a black dress and her bright silver hair ... her face cracked with make-up, with a scarlet gash of a smile ... her fingernails, overgrown, so that they curled over the tips like talons ... painted dark red", who uses "the blackmail of her very great age." She will be my role model from now on.

At the very end of the book, Fleur sees that friend with whom she discussed her earlier novel and has "a row with her on the subject of my wriggling out of real life", which I take as a statement about more than Fleur's decision to remain single and childless. There is something as intriguing but also as difficult to fathom as quantum physics here, which cleverer readers may be able to grasp instantly, but I cannot. I don't mind though. Spark has constructed something strange and intricate and often funny. The author - or at least the narrator - is someone who sees that all human activity is, from a divine perspective, mere foolishness. But, if she is godlike in her perspective, she is no Christian kind of god, for she sneers at her fellow humans rather than feeling any obvious affection for them.

The book closes with Fleur leaving her friend's flat and having a faintly transcendental experience:

"I came out into the courtyard exasperated as usual. Some small boys were playing football, and the ball came flying straight towards me. I kicked it with a chance grace, which, if I had studied the affair and tried hard, I never could have done. Away into the air it went, and landed in the small boy's waiting hands. The boy grinned. And so, having entered the fullness of my years, from there by the grace of God I go on my way rejoicing."

On reading this I felt as I usually do when arriving at the end of a piece of Muriel Spark fiction - no sense of dissatisfaction, as the spectacle has been entertaining, but faintly disturbed, having been made aware, that I am, compared to Spark, sadly, rather dim.

January Reading - Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner

Having read this review, I came to this book with high hopes. Boy, what a disappointment it turned out to be. Lady Glenconner cannot write for toffee. She is a person who has had quite a life but her account of it has all the excitement and narrative drive of a telephone directory. Understatement and stiff upper lippery is so pronounced in her character that her verdict on her marriage to a serially unfaithful man who regularly erupted into unspeakable rage and occasionally bought elephants on impulse is merely this:

"Apart from his infidelity and his temper, we got on so well."

But perhaps she didn't know there were other kinds of marriage. After all, as she explains, her:

"sister Carey had trouble with her husband ... after a few years, [he] refused to talk directly to her and instead would talk through his Labrador, saying things like 'Tell her to bring the bloody paper over here'."

Furthermore, Lady Glenconner's father in later life believed his wife and the writer's youngest sister "were Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields. At his insistence, they sang songs like 'The Biggest Aspidistra in the World'." As if this were not enough, Lady Glenconner's "father got into a habit of chatting up women on the train to London and inviting them back to Holkham, where he would take them off on the fire engine, encouraging them to ring the bell.'

The book really brought home to me what an extraordinarily good writer the Duchess of Devonshire was. Describing a similar milieu but provided with far fewer eccentrics, the Duchess was able to produce hilarity from the flimsiest of material. Lady Glenconner has much more exciting substance, but her supreme gift is to render everything banal. Take her account of the demise of an acquaintance called Laura Brand, who was, she explains:

"the rather eccentric sister of Lord Hambleden ... [She] always wore sombreros and was always in the sea. ... Laura drowned [when] she and her husband Micky were in Grenada and she went for a swim. Micky was on the beach when all of a sudden her hat floated past, out to sea."

That is the full extent of that story. We move rapidly on to a party, while the hat and the memory drift away.

But then in Lady Glenconner's social circle it seems very little is required to make someone appear wonderfully entertaining. A ritual of the Queen Mother's involving drinking toasts to people is portrayed as the height of wit but isn't, while one of Princess Margaret's entourage, a man called John Harding was, we are told, always welcome, since "the children adored [him] on account of his ability to tear a telephone directory [not often those get mentioned more than once in a blog post] in half." It does seem to me that that particular party trick would pall quite quickly, but not so far as the Glenconner children were concerned, apparently.

Mind you, some of those children went on to rather grisly ends, so perhaps something in their way of life - possibly the forced gaiety expected when witnessing the wanton destruction of telephone directories - did have long term bad effects. Or perhaps their mother's steadfast refusal to do anything but look on the bright side provoked them. Her tone remains constant even when she tells us how one of her sons would go off to rehab clinics packed "with other members of high society", (who she then lists). When her husband suggests disinheriting the boy, she remarks, utterly inconsequentially, "I didn't know what to think, but could quite see where Colin was coming from."

