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What He Said

2012-02-02T11:08:00.000+11:00

Here's someone else talking about tennis, far more eloquently than me (it's a great article, but I particularly like the phrase, "Roger is so cool and frictionless", which refers, of course, to Federer; and the description of Nadal's forehand: "you know, the one where he swoops the racket all the way around his head like he's whipping the team pulling his chariot.")

I didn't know which player I wanted to win in the Djokovic-Nadal Australian Open final - Nadal is the one I had a soft spot for, but I couldn't help admiring Djokovic's self-discipline and the apparent disappearance of some of his earlier more unattractive mannerisms. However, after seeing Djokovic tear off his shirt and strut about in victory, I knew Nadal would remain my favorite. In the article I've linked to above, Brian Phillips mounts a convincing case for why.

One other admirable thing about Nadal is that, apparently - I'm relying on a Twitter source for this one - he used to be a right-handed player but, having damaged his shoulder, he taught himself to be left-handed. Now that takes guts, if true.

So yes, to put it in a nutshell: after all these years, I'm once again experiencing the sensation I had when the Beatles arrived upon the scene, (and yes, I am a Tintin/Beatles wimpy kind of person, not an Asterix/Rolling Stones cool individual, but that was probably obvious already). Once again I'm enjoying understanding just what it's like to be a fan.

My Favourite Reality TV

2012-02-01T15:50:00.000+11:00

According to the New Yorker, researchers at the National Institute of Health have discovered that "diazepam - more commonly known as valium - has no discernible effect on anxiety unless a person knows he is taking it."

I read this odd little piece of information just after I'd written about the steps I climb most days and the odd fact that, were I to encounter them at a different point on my walk, I might find them very much harder to bear. Shortly afterwards, I heard Ricky Ponting say this, in answer to a question about his long period of poor performance on the cricket pitch:

"It's amazing when you're going through a lean trot, how many little things creep into your head and get in the way of what you're trying to do."

"How strange a thing is the human mind," I thought, "sometimes it is unable to recognise that a chemical is at work on it, unless it is told that that is what is happening; in certain circumstances it is happy to put up with something that at other times it would find unendurable; if not watched carefully, it is more than capable of undermining a considerable talent like Ricky Ponting's with creeping, slithering, self-perpetuating fears ."

Then came the annual feast of wall-to-wall tennis that is the lead up to, and then the actual, Australian Open. We saw Samantha Stosur, (who, in beating Serena Williams to win the US Open, proved she knows all there is to know about technique, when it comes to playing tennis), lose a "battle with mental demons", as one newspaper put it. Despite facing a far less daunting physical opponent than Serena Williams, she went down 6-2, 6-4. The only explanation she could offer was this:

"I think the whole emotional side of things really took over today ... I certainly didn't handle that side of things at all well."

Ponting, I suspect, would understand.

A week or two later, we saw Kim Clijsters damage her ankle during her fourth round match against Li Na but continue playing, eventually prevailing, despite considerable pain. This is how the Australian reported her triumph:

'"I have no idea how I won," Clijsters said ...The drama began when Clijsters went over on her left ankle, serving at 30-30 and 3-3 in the first set. Incredibly she got off the floor and finished the point after her ankle gave way. Most thought she would be lucky to see out the set as the WTA trainer applied three layers of different tape to support the ankle. Clijsters also gulped down two painkillers. "It definitely crossed my mind a couple of times," Clijsters said referring to thoughts of retirement at that stage. "But I knew if I could just try to kind of let the medication sink in or, if I could get through the first 20 minutes, half hour, you know, I think the pain would go away a little bit ... and I did and I'm happy that I didn't give up."'

Even more spectacularly, a few days after that Lleyton Hewitt came from being ranked 181 on the eve of the open, only allowed in on a wildcard, to reaching the fourth round where he gave Novak Djokovic, the world number one, a reasonable run for his money, despite being riddled with injury.

"A couple of months ago I didn't know if I would be able to play," Hewitt was quoted as saying, again in the Australian, which went on to report that the player has 'more crook joints than Dodge City...Wonky hips, knee and toe have required five significant surgeries" (and I have also read that one of his toes no longer has any cartilage and causes him constant pain).

It is this that makes me love watching tennis - the way it reveals so starkly the influence of the mind. For the successful players are not the ones who possess physical skill alone but those who also embody a tough unneurotic sense of endurance, an untiring persistence which carries them through to either win or at least to have the tenacity to return again to the arena following defeat. It is the only sport I know where what you come to see is not only a physical battle but also a test of an individual's mental strength. Out there, alone on the court, the scene is almost gladiatorial - the two combatants pit themselves against each other, and the skills they need are often more to do with mental state than technical or physical prowess. They have to conquer their opponent's merciless backhand, but they must also overcome the little things Ponting described that 'creep into your head'.

And that is why I believe that telecasts of live tennis tournaments are the only true reality TV. While in theory Big Brother reveals a lot about human nature, relaying what happens when random people are forced to coexist, what it presents is actually a fair way from the truth. In reality, (as opposed to reality TV reality), crafty editors transform the events in the 'Big Brother household' into a kind of unscripted fiction; they shape our understanding of the personalities involved and allow us to see only a fraction of what really takes place.

On the tennis court, by contrast, there is no opportunity for manipulation. Nothing can be edited out. What is presented to viewers is as close as it can be to an unfiltered record of what is actually happening. The struggle between two individuals unfolds before us, and in the few hours it takes to reach a conclusion we see more real human behaviour than in months of what is designated as 'reality tv'. Instead of false emotional crescendoes, manufactured through tampering with the flow of scenes, we witness displays of ambition, fear, tenacity or ingrained pessimism, as each player's true nature is revealed. The way each one masters or lets their emotions get the better of them makes all the difference to the outcome. The power of the mind is vividly on display.

As a result, the game often delivers huge surprises. For example, halfway through the match between Birdych and Nadal, it seemed certain that Birdych would overcome the Spaniard, who seemed to have no answer to the other man's relentless aces. However, somehow, as we watched, Nadal found reserves of energy and hope and intelligence, and eventually, largely through pure determination, managed to win through.

Similarly, I remember sitting through that long and astonishing Wimbledon final between Federer and Roddick some years ago, a match which Federer won, seemingly entirely by dint of being determined to do so, despite at moments looking as though he had not a single chance (and, incidentally, the most disappointing thing about that game was the fact that, although we were given long interviews with the victor, we had no chance to hear Roddick's side of the story - I would love to have been given some insights into what it felt like to have fought so hard and come so tantalisingly close to victory and then to have had it slip from your hands).

Even the extraordinary struggle that took place between Djokovic and Nadal on Sunday evening, in which the power seemed to move almost tidally between the two of them, may ultimately have come down to psychology rather than technique. After all, according to the commentators, this was Nadal's response to a question after the US Open about whether Djokovic had somehow psychologically mesmerised him:

"You all know, I know, he knows, that he has got inside my head."

Could the thing finally have come down to this one factor - a mental chink of weakness, of lack of self-belief that dictated from the first moment that Nadal was heading for defeat?

Of course, there is always the criticism that this is all nonsense, that tennis is merely a few silly - or greedy - people running about hitting a round thing with a an odd shaped loop that's been threaded with strings. While that's true on one level, I still think the game represents more than that. Patrick Smith, a journalist at the Australian, appears to agree with me when he speculates about whether we can learn from Lleyton Hewitt's example on the tennis court:

"Have you ever thought what our lives might have been, or might be, if we were Little Lleyton? Not our tennis game, forget the lob and the volley, but our lives themselves ...It doesn't matter what we do, how we make a quid, run the household or maybe play the piano. Journo, accountant, carpenter, musician, mother, partner. Whatever. If Little Lleyton was the voice inside our head there would not be one part of our endeavours that was not pushed, probed, stretched or pulled apart to see if one more morsel of success could not be unlocked ... If all of us chased our dreams with the commitment Hewitt practises, prepares and plays his tennis, we might write a better story, build a better house, play a better tune."

I can't add a thing to that except, 'Roll on Wimbledon.'

Ooh Look

2012-01-31T09:59:00.000+11:00

Some excellent drawings by my favourite illustrator.

This Island Race

2012-01-30T17:25:00.000+11:00

On the way home yesterday, I heard this fascinating recording of Australian youth being interviewed in 1976:

More About Mince

2012-01-29T16:52:00.000+11:00

My childhood was not like today's childhoods - gosh, no-one's ever said that before, I'll bet. Still, I never said I was going to be original - and, in any case, however cliched, in my case the statement is absolutely true.

The reason for this is that, unlike their modern counterparts, my parents did not exert themselves to conjure up diversions and entertainment for their offspring. Instead, they devoted most of the little attention they gave to us to trying to offload us onto someone - well, anyone, actually - else.

Which was why we were regularly sent to spend holidays with a large family of cousins, all of whom we loved dearly but whose nanny was so utterly dreadful that whenever we returned home we would beg our parents never to be sent there again.

We were wasting our breath, of course. They took no notice and, sure enough, a day or two after school was next over for the term, we'd find ourselves hurtled off into the terrifying arms of the starched old bag once more.

One blogpost - indeed, one lifetime's entire blog - would not really provide enough space in which to describe that woman's horribleness. Suffice to say, it came as an enormous surprise when, one wet afternoon, rather than forcing us all out of the house into the rain in insufficient clothing and then berating us for getting wet when she finally permitted our reentry, she told us all that we were going to be allowed to watch television.

It must be a trick, we all agreed, but that didn't mean we were going to argue. We arranged ourselves in a dutiful row on the green ivy printed white chintz of the drawingroom sofa and waited for the set to warm up. The film we then saw was so striking that I have never forgotten it. It was called Carve Her Name with Pride, and told the story of Violette Szabo, to whom a memorial has recently been erected near Lambeth Bridge.