Just as Lady Glenconner seems unable to differentiate between tragedy and daily life, she appears to have absolutely no idea what is funny and what is boring. Thus she mentions in passing, as if she hadn't even noticed it, that the undertakers she dealt with after her husband's death were called Lazarus Funerals, but devotes a whole paragraph to a story with no punchline at all:

"In the late afternoon we [Lady Glenconner and Princess Margaret] would often go and sit in Basil's Bar, watching the sunset, sceptically waiting for the 'green flash' that is supposed to appear on the horizon just after the sun vanishes. Neither of us believed it, yet we always seemed to be distracted by the thought, pausing our conversation to stare at the view, just in case we saw it. We never did but it became a fun habit."

A fun habit! Elsewhere in her narrative we have Princess Margaret trying to beat grey squirrels to death. Another fun habit? Possibly.

In the end, I even began almost to sympathise with Lady Glenconner's monstrous loony husband. A few hundred pages spent in her dull, dull company was bad enough; if one had to spend a lifetime with her, who knows how angry and irrational one might not become.

Past Presents

When I noticed this little clip on Twitter, memories of past Christmas presents from my father came rushing back. Although, like me, generally tending toward the cloth-eared end of the spectrum, he would occasionally become possessed by brief but intense enthusiasms for some genre of music or other.  If Christmas happened to be in the offing at such moments, his choice of presents would then reflect whatever happened to be his latest craze.

Which is why one year I found myself unwrapping a quantity of long-playing records featuring traditional singing from Mongolia, while another year, unexpectedly,  I received a selection  of the best bagpipe music money could buy.

“Bagpipes”, my maternal grandmother observed, “best heard over several hills.”

In a non-musical mood, my father also posted me a birthday present from Hanoi where he was stationed. The city had been being bombed fairly heavily and so I ought not to have been surprised when I untied the ribbon and tore off the paper to find an old box lined with cotton wool on which he had arranged several pieces of shrapnel that he’d collected from his verandah.

I was too young to understand what a thoughtful gift this was, given that the alternatives available to him in wartime north Vietnam were nothing or nothing - and even a few bits of carefully chosen shrapnel are better than nothing. At the time, it was pointed out to me that it was the thought that counted, which only led to me wondering at length what exactly the thought behind this odd gift  might be

A Budapest Guest

At Budapest’s Fine Arts Museum at the moment there is a visiting exhibition that I looked round quickly this afternoon. It was packed with people, and so I will go back again when the Christmas and New Year crowds have abated.

But even during a cursory visit several pictures caught my eye. They included: this - for its decorative borders, amusing cherubs and splendid dog; and this - the person I went with asserted all such flower paintings are boringly the same, but I think some, this one included, are wonderful; apart from anything else, as well as flowers, you get a bumble bee, a grasshopper and an exquisite mouse; and this - which really needs to be seen in reality, as the glow and liveliness that Rubens creates on the canvas somehow does not  get conveyed by photographs; and this - mainly because I wanted to look at it properly but couldn’t over the heads of others, as I would like to see if it is really as oddly modern looking for a 17th century painting as it appeared from the glimpse I had; and this - as with the Rubens, the reproduction does not do it justice; and this - partly for the dogs annoying each other in the bottom left hand corner, partly for the feeling that all the pictures in the room in which this one is hung are less paintings than windows into the past; and this - which is tiny and very beautifully painted. There was also an image from the Prado that I didn’t get the name of; it looked like surrealism but was made in the 1600s.

I shall go back quite soon and find out more.

Battered Penguins: The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

Edmund Crispin's books are far-fetched - some might even say silly - but I find them charming. Rather than explaining the details of this particular one, I will simply tell you that it is similar in tone and milieu to others in his series about Gervase Fen - university setting, arty types, outdated views on male-female relationships, no diversity and an unlikely plot. If the others amuse you, this one probably will too, ( a cursory glance at information about Crispin on the internet suggests that it may actually be the very first of his books about Fen).

Needless to say, I do like the books in the series, partly because they are the ideal kind of thing to read when you have jetlag and don't want anything tiresomely thought-provoking and partly because in passages like the following Crispin conjures up absurd scenes that make me laugh:


"The 'Aston Arms' was none of your brightly-painted, up-and-coming hostelries. It exuded so strongly an atmosphere of the past that drinkers living were spiritually cowed and jostled by the shades of drinkers long dead and gone. Every suggestion of improvement or modernisation was grimly resisted by the management, which consisted of a large, ancient man manifestly disintegrating at a great rate into his component chemical elements. An elaborate ritual, the abandonment of which was anathema, presided over the ordering and consumption of drinks; a strict social hierarchy was maintained; irregular visitors were unwelcome, and regular customers, particularly the acting profession, were treated with a mild pervasive contempt. The only salient feature of the small, rather shabby public bar was an enormous nude parrot, which had early contracted the habit of pecking out all its feathers, and which now, with the exception of the ruff and head, which it could not reach, presented a dismal and ludicrous grey, scraggy body to the gaze. It had been given to the proprietor of the 'Aston Arms' in a fit of lachrymose gratitude by a visiting German professor, and was in the habit of reciting a lyric of Heine, which feat, however, it could only be induced to perform by the careful repetition of two lines from the beginning of Mallarmé's L'Après-midi d'un Faune, this appearing to start some appropriate train of suggestion in its mind. This aptitude aroused the deepest suspicions in such soldiery as frequented the 'Aston Arms', equalled only by their suspicion of those of their countrymen who were capable of similar or greater achievements in the same direction;it was employed by the proprietor to warn customers of the imminence of closing-time, and the raucous tones of Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin were the normal prelude to more forcible means of ejection." 

I think being able to make people laugh is a talent that is under-rated and much harder than producing solemn works of art. I would not go so far as to suggest that Crispin ought to have been given the Nobel Prize for Literature but I am certainly grateful he gave us the volumes he did.

Twitter Treasure

From time to time, I post something here in praise of Twitter, which is a form of 'social media' that has a fairly bad name. It is often characterised as a cesspit of insult and extreme politics but, as in actual life, it depends who you talk to, (in Twitter terms, that means who you follow). If you steer away from politics, you can find all sorts of interesting accounts that lead you to things you would never otherwise come across.

My example for today is a tweet by @MsJeanRhys, a Twitter account that tweets quotations from the work of Jean Rhys. A couple of days ago, @MsJeanRhys tweeted a link to a copy of an article Jean Rhys wrote for the Times about growing old. It was published on 21st May, 1975, when Rhys was 84. She died one week short of four years later, on 14 May 1979. According to @MsJeanRhys, the article has never been republished since, even though it is very well worth reading.

I am reproducing it here for those who, despite my evangelising, still cannot bring themselves to dip their toes in the wide Twitter sea:

Whatever became of old Mrs Pearce? - Novelist Jean Rhys contributes this week's guest column in our International Women's Year series

In one of Aldous Huxley's stories a Mr Hutton remarks that whenever he hears the word 'cynical' he longs to say 'Bow wow'. Every time I hear the remark, 'she thinks she's young' (for it's nearly always 'she'), I feel like saying 'Bow wow wow'. For to think you're young when you're old is an impossibility. Old people are constantly reminded, every day, every hour, almost every minute, that they are old; only a lunatic wouldn't be convinced.

But age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks. After the first, you slowly recover. You 'learn to live with the consequences'. Then comes another and another. At last you realise that you'll never feel perfectly well again, never be able to move easily, or see or hear well.

You don't realise that you will die soon, because while you are still alive this is inconceivable. But the knowledge is there, unconscious, hidden, suppressed. Willingly or not, you think, 'Will I ever see another summer, another spring, ever do this, that or the other again?'

People meet all this differently. Some yield without a struggle, even exaggeratedly. Some try to ignore it. Some fight it.