I have no idea why Nanny allowed us to watch it - at the time, I assumed she was hoping to pick up a few techniques from viewing the Gestapo torturers at work (in which case, she would have been disappointed by the lack of explicit detail [but more of that later]). Whatever her thought processes were - and I have no doubt they were weird and twisted - it is the one thing that, despite all her iniquities, I'm grateful to her for.

Mind you, I'd forgotten all about the film until I went for a swim this morning and listened to Simon Heffer talk about it with what I thought was rare insight.

Just before the swim, I'd read a comment by Frank Wilson that yesterday's post wasn't "really about censorship" (or indeed organic minced beef) , "but about prudence and taste" .

He's right of course, and this was only reinforced by Heffer's observation that, were Carve Her Name with Pride ("the French are magnificent, of course, but they have to be organised"), to be made today, the film makers would be unable to resist showing the full details of how exactly Violet Szabo was tortured, sparing the viewer nothing. That's almost certainly true, but just as I can't see any useful purpose for much of the sensational information that is served up to us daily, I doubt the addition of more graphic scenes would have made a more moving or memorable film.

In Praise of Censorship

2012-01-28T13:58:00.000+11:00

As I was bicycling back to Canberra's pathetic attempt at a Chinatown, (when I went there the other day, I couldn't get what I wanted as the markets in Cabramatta had been closed for Chinese New Year and so supplies were delayed - boring explanation, but I wouldn't want anyone thinking I'm easing off on my attitude of haughty contempt towards the place and becoming a fan who can't keep away), I noticed this in the gutter:

For those who can't zoom in and see the detail, it is a pristine packet of Cleaver's 'Healthy Organic' beef mince, priced at a healthy - one might even say hefty - $8.74.

My initial reaction was to think, 'Oh, some poor person has ridden home from the shop, imagining they have a lovely mince-based meal ahead of them, (if it's possible to have a lovely mince-based meal, which is debatable), and then they've got home and found that somehow - oh dear, could it be the onset of ... no, don't even tempt fate by mentioning it - although they thought they went to the shop and bought the stuff, it turns out they only imagined doing so, in which case what precisely did they do during the past forty-five minutes, (and what's the betting that that leads to a quick slug from the vodka bottle and from there it's all downhill?)'

And then I thought, 'But, no, wait a minute, what if, in fact, that organic mince has been put there deliberately to trick us into thinking that, but really a maniac has taken an incredibly fine needled syringe, which can penetrate the plastic covering while leaving it apparently unperforated, and - in the hope that a passer-by might pick up the packet, thinking, "Oh, jolly good, here's a free meal someone's dropped", and take it home, cook it and die - has injected into the so-called 'healthy organic' mince a terrible toxin that will kill in minutes.'

And then I thought, 'Hang on, where did that incredibly mad idea come from?'

And then I thought, 'It came from having all sorts of idiotic so-called news stories, about maniacs injecting food in supermarkets and stuffing jars of baby foods with ground glass et cetera, shoved at me by the media over the decades, so that now I can actually imagine that there are people out there who might possibly be nuts enough to do weird things that I previously could not have come near imagining.'

And then I thought, 'How utterly useless it is to know that kind of thing, how unnecessary it is to be told such stories, how irresponsible it is of news services to provide information about things that are so rare and aberrant that they are never ever likely to affect most people and yet once most people are given information about them they will never be able to get rid of that information or the possibility that such things could happen. Their minds will be cluttered up with lunatics lurking with poison and grisly details about murderers who boiled up their victims or kept them in bits in office fridges or buried them under the paving of people they were working for, things that offer no enlightenment but merely terrify and leach away trust between human beings. Furthermore, having been introduced to the knowledge that certain individual human beings can behave in extraordinary and terrible ways, they inevitably are forced - by virtue of being robbed of their innocence, of no longer not knowing that such things are possible - infinitesimally closer to being able to actually commit such acts themselves, because they have gone beyond the initial utter shock and reached the point of acceptance that such things occur.'

And then I thought, 'Do newspapers and reporters ever ask themselves what good it actually does, when they decide to tell us many of the things that they do decide to tell us, usually without ever being asked to tell us?' Do they wonder to themselves about what exact important purpose is served by providing us with all the prurient details of individual acts of gory madness?'

(On a separate note, I also think it's unforgiveable to insist people watch horrible things, just because you either like them or, more likely, want to spread around the trauma [and don't get me started on the night my friend went to see Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover and I said I wouldn't go because it looked too revolting and then he came home in a state of utter traumatised shock and insisted on cornering me and describing every scene in minute detail, thus ridding himself of his own horror and passing it straight on to me {I think what he did's called the talking cure, except that usually people pay - and did that really happen with the ... no, actually I really don't want or need to know}]. And, by the way, the mince is still there - in the gutter on Cowper Street, just after the intersection with Macarthur Avenue, should anyone be in the market for a free feed - although you might want to check the use-by date [and the possibly perforated cellophaned]).

Confessions of a Visual Illiterate I

2012-01-27T14:30:00.003+11:00

There is a poem I like by Marianne Moore about looking at pictures:

When I Buy Pictures

or what is closer to the truth,/
when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor,/
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:/
the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible/
than the intensity of the mood;/
or quite the opposite – the old thing, the medieval decorated hat-box,/
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass,/
and deer and birds and seated people;/
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps,/
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;/
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three parts;/
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking Adam by the wrist/.
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one's enjoyment./
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honoured –/
that which is great because something else is small./
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,/
it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things";/
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it./

I too, I'm sorry to say, 'fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments' when I look at pictures, although, unlike Moore, who remains concentrated on discovering the paintings' essences, the way in which they are, "lit with piercing glances into the life of things", I fear my love of narrative often distracts me from the paintings I'm looking at, diverting my attention toward speculation about their subjects and the stories behind them.

In order to illustrate or give a clearer picture of - and isn't it funny how the language of visual art seeps into writing - what I mean, here is a description of what happened when I visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales the other day.

I started by looking at a portrait by a painter I'm fond of called Moroni, (I am fairly sure he came from Bergamo, which always makes me think of Earl Grey tea, [because it is flavoured with bergamot], such is the trivial nature of my thought processes):

Dragging my mind from the possibility of going to the cafe and ordering a hot drink, I was soon leaning in a little closer toward the canvas, not in order to look at the painting as such, but rather because I was trying to imagine what the person who sat for it was like when he was alive. What was his story, I wanted to know, and what would he be like, if I were to meet him:

The caption beside the painting urged me to notice the way the light flickers over the man's facial features, lending them vibrancy, but I was too busy trying to work out how Moroni had managed to control his brush in order to create the illusion of ruff and hairline and beard and skin:

I moved on to the neighbouring painting but was unable to take it in at all. Any thought of what it looked like was driven out of my head by my outrage at its donor and her absurd sense of what appears to be cultural cringe:

"What was she thinking?" I asked myself, feeling quite baffled.

Unfortunately, my mind was still on such matters - in this case what the sitter was thinking, rather than the donor, (but still, alas, I was not considering the painting itself) - when I shifted my gaze to the next work, by Elizabeth Donche, a diptych of Cornelius Duplicius de Scheppere and his wife, who was the object of my focus:

I'm convinced her main thought is, "Bloody Cornelius, I wish we'd got Holbein - it might have cost a bit more, but you get value for money with Holbein."

I imagine her spending the rest of her life looking at this picture and trying to persuade herself that it's okay, while all the time noticing that the fabric of those cuffs doesn't glow the way Holbein's would have:

and that, although her skin's not badly captured, the eyes Holbein would have given her might have been filled with sparkling life:

The more I looked at the picture the more certain I became that every time Mrs de Scheppere looked at Donche's attempt to render the gauze underlay and fur edging of her garment, all she could see was how exquisitely Holbein would have managed them:

The painting, in fact, probably ended up in an art gallery purely because Mrs de Scheppere couldn't stand having the wretched thing in her house a minute longer.

By now I was beginning to realise that, as well as wanting a hot drink, I was getting hungry. As a result, instead of looking at the whole of the next work I came to:

my attention was drawn to one particular detail - the ham. This led me off into quite irrelevant thoughts about what the book Beatrix Potter wrote about two mice who get into a doll's house was called (because I seem to remember a scarcely less well-painted ham in that):

I focussed on the oyster in the same painting after that. I do like oysters but I couldn't help wondering whether this one would give me food poisoning, supposing I were able to actually reach out and grab it from its place among the grapes, (my mother, after all, has always claimed that you should never trust a European oyster, as she got terribly sick after eating some on one long gone occasion, although my father always counter-claimed that that was only because she ate nine dozen at one sitting [such helpful interventions may have contributed not a little to their eventual divorce]):

"Is being fascinated with an oyster on a par with Moore's interest in the 'artichoke in six varieties of blue'?", I asked myself as I stared out the picture's window (no, not the picture window, the window in the picture, although it might in fact be a picture window, for all I know - I've never been clear what the phrase 'picture window' actually means), my eyes drawn, inevitably, by the distant landscape in the background. What is it about background scenes glimpsed through openings in paintings - they almost always fascinate me more than the foreground I'm supposed to be looking at. I think it is their mysterious quality, the hint of other lives going on just out of view:

Karel Dujardin's 'Italianate Landscape with Shepherd and Peasant Woman' was next on my unscholarly agenda. Instead of appreciating the colour and composition, I found myself speculating, as I looked at it, on whether Dujardin, unable to find a female model at short notice, painted a bloke and added a phwoar kind of cleavage to him, in the hope of deflecting viewers' attention from the creature's manly stance and face. The peasant woman reminded me somehow of the Little Britain performer, David Walliams:

Similarly ignoble thoughts afflicted me when I turned to Blanchard's painting of Mars discovering a sleeping vestal virgin, (an event that the caption explains, opaquely, resulted in the birth of Romulus and Remus). Yet again I failed to consider the painter's method of paint application, his sense of colour or general composition, puzzling instead about whether or not what the caption coyly describes as 'the sensuousness of Blanchard's art', might not also be classifiable as high-class soft porn. Certainly, the virgin's face is not what Mars appears to be mostly interested in:

Out in the Australian section of the gallery, I came next upon Eugene von Guerard's 1865 painting of Sydney Heads:

In my philistine way, it was again the 'odd thing' that attracted me, the detail of the scene rather than the quality of the work of art - really, I suppose, a photograph would have suited my purposes equally well, since what intrigued me was looking at this now transformed but still familiar landscape and seeing all the vanished details, captured by von Guerard, of the pristine nature of the North Shore of the time:

The next canvas I came to was a painting of Milford Sound, which tured out also to be by von Guerard, even though I'd always believed it was by Caspar David Friedrich:

As usual, my mind quickly began trying to transform the thing into a narrative. Instead of absorbing the whole work as a visual object, I was soon dividing it up, as if it were one of those medieval religious story paintings, into little sections, finding small pieces within it that each had the potential to produce a story of its own.

I discovered a section depicting a bunch of people about to launch onto the water in a small boat:

and another section showing a similar vessel already floating out upon the water:

Meanwhile birds could be seen, flying above the water, unaware of the human activity beneath:

and over on the right of the canvas a mysterious steamer with unknown passengers was moving slowly across the lake's glassy surface (is Milford Sound a lake?):

while a waterfall thundered in the distance:

beneath a livid sky:

Is it all right to do this, to wander around galleries in such an ill-informed way, enjoying and admiring the displays but understanding practically nothing? I worry that the manner in which I approach these outings - outings that I love, I should point out - is the incorrect manner. I'm concerned that really I ought to be doing serious preparation. I fear I should be more intent on discerning 'piercing glances' and 'spiritual forces', rather than treating the whole visual experience with as much respect as I might the unfolding vista glimpsed through a car window on a long journey.

I worry, in short, that I'm a visual illiterate. But then I comfort myself with the fact that the New South Wales Art Gallery's curators appear to be linguistically illiterate, which, in my world, is just as bad.

Ashamed

2012-01-26T10:11:00.002+11:00

I know Canada has one too, but most self-respecting countries don't have a day on which they celebrate being them. We do though, and it's today - we call it, unsurprisingly, 'Australia Day' and it makes me uncomfortable.

The thing is, I love this country but we are already revoltingly smug, (with undertones of anxiety that we're not actually quite as great as we think we are). Rather than self-congratulation, self-criticism - not self-hatred, but a proper sense that, while we have achieved a lot and created a very nice place to live, there are still plenty of things we could improve, (as there always are, everywhere) - seems to me to be the healthy option. Instead, we have our immigration minister today stating, if the Sydney Morning Herald is to be believed:

"We say without a shred of arrogance or parochialism that Australia's the best country in the world."

This government inspired 'celebration of a nation', (actually I think that phrase was for the bicentennial, to be completely fair), has, as do most government inspired nation building exercises, a faintly North Korean tinge about it, in my view, (although - and perhaps this is one of the areas we could reflect on as we indulge in the self-criticism I recommend - we're not self-disciplined enough to do the synchronised displays they are so fond of.)

(If there are no more blog posts here in the next few days, it will mean I have been kicked to death by a crowd of green-and-gold, (dreadful colour combination), wearing Aussie-Aussie-Aussie-Oy-Oy-Oy zealots.)

Works for Me

2012-01-25T21:08:00.002+11:00

Sometimes I feel in need of something to lift my spirits and I find this rarely fails.

Respect

2012-01-24T17:34:00.000+11:00

Just now, in the short street that has been rather imaginatively renamed Canberra's Chinatown, (it's not a town and it's not enormously Chinese [although I have to admit that it is probably more Chinese than anywhere else in Canberra]), I was locking my bike to a bike rack when I became aware of a person standing rather close to me.

What made me become aware of this person was, I suppose, the fact that he suddenly bellowed, 'It's a pity you have to lock up your bike', right beside me, in a Scottish accent. I straightened up and looked at this person, whose voice I didn't recognise but who nonetheless appeared to be addressing me. The main thing I noticed was that he was a man who had quite a few teeth missing and that his face was rather closer to mine than I might have liked. 'It is a pity,' I agreed and bent down again, to extract my key from its padlock.

'I went to Japan once,' the man yelled down at me, as I did this. I glanced up and gave him what I thought was an unencouraging nod. 'They don't need to lock up their bikes there,' he continued, clearly too entranced by his subject - or perhaps the sound of his Scottish lilt - to notice encouragement or the lack thereof.

'Oh yes,' I said, straightening up again and putting my key away in my pocket.

'Do you know why they don't need to lock up their bikes in Japan?' he demanded, shoving his mug so forcefully into my vision that there was room for nothing else. I inched away, shaking my head. 'Is it because no-one steals bikes over there?' I ventured. 'Yes, but do you know why they don't?' he asked.

He didn't wait for my answer - which was lucky, as I didn't have one - but went straight on. 'I asked them why, you know, and they told me. They said it was respect that stopped them doing it. They have respect in Japan, you see, but we've lost it.'

Before I could argue - or agree - with this statement, he turned on his heel and marched off.

I looked after him. What he'd said was not totally uninteresting, even though he was probably fairly mad. I didn't really have any particular objection to his diagnosis - I did wonder though if the loss was entirely a bad thing. After all, could it not be argued that an excess of respect led to no-one challenging authorities with sufficient vigour to prevent the building of nuclear power plants along an earthquake fault line?

If it's a choice between the odd stolen bike or a nuclear catastrophe, I think we may have got the better part of the bargain. On the other hand, it would be nice to never lock things up.

Stratford's Sayyid Qutb

2012-01-23T13:11:00.000+11:00

I suppose everyone else in the world is already aware of this latest piece of evidence that the world has gone stark raving mad - somehow The Tempest has fallen foul of a law that is designed to prohibit teaching that promotes the overthrow of the United States:

Any education system that promotes the avoidance of discussion of any topics is a faulty education system, I reckon. Of course, 'discussion' is the operative word - that is, all possible points of view should be aired, rather than simply one doctrine. Rather than banning things, however, wouldn't it be better if the authorities involved ensured that the teachers they employ are dedicated to seeing that issues are discussed in a thorough, uninhibited, unbiased way?

Never Ignore the Short Form

2012-01-21T14:15:00.001+11:00

Someone told me the other day that Alfred Hitchcock said films should not be made from novels, but from short stories - novels were too complex to be distilled into a feature length form. As I've pointed out (at great length) before, I think the novel form should not be tinkered with at all - if you want to put something on the screen or the telly, make up your own stories.

Anyway, before I go off on another 19,000 word rant about that, let me explain the actual point of this post: after puting up all those pictures (or rather all those potential Trollopian novels), yesterday, I realised that I'd left no scope for those who do not want to embark on such a large undertaking but may, like Frances's little sister Gloria with her string beans (from that great Russell Hoban work, Bread and Jam for Frances) -

- wish to practise with a short story (whether for potential adaptation by Mr Hitchcock's disciples or simply as a narrative in its own right).

So, not wishing to leave out this category of hopeful writer, I am adding this picture to yesterday's offerings :

Needless to say it is, once again, taken from Yass District Hospital, (this time circa 1915). To me it seems full of Chekhovian possibility.

"Creative Writing" - Exercise II

2012-01-20T09:54:00.000+11:00

In "Creative Writing" - Exercise I of the famous ZMKC online "Creative Writing" course, readers were offered the opportunity to craft stories based on the scraps of overheard conversation I picked up while walking up my local hill (and, by the way, I forgot to include the one that I think may in fact offer the most dramatic potential: "It was only afterwards that we realised they were Japanese.")

Now, in Exercise II, I offer you these photographs, taken at Yass Hospital, where I've been spending a lot of time lately, (long, boring story), and challenge you to conjure full-length period novels from them. You have the choice of a couple of early 20th century settings, or the 1950s. Your cast of characters is large and varied. Doubtless, most of them had friendships, difficult families, disappointments, complicated lives. All you have to do is imagine the details (and I'm even giving you the names, to make life easier).

In the first group, you see the staff circa 1910 (back row, "Nurse, Matron, AB Triggs, AC Wood, front row, Dr Doolan, Dr J English, 'unknown', Dr Thane, Mr W Thompson, Nurse, Mr Griffin, [wonderful how the women have no names recorded]):

In the second group, we jump forward to 1957, where women get names and everyone seems the happier for it, (back row: Mick Nash, Ray Hammil, Bill Cook, Joe O'Connor, Lloyd Parker, Front row: AJ Shannon, Naomi Oxley, Matron Besley, Ken Hartigan):

Then back we go again to 1925, which looks oddly more remote than 1910 and where again, despite their numerical preponderance, the women remain nameless (Dr J English on the right, and Dr Colquhoun on the left):

Finally, we go right back to 1895, when the hospital was only a twinkle in the planning committee's eye (BA Nichols, W Thomson, A Wood, T Comins, Dr English, AW Thomson, T Colls, AB Triggs, TJ Sheekey, Dr Doolan, THF Griffin, J Waddell, EJ Howard, G Bates):

They were a rum looking lot, but I think what their efforts produced was beautiful:

Once More, with Pictures

2012-01-19T16:58:00.001+11:00

Sometimes, when you have been ill and are now better but somehow cannot quite shake off the last traces of the germ you had, the only thing to do is to go on a trip. If you don't have much time and you live in Canberra, then the closest place to go is Sydney and, since we do live in Canberra, Sydney is the place to which we have just been.

And while we were in Sydney, among the many things we did, one was to revisit St James's Church, which I wrote about some time ago. This time I took my camera with me on the visit, so now I can repost my earlier post, but this time including photographs of some of the things I saw inside the church:

"Miss Marsh, our school scripture teacher, had two catchphrases. She began each lesson with one - 'Pull up a pew, girls', (bellowed as she strode into the room) - and wound things up with the other, which was delivered as part of a slowly swelling valedictory sermon, intended to sustain us through the days until she saw us again. Its subject was the virtues of the bible, which she claimed was jampacked with excitement. Within its pages we could find everything, she told us - adventure, romance, tragedy, history, madness - if only we would just 'dip in.'