The first is, of course, the easiest, but has its dangers. When it becomes impossible to ignore age, you can still fight it. Battle has its excitements, its plans, stratagems, defeats. Also its victories. It's a matter of character, temperament and circumstances. Why not allow the old, whenever possible, to follow their bent without interference, malice or ridicule? Why must everyone be forced into this legendary uncomfortable bed - the right size for all - for the tall have had their limbs lopped and the short have been racked and stretched to fit? The tiresome old will soon be quiet enough.

Now for the compensations. For there are compensations of age. The first is that time alters. I don't know how else to put it. As a rule it gallops: scarcely is it Monday before it's Thursday, scarcely Thursday before it's Sunday and another week has gone. It's May, then August, then October and winter again. But other days, instead of flashing by, seem to stretch so that 12 hours becomes an enormous, an infinite time.

For instance, I (for now it must be I) wake very early; at the time of year I am writing this it is still dark. I used to keep a book handy, put the light on and read, but now that I've decided to save my eyes I get up instead, and, without looking at myself, stumble along the passage, switching lights on as I go. Then I am filling the kettle, taking the blue cup off its hook (careful now, don't drop it), getting a saucer, spoon, sugar. From then on its routine.

After tea and cigarettes, it gets lighter and I am happier. Perhaps the real deep feeling is of joy, even triumph, that one has survived the night. Once more darkness has been conquered and, however dreary, day will soon be here. Of course you could die during the day, but it's not likely, not even possible, is it? This year, next year, sometime again becomes never.

The first motor bicycle passes, the sun rises - cold and watery, perhaps, but sun. It is then that time stretches, time that you're free to spend exactly as you wish. You can eat what you like when you like, drink what you like when you like, or not at all, for no reproving warning glance forces you to drink out of defiance. You can spend a couple of hours dressing or slop around, not bothering to dress at all, reading passages from King Solomon's Mines or Lady Audley's Secret. Or wander about in what passes for a garden. There's time for everything. The intoxicating feeling of freedom repays you a thousand times for any loneliness you may have endured.

And while I am on the subject, loneliness is not the worst thing by any means. Some old people are lonely. But a great many others live in dread of being argued with, persuaded or even forced to do something which they know will be catastrophic.

Old people, especially women living alone, are very vulnerable. Some are protected by money (up to a point), some by friends or relatives, (perhaps, perhaps). But some are not. And the older and frailer they grow the weaker their position, the greater their dread of being interfered with. I don't know whether the story of the old lady who hid the fact that she'd broken her leg for two weeks is true. She so feared the sort of help that wold be flung at her. I for one believe it.

'What's become of old Mrs Pearce', you wonder. She usually passes my window on her daily walk and I haven't seen her for some time. You're told that Mrs Pearce is now perfectly happy in an old people's home. 'Perfectly happy, they're so kind.' You remember uneasily that the last time you saw Mrs P. she said that more than anything else she dreaded being sent to an old persons' home. 'I keep very clear of them', she'd said. 'Don't let them in the house if I can help it.' But when I half-heartedly suggest visiting her it seems she's going through a difficult phase. She keeps saying she wants to go home and won't eat or talk of anything else.

'Why not let her go home then?' I say. 'She's quite able to look after herself.''

'Not now', I'm told.

Perhaps not after six weeks of worry and anxiety, longing for her usual chair, her favourite cup, and wondering who will put out milk for the hedgehog which is almost a pet. Soon Mrs Pearce isn't mentioned any more and that's enough of Mrs Pearce.

The sad thing is that a fierce desire for independence and freedom can exist with the longing for companionship or help. It generally does. It's a difficult problem which euthanasia would solve. The trouble is that human nature being what it is euthanasia wouldn't be voluntary for long. Nor would it stop at old people.

Two more compensations. The first is that old people, like children, can live in the present. A fine day, feeling almost well, some small pleasure, and they forget everything else. Perhaps only old people and children can do this. Or should I say, some old people, some children.

The other compensation is the calm that often comes with age. If you've often tried in the past to put yourself to sleep by repeating, 'nothing matters, nothing matters at all', it's a relief when few things really do matter any longer. This indifference or calm, whatever you like to call it, is like a cave at the back of your mind where you can retire and be alone and safe. The outside world is very far away. If you sometimes long for a fierce dog to guard your cave, that's only on bad days. Perhaps tomorrow will be a good day.