I thought of Miss Marsh's advice when I went into St James's Church yesterday morning. Built in 1819 and intended as a courthouse, it is Sydney's oldest church now. It stands opposite the lovely Hyde Park Barracks and, like them, was designed by Francis Greenway, of whom more another time (he needs at least a post to himself). Whereas the bible, upon being dipped into, has not always fulfilled Miss Marsh's promise of excitement, it turns out that the walls of St James's certainly do.

For a start we have history in the plaques to Ensign Henry Middleton Blackburn, Captain John Shaw Phelps and Lieutenant George Philpotts, all of whom died in the Maori Wars - an episode most of us barely realise Australia ever took part in, (it certainly wasn't mentioned in any school history I did.)

Then there are the the inscriptions, such as the one praising Commodore Sir James Brisbane for his efforts in 'the submission of the Burmese empire'.

Such a confident phrase that, expressing an unquestioning belief in European cultural superiority - although not quite as astonishing as the one we saw in a Belgian town called Chateauneuf: it was on a memorial to soldiers who had died in the Belgian Congo, and read, quite simply: 'Morts pour la civilisation'.

The fairly casual view we once took of foreigners and their rights is also on display in St James's in the form of a framed bit of mosaic tiled floor, which, according to the inscription, the desert mounted corps helped themselves to in August 1918, when they 'discovered' an ancient church near Jericho, in which the tiled floor lay.

The plaque 'To the memory of the Reverend Richard Hill, the first minister of this church, who expired suddenly in the performance of his duty within its walls,' brings us the drama that Miss Marsh promised.

The mind boggles at the thought of what that service must have been like. Did he lean out of the pulpit and drop like a stone or was he administering Holy Communion when he 'expired', the goblet flying from his hand, wine splashing across the lace fronted panelling of some pillar of the community's best Sunday frock?

There's tragedy in the plaque 'In memory of Robert John Birch, who was accidentally drowned at Clontarf, Middle Harbour, Dec 7th AD 1865, aged 8 years'.

The poignance of this incident is increased by the fact the plaque was erected by his playmates 'in affectionate remembrance of their beloved school fellow.'

More tragedy follows in the commemoration of 'James Green, Commander of the ship Dunbar, who perished with all his passengers and crew save one by the wreck of that vessel at the Sydney Heads in a fearful gale on the night of 20th August 1857.'

This event, sometimes referred to as 'Australia's Titanic', shocked Sydney at the time. According to marinewatchnsw.com, after an 81 day voyage, the clipper was driven into the reef at South Head and began to break up immediately. Only one able seaman survived, by clinging to a cliff face for 36 hours. A mass funeral was held for the victims and a monument to them can still be seen in Camperdown in Sydney.

Finally, there are the several plaques which refer to conflict with the original inhabitants of the land. There is one that is 'Sacred to the Memory of Capt Collet Barker, of His Majesty's 59th regiment of foot, who was treacherously murdered by the Aboriginal natives on the 30th April 1831 while endeavouring in the performance of his duty to ascertain the communication between Lake Alexandrine and the Gulf of St Vincent on the South West coast of New Holland.'

Another pays tribute 'to the memory of Lieutenant Edward Murray Tupper Rn Aged 22 years and William Kennedy Seaman aged 43 years, both of HM Ship Iris who were killed by the natives of Tana on the 1st July 1858 whilst on service on shore.'

A monmument headed 'Dulce et decorum est pro scientia mori' hangs near the door. It is dedicated to 'John Gilbert, ornithologist, who was speared by the blacks on the 29th of June, 1845, during the first overland expedition to Port Essington by Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt and his intrepid companions.'

Beside it a tablet with a carved scene of Aboriginals with spears in the background and a dying man being held in the arms of another in the foreground tells a wild story from which some of the subtle complexities of white Australia's relationship with the original dwellers of the land emerge.

Erected 'in testimony of the respect and gratitude of the inhabitants [of New South Wales]' it 'commemorates the active service and early death of assistant surveyor Edmund Besley Court Kennedy who after having completed the survey of the River Victoria was chosen by the government to conduct the survey of York Peninsula, where, after the most patient and persevering exertions to overcome the physical difficulties of the country, and the destructive effects of consequent disease, by which the expedition, originally consisting of thirteen persons was reduced to three, he was slain by the Aborigines in the vicinity of Escape River on 13th December 1848, falling a sacrifice in the 31st year of his age to the cause of science, the advancement of the colony and the interests of humanity.' So far the dividing lines between natives and settlers seem clear and undeviating, but the tablet goes on to memorialise a survivor of the expedition, 'Jackey Jackey, an Aboriginal of Merton district, who was Mr Kennedy's sole companion in his conflict with the savages and though himself wounded tended his leader with a courage and devotion worthy of remembrance, supporting him in his last moments and making his grave in the spot where he fell.'

Aside from the very touching story this tells, which gives us a glimpse of a less simple world than the usual one we are taught about, in which whites oppressed blacks and blacks hated whites, it is interesting that only in this final passage, in which they are actually praising an Aboriginal individual for his - to western eyes at least - noble behaviour, do the writers of the inscription stray from neutral terms such as 'blacks' or 'natives' and describe the Aboriginal attackers as 'savages'.

Sometimes it seems to me that it is no easier to see into the past with any clarity than it is to look into the future. Certainly, the story of Kennedy and Jackey Jackey indicates that history - especially Australian history - is never as straightforward or clearcut as we're sometimes led to think."

Let the Right One Out

2012-01-18T16:54:00.002+11:00

Sometimes on the television I glimpse trailers for a very unattractive looking programme called The United States of Tara, which, from what I can glean, tells the story or stories of a person who believes she contains within herself several other personalities, most of whom appear to be rather ghastly.

I can't compete with the cast of thousands summoned forth by "Tara", but I do have to admit that, while I usually present the outward appearance of a perfectly normal, (well, all right, fairly normal), person, there is lurking in my psychological basement a raving pedant, who insists that I allow her out from time to time.

On those rare occasions, my alter ego, who seems to spend most of her hours of incarceration combing through newspapers and magazines with a manic glint in her eye, (she only has one), bursts forth and goes wild on my other blog, which is here.

I'll have to go now - I need to get the mad harpy back under lock and key before she heads for the fruit and vegetable section at the local supermarket. If she catches a glimpse of "Tomatoe's - cheaper prices here", who knows what might happen..

Losing Patients

2012-01-17T13:07:00.001+11:00

Dear 'Health Professional'
If you want to make life more pleasant for your patients as they wait endlessly to be granted a brief moment of your time, perhaps you might like to consider purchasing some slightly more appealing reading matter for your waiting room. While I'm sure leafing through the pages of the only volume you offer is nowhere near as boring as writing and researching it must have been, when you're feeling less than 100 per cent it's quite nice to have your attention diverted by something mildly interesting:

You are after all supposed to be healing us, not boring us to death by proxy.

I Thought You Had to Be Over Sixty

2012-01-12T11:33:00.001+11:00

It turns out there's too much to do to allow for full-blown, lying-in-bed sickness, so, after a couple of days sleeping, I stoke up with pills and stagger up to the local shops. Apart from anything else, I'm worried they'll all close down unless I hurry back to ply them with my trade.

When I get there, I realise I may have exaggerated the importance of my custom. There's no sign that the brief loss of it has made any difference to anyone. This should make me happy, although really it makes me feel depressingly expendable.

Then, as I come round the corner by the pub, I see two young men approaching. One is talking on his mobile phone. When he finishes his conversation, he shakes his head, as if someone had punched him. 'She wants me to give up bowling', is all he says.

Bowling? Young men, (presumably he's not in it just for the free carparking)? Either I've still got a fever, or else the world has changed while I've been away.

Gah

2012-01-08T08:37:00.000+11:00

Despite all precautions, I have caught my husband's flu, (although not nearly as badly as him, apparently). No blogging until further notice.

Planet Paprika

2012-01-07T08:48:00.000+11:00

Extra-terrestrial travel would be much more appealing, if one could be certain that there was a cafe serving Dobos Torte at the other end:

"In wartime Los Alamos, there was a conversation piece known as the Fermi Paradox, posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Given the high overall probability that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe, why hadn’t the extraterrestrials made contact? ‘They are among us,’ Leó Szilárd replied, ‘but they call themselves Hungarians.’ The story was told by the Hungarians themselves and it went like this: the Men from Mars were a restless sort and, in search of new worlds to colonise, they long ago came to Earth, landing on the banks of the Danube. They had effectively concealed their true identity, but there were several signs that could give away their Martian origins. One was their wanderlust: they loved to travel and they readily upped sticks; second was their language, which had no known earthly relation; and third was their supernatural intelligence – they knew things, and could think in a way, that no other people did. One could add a corollary: though they often had a profound understanding of the whole spectrum of mere earthly culture, they seemed to understand it, as it were, from the outside."

The major flaw that I can see in this theory is the notion that Hungarians have a sense of wanderlust. They seem to me - and this is borne out by the fact that it was Poles in large numbers, rather than Hungarians, who took the opportunity to move to Britain and work, when EU regulations made it possible - fairly resistant to leaving their homeland, unless they have to. Not that I blame them.

(From a review of a book about Michael Polanyi in the London Review of Books)

Battered Penguins XVI

2012-01-06T12:08:00.001+11:00

Prater Violet is Christopher Isherwood's novelised account of his time working with an Austrian film director who he calls Friedrich Bergmann, a character believed to be based on Berthold Viertel. The novel is set in London in 1934 and, in telling the story of his time as a scriptwriter for a film called Prater Violet (the film he actually worked on was called The Little Friend), Isherwood highlights the almost wilful complacency of pre-war Britain, while providing a vivid portrait of his central character and juxtaposing the increasingly serious political situation in the wider world with the frivolity of the movie that is being made.

At the start of the novel, Isherwood, rather endearingly, presents himself as a hopelessly blinkered prognosticator pompously explaining to his mother and brother how unlikely it is that the rise of Hitler will ever lead to war. He goes on to describe the mood in Britain in that pre-war interlude:

"The newspapers were full of optimism. Things were looking up: this Christmas was to be the greatest ever. Hitler talked only of peace. The Disarmament Conference had broken down. The British Government didn't want isolation: equally it didn't want to promise military aid to France. When people planned their next summer's holiday in Europe they remembered to add: 'If Europe's still there.' It was like the superstition of touching wood."

Against this backdrop, he presents the film director, Bergmann, who we are encouraged right from the first moment to see not only as an individual but as a representative of a whole culture and territory. When Isherwood meets him, he explains:

"There are meetings which are like recognitions; this was one of them. Of course we knew each other. The name, the voice, the features were inessential: I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. It was the face of Central Europe."

Luckily, Isherwood does not merely assert Bergmann's emblematic quality but also provides many of his features, however' inessential' they may be. A vivid figure is created whose 'head was magnificent, and massive as sculptured granite', whose 'stiff drab suit didn't fit him' and whose 'shirt-collar was too tight', his 'tie ...askew and clumsily knotted', his face 'the face of an emperor, but [with] ... the dark mocking eyes of his slave - the slave who ironically obeyed, watched, humoured and judged the master who could never understand him; the slave upon whom the master depended utterly - for his amusement, for his instruction, for the sanction of his power, the slave who wrote the fables of beasts and men."

Through Bergmann, Isherwood is given a new perspective on his own home:

"Bergmann showed me London: the London he had already created for himself in his own imagination - the dark, intricate, sinister town of Dickens...He was always the guide, and I the tourist...We visited the Tower, where Bergmann lectured me on English history, comparing the reign of the Tudors to the Hitler regime...I had some difficulty in getting him out of the Bloody Tower, where he was inspired to a lurid reconstruction of the murder of the LIttle Princes, amazing the other visitors, who merely saw a stocky, shock-headed, middle-aged man pleading for his life to an invisible assassin, in German, with theatrical falsetto accents...In the National Gallery he explained, with reference to the Rembrandt portraits, his theory of camera-angles and the lighting of close-ups, so loudly and convincingly that he drew a crowd away from one of the official lecturers, who was naturally rather annoyed."

Also through Bergmann, Isherwood discovers the world of movie-making:

"'You see, the film-studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century'", Bergmann tells him, "'There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favourites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is the most insane extravagance, and unexpected parsimony over a few pence. There is enormous splendour which is a sham; and also horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery. There are vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep.'"

Bergmann's mood regarding the film they are working on oscillates between a fierce desire to maintain his artistic integrity - he insists at one point that the flimsy love story is not silly but "political", a "symbolic fable" - and a despairing contempt for the whole enterprise - "Yes, by all means. Let us shoot it again. Perhaps we can achieve something worse," he cries, "I doubt it. But let us try". Simultaneously, his view of what is going on in the world outside the studio becomes gloomier by the day. He regales Isherwood with "apocalyptic pictures of universal doom" and when a journalist tells him that the Austrian civil war and the resulting political changes in Austria are not "our affair. I mean you can't really expect people in England to care -", he transforms into a terrifying oracle:

"His fist hit the table, so that the knives and forks rang. He turned scarlet in the face. He shouted: 'I expect everybody to care! Everybody who is not a coward, a moron, a piece of dirt! I expect this whole damned island to care! I will tell you something: if they do not care, they will be made to care. The whole lot of you. You will be bombed and slaughtered and conquered."

Hindsight tells us that Bergmann was very nearly right. Millions were slaughtered and much that was wonderful was swept away and destroyed. Whether things would have been different had the voices of Bergmann and others like him been heeded sooner is a question that Prater Violet does not attempt to answer. What it does do is provide a fascinating and often amusing reminder of a period of equivocation, as well as a wonderful picture of a wild, lonely, enormous personality who for a brief period came into Isherwood's life, impelling him with the force of his own character to question the way in which he had:

"always done whatever people recommended. You were born: it was like entering a restaurant. The waiter came forward with a lot of suggestions. You said: 'What do you advise?' And you ate it, and supposed you liked it, because it was expensive, or out of season, or had been a favourite of King Edward the Seventh. The waiter had recommended teddy bears, football, cigarettes, motor-bikes, whisky, Bach, poker, the culture of classical Greece."

At the end of the book, the reader knows that the war will soon be coming and any remaining certainties will also be swept away. The minute concerns of the various characters - the actress who offers her face to the make-up man "as impersonally as one extends a shoe to the bootblack; this anxiously pretty mask, which is her job, her source of income, the tool of her trade"; the technician, Teddy, who is delaying marriage for five years until he has a better job; Roger, the sound man, for whom the best things in his life have been "Good unexpected lays" - appear silly when set against the huge political convulsions that are already rolling towards them. Yet, in the end, Isherwood tells us, all that matters is love. For him, Bergmann transcends the events that are coming. "He was my father", Isherwood tells us, "I was his son. And I loved him very much".

Storytime

2012-01-05T11:40:00.003+11:00

It's a bit too hot for climbing up the mountain at the moment and so I am swimming for an hour each day instead, an activity I enjoy far more, partly because, for some reason, I don't feel any compunction about listening to the radio while swimming, whereas, although I don't know why, I refuse to allow myself any audio entertainment while trudging uphill. Maybe I concede myself this pleasure when swimming because I am so amazed it's possible - to be able to listen to MP3s underwater is so miraculous and I am so lucky to be living in an age when it can be done that I have a duty to make the most of the opportunity.

Anyway, as I have been listening to the radio and not climbing up the mountain, I haven't been hearing the snatches of conversation of those passing me in the opposite direction that are about the only thing that provides any respite from the tramp tramp tramp of my weary feet. I miss them and I think when I do go back to the mountain I will start to collect the best ones and post them here, so that aspirant writers, unable to get themselves started, will be able to pick up one or other sentence and use it as a hook on which to hang a whole new work of fiction.

The ones I did pick up before the advent of proper summer weather seemed to be dominated by talk about job applications - 'They said I didn't have the right skillset', 'They only told me too late that I needed three referees, not two', 'I didn't realise when I applied that you had to stay on the ship the whole time' - but there were a few that offered possibilities to anyone with a speculative turn of thought. Here are the ones that I thought had the most promise:

"It's just habit though, isn't it? It's always just habit."

"My parents loved India. Well, mum did anyway."

"I don't think I should have asked him now."

"I really wish I'd never bought those little red boots."

Chiz Triple Chiz

2012-01-04T15:08:00.002+11:00

My brother telephoned last night to tell me that Ronald Searle had died. He also told me that, without Searle's drawings of Nigel Molesworth and St Custards, his time at prep school would have been even more unpleasant than it actually was. Given what this man says about that same school and its longlasting effect on him, I'm not surprised.

In 2003 Searle once again provided some kind of comfort - both for my brother and for me - after our father died suddenly. We flew to London together in time for his funeral but, heartbreakingly, too late to say goodbye. During the days we spent wandering dazedly around the city after our arrival, I remember only one cheerful interlude - a morning spent at Chris Beetles's gallery in Ryder Street, (from the doorway of which we could see one of our father's favourite places in the world - Brooks's), looking at an exhibition of Searle's work.

Sadly, there was no chance of buying any of the pictures on display, as they had all been snapped up long before we turned up, (we probably couldn't have afforded them anyway), but I did keep the catalogue of the exhibition. It contained this account of Searle's remarkable life:

Click to enlarge for reading

and this - I suspect typically - self-deprecating note from Searle himself:

and pictures from every period of his life, starting with pen and ink drawings from the POW camps he endured in the 1940s:

Left: Tent Life and Emaciation, pen and ink on tinted paper, 6.5 x 4.25" Right: Rock Breaking, pen and ink on tinted paper, 6.75 x 4.25"

Left: A Burial, pen and ink on tinted paper, 6.75 x 4.75" Right: Freight train to Thailand, pen and ink on tinted paper, 6.75 x 4.75"

progressing through the 1950s:

The First Night Scene, pen and ink, 10.5 x 12", Punch, 23 April, 1952

The Modern Olympus, the Gods being Entertained by the Muses, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 18 x 29.75" Punch 27 November 1957, Key, l to r, with last four figures reading downwards: THE MUSES - Calliope (Epic Poetry)-Situation Vacant;Melpomene (Tragedy)-Sir Donald Wolfit; Thalia (Comedy)-Joyce Grenfell;Clio (History)-Arnold Toynbee; Urania (Astronomy)-The Astronomer Royal;Euterpe (Lyric Poetry)-John Betjeman;Erato (Erotic Poetry)-Tommy Steele;Polyhymnia (Sublime Hymns)-Vera Lynn;Terpsichore (The Dance)-Dame Margot Fonteyn. THE GODS - The Church-the Archbishop of Canterbury; Pulchritude-Sabrina;Education-Sir John Wolfenden;the Trade Unions-Frank Cousins;The Press-Sir William Haley;Science-Sir William Penney;The Law-Lord Goddard;Politics-Aneurin Bevan;Campanology-Lord Hailsham

The Tragedy Queen, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 14.5 x 12.75", Mr Rothman's New Guide to London. Together with a Guide to some Londoners of the Eighteen-Nineties, Rothman's of Pall Mall, 1958

The Actor Manager, pen ink and monochrome waterolour, 14.25 x 9.75", as for preceding picture.