Books - Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas is best known for his novel The Slap, which tells the story of a group of friends who go to a barbecue and disagree when one of them slaps the child of another. I thought the concept was clever, but I hated the characters, who seemed vulgar and grasping and driven by startlingly forceful sexual appetites. 

All the same, I did recognise that Tsiolkas writes energetically and has original ideas, which is why, when I saw his latest novel in a bookshop in Sydney, I bought it - that and the fact that I was intrigued to discover that he had chosen St Paul as the book's central character and subject, a choice that, had he not already made a success of his writing, might well have guaranteed that the book would never be published. But it has been - and one can't help wondering if Saint Paul is having what is these days called "a moment", since the historian Tom Holland has just published a book called Dominion which, as I understand it, is essentially an attempt to explain how Saint Paul is central to western civilisation, influencing the ideas and thought of even those who are most violently opposed to the religion he espoused.

Tsiolkas's novel is written in the present tense, (so much is these days, and I'm still not at peace with it) and contains dialogue that is often rather wooden. It has very little in the way of a plot, which may explain the large amount of semi-pornographic sex and violence within it, which may be intended as compensation. 

Given that Tsiolkas has spent the last several years studying all aspects of Saint Paul's life and times, (including, I assume from his reference at one point to a feast that includes 'salted acorns', the culinary habits of the period [does anyone have a recipe for 'salted acorns' I wonder?]), I hesitate to challenge his portrayal of Paul's world as obsessed with violent sex*, circumcision and the punitive removal of genitalia in the most painful ways possible. And who am I to argue with his characterisation of Paul as a repressed and tormented homosexual who was in love with Timothy or his depiction of Timothy's death as suicide. 

Tsiolkas has done the research and I haven't, but I still find these last two suggestions offensive, even sacrilegious - although one might argue that, as Tsiolkas is himself gay, the most loving thing he can do to a character is to make him gay too.  But the Paul who wrote the various wise letters that form a large part of the New Testament does not seem to me to have anything to do with Tsiolkas's tortured fanatic, who spends most of his time in the book engaged in a desperate struggle with his sexual impulses. (And, given that the sex in the book is so full of disgust and deliberately inflicted pain, I can't help wondering about Tsiolkas's happiness, because at least in this piece of fiction he seems unable to imagine love and sex as coexistent.)

This is a strange and courageous (and, as so often nowadays, sloppily edited) book, which is largely unappetising. However, I do admire its author for tackling the unfashionable subject of Christianity with honesty and sincerity, and on some level understanding the importance and revolutionary nature of the faith:

"...the Lord forgives. That was the thing about the Jews that the Greeks and Romans could never understand. Their gods despised men for not being gods. This was the greatest wickedness, the worst lunacy. The Lord was the only god that forgave men as men"

as well as the difficulty of actually being a good Christian:

"I bring my head to the cool plank of the floor and pray for forgiveness, pray for charity and for filial love ... I pray, but rather than being soothed by the balm of selflessness and duty, my heart is struck by the poison dart of envy."

I will not be giving Damascus to any of my friends as a Christmas present, as for much of the time while reading it I was feeling rather sickened, but I admire Tsiolkas for taking the subject on. 

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*Read no further if you don't want to feel queasy, but here are two passages to give a sense of what I'm referring to when I complain of the sado-porn aspect I discern in the text:

"...we enter the tight unsoiled cunts of the girls and we break open the tight buttocks of the boys and our spirits and our sex are guided by the hand of Venus and our hatred and our lust is enflamed by the mighty Mars and .... as we spill our seed into the children and the maidens and the women and the crones we know we are continuing the justice of war ... and we know we are beloved of The God and in this sodden pit our sex is full and we smear our sex with blood and we spill into the earth ...."

"...I look down to my body, below the blood-soaked pelt of my loins where there was once my sex there is now only a gash, raw and violently purple meat; flyblown, host to crawling, feasting maggots ...|