Miss Jennings: Two Thousand Thimbles Worn Out in the Interests of Male Vanity, pen and ink, 11 x 14.5", News Chronicle, 15 May, 1953 (Ronald Searle and Kaye Webb, Looking at London)

Mr Hansen, Head Porter of the Savoy Hotel, London, pen ink and bodycolour with pencil on tinted paper, 12 x 9.75", inscribed: "John Hansen, Head Porter of the Savoy Hotel controls the staff of porters and doormen from his cubby hole between the revolving doors. He has six telephones on his desk."

Jack Warburton, Carriage Man at Claridges Hotel, pen ink and bodycolour on tinted paper, 11 x 9", inscribed with title, plus: "has saluted more kings than many prime ministers. Top hat, black tie and tails."

On the Road: Herbert Morrison Electioneering, pen and ink, 13.5 x 14", signed, inscribed 'Lewisham' and dated 1951, News Chronicle, 18 October, 1951

Have a Good Rum for your Money, pen and ink, 15 x 10", designed as advertising for Lemon Hart Rum, 1950s

Agatha Christie's Bathtub, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 7.5 x 10", Life Magazine, 14 May, 1956

Perdu dans le Labyrinthe Londonien, pen and ink, 12 x 13.5", Figaro, 18 February, 1955

Design for Licking, pen and ink, 10 x 14.5", 1953

A Hubbub of Music, pen and ink, 9.25 x 6", Night in a London Coffee House, The Big City, Perpetua, 1958

What Calm and Pleasant Seclusion the Library Presents, pen and ink, 8 x 5.5", drawn for but not illustrated in Holiday, November 1952

Wimbledon, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 20.5 x 12.5", News Chronicle, 26 June, 1954

'I Say - I Think it's Going to Clear ...' Summer Holidays, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 20 x 12.5", News Chronicle, 7 August 1954

Detail of preceding picture

Office Duo, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 15.5 x 18.5", Punch, 12 January, 1955

I'm Afraid it's the Weather, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 22 x 14", News Chronicle, 14 August, 1954

The Guest Book, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 22 x 15", News Chronicle, 23 August, 1954

Detail of The Guest Book

The Spirit of Autumn, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 22 by 15", News Chronicle, 25 September 1954

Street Scenes, pen and ink, 22 by 14.75", News Chronicle,19 September 1954

- an era that saw the birth of Nigel Molesworth and his world:

We Mite Get a Rusian Master, pen ink and blue crayon, 12 x 9.5". Whizz for Atomms, 1956

That's Enuff of that for the Moment. In the Meantime this Should Constitute a Provocative Action, pen an ink, 13 x 9.5", Down with Skool, 1953

The Molesworth Production Line for Latin Sentences, pen and ink, 14 x 10". Whizz for Atomms, 1956

Gosh, Chiz, This is Molewsorth 2, My Bro, He is Uterly Wet and a Weed, it Panes Me to Think I Am of the Same Blud, pen and ink, 9 x 7.5", Down with Skool, 1953

Cad with an Ancestral Conker, pen and ink, 11.25 x 8.5", How to be Topp, 1954

It is by Such an Example as I, Like Those Other Brave, Clear-Eyed Workers in the Documentary Films, that Britain Will Win Its Export Battle, pen and ink, 13.25 x 10.25", Whizz for Atomms, 1956

but in which Searle also turned his attention to more serious subjects:

Anna Barth and Leonard Hess, Camp Laschenskyhof, Salzburg, pen and ink, 15 x 21.25", Punch, 30 December, 1959: "Anna Barth, the woman in this picture, is 45 years old. She comes from Yugoslavia. In the last war she and her crippled husband were told to hand over German soldiers who were billeted with them. They refused, and so the partisans murdered her husband. At war's end she and her four children were taken to a prison labour camp. Her young son was beaten to death by guards and two of her daughters died of starvation. She then had 12 of her teeth pulled out and gave the gold fillings to pay for bread for the last child. 'But she was too weak. She died holding the loaf in her arms.'"

Christo Bogaitziev, Bulgarian Aged 26, Seven Years in Camps, Lavrion Refugee Camp, Greece, pen ink and pencil, 15 x 11 inches, Punch, 30 December, 1959: "Christo Bogaitziev escaped from Bulgaria to Greece when he was 19. He is now 26. He has twice been accepted for emigration overseas, but both times excitement affected his reason, and so he lost his visa. Although he has been stable for more than a year, he no longer hopes for a third chance and would be content to be allowed to work. In his seven years of waiting he taught himself Italian, Russian, French, Greek, and English. Now he wants only a room of his own, books to read, and a positive future. 'What I can't endure is this in-between state'."

Wash House, Camp Lexenfeldstrasse, Salzburg, pen ink and monochrome watercolour on tinted paper, 15.5 x 21.5", Refugees 1960: "a washroom in camp Lexenfeldstrasse, Salzburg is typical of those in every official refugee camp. At the end of a long dismal corridor and unpainted gloomy room with basins of either stone or galvanised metal. It was constantly in use, for washing or ironing seemed almost the only occupation for women refugees. Although this was, in a sense, the only communal room in the camp, there was very little conversation or friendliness between the women who used it. They had lived together so long, and so little had happened to them, that there was nothing left to say. They had no homes to be proud of, no work to grumble about, and no news to engage."

the 1960s:

Nikita Khruschev, pen ink and watercolour, 15.75 by 12", Holiday, February, 1961

Bedtime Reading, pen and ink, 11 by 15.5", Which Way Did he Go?,Perpetua, 1961

C Northcote Parkinson, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 15.5 x 13", Punch, 29 August, 1962

Benjamin Britten, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 14 x 13", Punch, 23 May, 1962

Ivy Compton-Burnett, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 15.75 x 14.5", Punch, 7 March, 1962

Iris Murdoch, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 16 x 16", Punch, 21 March, 1962

Alfred Hitchcock, pen ink and monochrome watercolour, 15.5 x 13", Punch, 6 June, 1962

the 1970s and 1980s, (a period that seems to have included the advent of the famous Searle cats):

Family Photograph, pen ink, pencil and watercolour, 8 x 5.5", 1982

Crackers, watercolour, pen ink and crayon, 12 x 9.25", Design for Christmas card for Camden Graphics, London, 1982

A Bigger Slash, Homage to David Hockney, lithograph with crayon and watercolour, 25.5 x 20", 1984

Whither the Pound?, pen ink, pencil and monochrome watercolour, 16.5 x 12", 1983

A Clash of Symbols, pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour, 14.5 x 17.5", drawn for Anglo-American company report, 1987

Cutting Costs, pen and ink, 18 x 12.5"

The Babysitter, lithograph with pencil, watercolour and coloured chalks, 20 x 26", 1976

Breakfast TV, pen ink and watercolour with crayon, 14 x 12", TV Guide, 1983

Nice Set, but one Volume Missing, pen ink and watercolour, 12.5 x 10", drawn for Slightly Foxed

Outwardly Cracking, pen ink, watercolour and crayon, 12 x 9", Slightly Foxed

Savile Row in All its Glory, pen ink and watercolour, 19.25 x 16", Town and Country, April, 1989

Tea Shoppe, pen ink and watercolour with crayon, 15 x 15.5", Conde Nast Travel Magazine, April, 1990, 'London', by David Mamet

Numerous Headpieces, pen ink and watercolour with crayon, 12.5 x 9", Slightly Foxed

Knit to a Harmonious Whole, pen ink and watercolour, 12.75 x 9", The Illustrated Winespeak, Souvenier Press, 1983

Film Publicity - Welcome to a Film Person, pen ink and watercolour with crayon, 14 x 12.25", TV Guide, 1984

The Briefing, pen and ink with monochrome watercolour, 12 x 11.5"

arriving at last at the 1990s and then the new century:

Synchronised Ratting, pen ink, watercolour and coloured crayon, 11.25 x 18.75", Delta Sky Inflight Magazine, 1996

The Rendezvous, watercolour, pen ink and crayon, 17.5 x 12", 1990

Christmas Presents, pen ink, watercolour and crayon, 18.75" x 14.25", Design for a Christmas card for Married Women magazine, 1993

Brief Encounters: Gertrude Stein Meets Spectre de la Rose Rose Rose, pen and ink, 13 x 11.75", New Yorker, 1990

Girl Power!, pen and ink, 15.5 x 13", International Herald Tribune, 16 March, 1996

Gettin' the Bird, pen ink and watercolour, 14 x 10", 1991

Cloning, pen and ink, 12 x 19", New York Times, 4 February, 1994

Fast Food, pen and ink, 13.75 x 15", International Herald Tribune, 14 October, 1995

Waiting for Walkies, pen and ink and watercolour, 12.25 x 18", International Herald Tribune, 13 January, 2001

Alice in No-Man's Land, pen ink and crayon, 12.5 x 16.75", 1990

Butler School, pen ink, watercolour and coloured crayon, 19 x 16", Forbes FYI Magazine, November , 1992

I am very sad that Searle has gone, but I will always be grateful he has left Nigel Molesworth behind to cheer us up forever. If the chips were down and all other literature had to go on the bonfire, I'm afraid I would, with regret but no real hesitation, pass over many, many great books, including Middlemarch, much as I hugely love it, and even the entire works of Dickens, in order to retain The Compleet Molesworth, which contains too many wonderful moments of satire and other more gentle forms of humour - and too perfect an understanding of humanity in all its absurdity - to be given up.

To conclude, I can only borrow the words of Twitter member @Skool_Dog, who tweeted thus this morning, adapting the immortal words of Auden into the even more immortal language of Geoffrey Willans:

"Stop ol the cloks, cut off the telefoan / Privent the DOGG from barkin with a joosy BOAN" (peotry) RIP Mr SERL"

Another Sentimental Bloke

2012-01-03T07:57:00.000+11:00

As well as the famous Sentimental Bloke, creation of CJ Dennis, (also author of the wonderful Book for Kids), there are many other, less celebrated, but equally sentimental, blokes scattered across our nation.

In our household, we have one whose sentimentality applies particularly to the Austro-Hungarian empire during the half century leading up to the First World War. In that period, he believes, the Austro-Hungarian empire was, despite its faults, a remarkably successful multi-national state - and also very successful in spreading civilisation, (opera houses, theatres, cafes, fine municipal buildings), to all the exotic corners of its territories.

This, I imagine is why, when it was his turn to set up our two cribs this Christmas, (which, as I mentioned the year before last come respectively from Austria:

and from Hungary):

he decided not to separate them, but to put them all together in a reenactment of the Austro-Hungarian empire's glory days:

Perhaps he was thinking of Otto von Hapsburg and his reply, when asked whether he'd watched the Austria-Hungary football match (and, on that note, thank you Australian Broadcasting Corporation for forgetting in your round-up of deaths in 2011 not just Hapsburg but, even more shockingly, Vaclav Havel - unlike Amy Winehouse, who did get a mention, they weren't what you regard as celebrities, I suppose).

Words and Phrases that Annoy Don Watson

2012-01-02T07:52:00.000+11:00

I haven't been posting about the words and phrases that annoy me lately, even though 'skillset' has been slowly driving me up the wall. Instead, I've been reading a book called Bendable Learnings in which Don Watson, formerly Paul Keating's speechwriter, lays out in masterly detail just how clogged with jargon and verbal piffle public life has become. Here are some examples from the chapter on education:

Watson has also just written an excellent article in The Monthly on the damage this kind of language is doing to education in this country. Read it and weep.

The Year of Living Unneurotically

2012-01-01T12:58:00.000+11:00

'Begin as you mean to go on,' the head of the Russian department told us, on the first day of our three-year university course. I assumed he meant by this that we should all work frantically, applying ourselves feverishly from the first moment and continuing in that vein for the entire degree. I decided, based on his advice, that I should learn a page of the dictionary daily and then fill every other waking minute with grammar exercises and wild efforts to read everything ever written in Russian. Needless to say after a matter of weeks - oh, all right, days (okay, a day) - my admirable plans collapsed.

What he actually meant, I now suspect, was 'Go steadily.' I suppose I might have been a reasonably good student, had I understood this sooner. Instead of beginning each year with mad intensity and then collapsing into exhausted torpor until a few days before the panic of the final exams, I might have made gradual, incremental progress, moving imperceptibly forward in the pursuit of knowledge, day-by-day. But I was in the grip of a dream of self-improvement - a dream that contained the idea that only by giving oneself a pretty tough time could one achieve anything good.

The concept of self improvement is still very much with us, even if its form is not always punishingly severe. After all, it is chiefly by stimulating the desire for self improvement that advertising has its effect. The parade of perfect families we see in the ad breaks on television - breakfasting in pristine, gleaming kitchens, strolling along empty beaches in honey-coloured evening light et cetera - is designed to make us feel inadequate, while offering us the opportunity to buy our way to redemption.

While in actual fact everyone in my family looks perfectly attractive, (even if, these days, when I glimpse myself in the bathroom mirror, I can't help recalling Paddington Bear's thoughts, when confronting a failed attempt at DIY*: "there was still a nasty sag in the middle, and even with the curtains drawn and the light out it was obvious something was wrong"), somehow after seeing the family that has Coco Pops or Nutrigrain or whatever it is for breakfast, it is easy to believe that we aren't quite making the grade. My hair doesn't swing like the mum's in that house, my husband's shirt doesn't gleam quite so dazzlingly, my children aren't as neat and easygoing. But I can make myself better. I can purchase my way into this world of youth, good looks and eternally spotless work surfaces. All I need is a packet of Special K (or was it Weetabix?)

For obvious reasons, new beginnings are often triggers for the self-improvement impulse - a fresh start, a clean slate, a new dawn, et cetera. Of these, none is better than the initial day of a new calendar, the first day of January, today, aka New Year's Day. This is the day people resolve to stop drinking or smoking or being mean to the hamster, to start listening to their spouses, to bicycle to work. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, this is also the day I look back on regretfully, realising in late November that it is too late to fulfil my promise to read Finnegan's Wake or relearn latin or get up each morning to exercise at five a.m.

Which is why today I've decided to take my Russian professor's advice in the way I believe it was meant to be taken. I'm not going to make some extreme, unkeepable vow. I'm not going to resolve to be tidier, when I know I will never be tidy. I'm not going to resolve to be less clumsy, particularly as the first thing I did this morning was break a wineglass, (by mistake, you understand - and no, I wasn't lying in bed, feeling about on the floor beneath, in the hope of finding the dregs of last night's revelries; I was tidying the kitchen at the time). I'm not going to resolve to remember to take notice of where I put my keys down, so that I don't waste half the year looking for them. Instead, I'm going to resolve to accept that I do all these things, that I am untidy, clumsy and forgetful. My new year's resolution is to stop worrying that I am me.

* Paddington Helps Out, published by Collins, 2nd edition, February 1963, page 51

Progress Visualised

2011-12-31T13:00:00.000+11:00

After looking at yesterday's post, my brother reminded me of Osbert Lancaster and the town he invented called Drayneflete. Lancaster made detailed drawings of this imaginary place, chronicling how it changed through the ages:

As well as illustrating his own fictional town, Lancaster also made drawings showing what he thought might have become of other artists' fictional places:

These pictures all come from a catalogue by John Murray, produced to coincide with an exhibition of Osbert Lancaster's work a year or two ago. It is a lovely book and well worth searching out on Abebooks.

Progress

2011-12-30T10:10:00.000+11:00

"You can't stand in the way of progress". This, I suspect, was the guiding principle of town planners all over the world in my youth. It was their justification for sweeping away many fine old buildings. On the whole, I think that they were wrong.

This is partly because I believe that buildings that were put together largely by craftsmen, rather than machines, provided greater satisfaction to their makers and somehow pass on the pride and pleasure that went into their creation to the people who use them or look at them today. I also think such buildings are the result of a way of life that was more nourishing to the human spirit than are many of the ways of life on offer in our more automated world.

While being freed from the demands of relentless backbreaking work has to be a good thing, being freed from the demands of skilful labour may not be so great. Michael Innes, as I mentioned the other day, described - with great prescience, since he was writing way back in the 1930s - some of the problems that result from suddenly having a lot of time on your hands:

"Appleby drew deep breaths of June air as he went briskly down the drive. The summer was advanced in this southland country; from somewhere came the scent of the first hay and already the oak-leaves were darkening. Over his left shoulder he looked up at Horton Hill. Across the crown there must be some right-of-way, for no attempt had been made to eject the people gathering there. It was quite a crowd now: idlers in the neighbouring towns, reading the stimulating news in their morning paper, had hurried to get out the car and motor over to see what they could. And soon there would be similar arrivals from London; people 'running down for the day'. And portents these, thought Appleby, of a society running down in another sense: clogged by its own mass-production of individuals who, let loose from a day's or a lifetime's specialized routine, will neither think nor read nor practise any craft, but only gape."

On the other hand, I have gradually learned to admire, in lieu of minute craftsmanship, the astonishing skill that must be needed to organise an airport, (I may be alone in this, but I'm rather fond of airports), and, indeed, that must be needed to design the engine of an aeroplane. Reading Clive James's new collection of essays, taken from the BBC radio programme Point of View, I realise he would understand this.

In one of the essays in the book, he talks about his longstanding admiration for the beauty of technology. He suggests that we should not object to all modern architecture but instead should reject "Le Corbusier's horrible plans for a modernized Paris", while recognising more worthy designs.

James though is commenting on the battle between those in society who favour the built world and all the advances that go with it and see "planes, trains and automobiles" as "human creations ... as interesting as poems, paintings and pieces of music" and the Rousseauesque others, who "hanker... for a return to nature".

My concern is slightly different. I am not against comfort; I don't want to live in a mud hut with no running water. All the same, I want to be certain what exactly 'progress' brings. Aside from the puzzle of why it makes sense to liberate people so that they have nothing to do, when that only makes them feel worthless (oh yes, I forgot, it saves their employers money), what I am very unsure about is whether replacing something beautifully-made is ever a good idea.

Technological advance may be useful, but is it better? Is there really any justification for replacing a handbuilt structure that exhibits everywhere the signs of individual craftsmanship with a piece of sturdy but impersonal engineering, whose concrete, steel, glass et cetera components are produced in a factory and slotted together without the need for really fine artisanship - particularly as the change in method is largely the product of economic imperative rather than any aesthetic belief, (whatever supporters of Modernism may say, the fact that their mad theories also led to lower costs was of the greatest assistance in their achieving success)? I recognise that the skills of the design engineer are enormous and extraordinary but I feel somehow that, with the disappearance of much handcrafting in the making of buildings, we have lost more than we realise.

As a result of my conflicting feelings about these things, I find myself, whenever I go to the State Library of New South Wales and look at the two panoramic photographs they have on display, showing central Sydney in 1904 and then again a couple of years ago, unable to decide what I think about the changes that have taken place in the interval between the two:

I usually tell myself that the city would look odd and false if the streetscapes had stayed as they were. Then I think of Vienna and Budapest, where very little has been altered since the nineteenth century. I don't feel the lack of shiny skyscrapers there. However, the surviving buildings in those cities do tend to be of a grander scale than those in the early Sydney picture, so perhaps scale is the important factor here. Three-storey terraces in the centre of a city, however pretty, might look silly in the modern age. Perhaps, if they had all been preserved, central Sydney would have the air of an odd little toy town. On the other hand, the streets in the area called The Rocks, where the buildings have been allowed to remain standing, is absolutely lovely and full of real character.

The CBD, with its soaring glass and steel constructions is impressive, but it could be in Canada as easily as Australia. The buildings that confront people as their ferries berth at Circular Quay create no dialogue between us and the individuals who put them up. They bear no trace of a particular human being's patient skill and craftsmanship. Their scale is so inhuman and their style so impersonal that it would be easy to believe they were made without the aid of any human hand at all. Having been constructed using methods that were automated rather than individual, their character seems largely to be missing. Their facades are smooth and featureless. They exude no sense of personality. They lack warmth. They are not unique. They are simply the products of machines.

Strains of Christmas

2011-12-29T08:22:00.001+11:00

At the local shop yesterday, I was on my knees, hunting on a low shelf for some soft food for the stray cat we look after, (she recently seems to have mislaid all her front teeth in some late night feline punch up - or perhaps just through old age).

Over my head, two women discussed their Christmas.

'We had mum to stay,' said the first one, 'it was hard going.' 'Was she here long?', asked the other. 'A week and a half. She was very demanding.'

Neither of them spoke for a moment and then the first one began again. 'I love my mother,' she said, 'but I don't like her. That's what I realised while she was here.' 'Oh,' said the second one, 'I feel the reverse about mine.'

It All Depends Where

2011-12-28T09:54:00.000+11:00

On my walk each morning, I have to climb a set of steps - 39 of them, incidentally, such an odd number that I am convinced the designer was a fan of John Buchan, although others in my family say it's pure coincidence:

Although I am not keen on step climbing, (unlike the sweaty figures who run up and down these four times, while I am plodding up them only once), this particular staircase provokes not only dread but joy in me.

My reaction would be different if the staircase was positioned right at the start of my journey. In fact, if it were there, it might serve as a disincentive, looming large in my mind as I lay in bed trying to persuade myself to get up and go out. Similarly, if it were plonked right in the middle of the climb, I might hate it bitterly, regarding it as the worst bit of the whole enterprise.

As it is, because it is positioned at the very end of my walk, while it still represents a steep upward slog, it also signals that the pain is almost over. Therefore, although I still don't exactly leap for joy when I see the thing rising up before me, I do feel happy, because it means I'm almost at the end.

What's in a Name

2011-12-27T12:49:00.000+11:00

Ages ago, I mentioned a poem by AD Hope that featured Australian place names. Now I've discovered another, on a similar theme, this time by John Manifold:

The Map

Devil take our city-minded, imitative gran'dads who
Saddled us with Warwick, Ipswich, Bloomsbury, (near Yalbaroo),
Surbiton on Belyando - names like these will never do!

Mount Mistake, The Risk, The Blunder, Wilson's Downfall make a change,
But the names I like are those that show a sense of somewhere strange -
One Tree Hill and Wild Horse Mountain, Razorback and Nightcap Range -

And at sundown, when the hills are monstrous and the bunyip stirs,
I am pretty sure the native names are what the land prefers:
Murderer's Flat was our invention, but Eurunderee was hers.

Jundah, Thunda, Nocatunga, Thargomindah, Gunnewin,
Tarrewinnabar, Canungra, Tabragalba, Coolwinpin,
Ulandilla by the Maranoa where the songs begin.

Binna Burra, Bindebango, Mullumbimby - these belong! -
Bunya, Quinalow, Nanango, Tallebudgera, Durong
Xylophones among the timber,
Bellbirds in the border mountains,
Wallangarra, Woodenbong.

Lessons of Christmas

2011-12-26T12:00:00.000+11:00

1. Always tip well in restaurants - cooking is very hard work.

2. Nigella Lawson, annoying though some people find her, (not me - I love her), has made at least one major contribution to modern life - namely, recommending that you should use foil baking trays, so that you can throw them away instead of having to wash them all up.

3. Cooking is exhausting - oh, did I mention that already? Well, it's worth mentioning again. It strikes me as a form of brinksmanship, if that's the right word - to be fresh and delicious and hot and so forth, most food has to be prepared right at the last minute, leaving no room for mistakes or complete stuff ups - which reminds me, obliquely, of the story my friend's aunt, a Sydney girl who married a New South Wales farmer, used to tell:

In her effete urban manner, she'd prepared for the first Sunday lunch after their marriage - the first she'd prepared for her country relations - some kind of light first course, (cold consomme, possibly), and then a roast chicken, plus salad and a scattering of roast potatoes and pumpkin. She'd planned to offer fresh fruit after that, but, as the meal proceeded, it became clear to her that she hadn't cooked nearly enough meat or roast vegetables and that, even if she had, this particular mob regarded a hearty pudding as the only fitting end to such an occasion - or indeed to any meal.

She wanted to make a good impression, but she had no pudding - what was she to do? Finally, she came up with a plan that, while not actually providing a pudding, would go a long way to saving her reputation as someone who knows how to plan - if not execute - a decent feed.

Jumping up from the table, she hurried into the kitchen, turned on the gas flame and poured sugar over it. As the smell of burning sugar began to spread through the air, she dashed back to the dining room, tea towel in hand. 'I'm terribly sorry,' she cried, 'I completely forgot to keep an eye on the pudding - it's burnt to a cinder.' While they all went away a bit hungry, at least they didn't go away believing her to be a woman who didn't understand the importance of pudding.

4. Once a year is often enough for Christmas and, having done it and got it out of the way for this year, I can only quote TS Eliot's typist (while acknowledging that she was referring to an utterly different circumstance):

'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'

Gone Cooking

2011-12-24T07:27:00.000+11:00

This year, more than most, the lead up to Christmas has been about the hard scrabble of making ends meet and keeping the wolf from the door:

(And, among the many questions raised by the new economic situation is this: just how many foam reindeer antlers can one city actually absorb?):

I hope though that, when the big day arrives at last, it will be okay to relax and forget the troubles of the world for a few hours, to copy these boys and go for a surf, (and possibly then have a beer against a background of tinsel - that would be a perfect Australian Christmas, surely):

Whoever reads this, wherever you are, I wish you a very happy Christmas. I will be attempting to cook lunch for 21 brave people. Unusually, (five years ago, in the midst of drought, I would never have predicted this), my biggest concern - apart from justifiable doubts about my competence in the kitchen - is the possibility it may rain.

Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year.

It's in the Name

2011-12-23T06:56:00.000+11:00

One of the papers - possibly the Australian - has a column where they interview a new person each week. The people they interview are selected on the grounds that they have an unusual job. The other day the turn came for a stamp designer for Australia Post.

She told the paper that she was busy producing 'three secular Christmas stamps'. There was a picture of them. They showed a wrapped present, a Christmas tree, (looking a lot classier than any we've ever managed in this household), and some kind of bauble for hanging on a tree.

The designer explained, 'We have to be mindful that not everybody will like the one definition of Christmas.'

So, although we are all being given a holiday as a result of a religious festival, we should avoid mentioning the religious element, it seems.

I don't think you have to be a wild-eyed Bible-basher to object to this. While I would never argue that anyone should have to go to church or pray or pretend they believe in Christianity, I think it is basic good manners to acknowledge the underlying reason that we are celebrating Christmas. We may well have got the date wrong, but everything we are doing - getting time off, giving presents, putting up trees - is done as a way of celebrating the birth of Christ. That's why it's called Christmas - the clue is there, in the first syllable of the holiday's name.

So who exactly does Australia Post think will not like this definition of Christmas. Who do they imagine is going to storm out of the post office, when offered stamps showing a manger and three wise men? If they are worried about giving offence to people of other faiths, I think this letter demonstrates that that is a silly and pointless effort:

More Bush

2011-12-22T11:31:00.000+11:00

When we were in Sydney the other day we took a walk from Manly Beach to the North Head. As we plodded along, I found myself thinking about the late Alan Clark and his highly successful diaries.

This might seem surprising, since Alan Clark was a rather sleazy old snob whose private jottings are principally of use in revealing to any outsider the impossibility of ever being accepted by the upper middle classes in England. Clark's comments on the events of his life and the people he meets are infused with an understanding of - and devotion to - an unspoken and exclusive code that dictates what is correct behaviour in every area of human activity.

The best illustration of the kind of thing I mean is Clark's dismissal of Heseltine as a man who bought his own furniture, (rather than inheriting it, presumably). While I don't think I could ever find it in my heart to feel sorry for Heseltine about anything, I do think being criticised for one's choice of parents is a bit unkind.

Anyway, the reason Alan Clark and his diaries came to mind was that he also noted, disparagingly, of someone or other, (possibly Heseltine again, come to think of it), that, when he visited them, they had no flowers in the house. Looking around at the bush we were passing through, I thought how hard it would be to please Alan Clark in this regard, if he were visiting you in Australia.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are plenty of flowers and pretty things in our landscape, but they do not leap out at you - nor (apart from the good old wattle, which, as we all know has basically been put on earth to be shoved into a bottle) would they be easy to gather into a bunch and use to decorate your house.

To demonstrate what I mean, here are some of the blooms I spotted on our route. Some might be chivvied into a tiny posy, but none, I think, would be effective as a genuine, Clark-pleasing 'floral display':

A Small Hiccup

2011-12-21T06:25:00.000+11:00

Having just read the response to the death of Vaclav Havel in the Guardian's Comment is Free section, I'm at a loss to know what to think. The paper itself does often have good and interesting reviews on its arts pages, but the fact that it even considered publishing this article on Havel - let alone actually accepted it - suggests that the the editorial staff believe that the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe was just a small hiccup in the advance of worldwide socialism, a little glitch in the march to victory for the one true faith. Consider this excerpt:

"No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.

Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first."

That leaves me gasping. I wonder if the person who wrote it (who lists Pravda as one of his former employers, for goodness sake) has ever read with any concentration any of the great essays by Havel. One thing I can be almost certain of - he must never have visited any of the countries of the former Soviet bloc, while the Cold War was going on, let alone had any relatives who had to survive in those places.

Three Guesses

2011-12-20T07:04:00.002+11:00

When I was in Budapest, I saw some interesting signs, including one or two that struck me as surprisingly explicit. I am more used to the discretion of Canberra's designers. I wonder if anyone who does not live in Canberra can guess what these two are showing the way to:

(A clue - Alexander Maconochie has nothing to do with increasing the popularity of Scottish dancing).

The Annual Dilemma

2011-12-18T13:46:00.002+11:00

It's that time of year when the newspapers fill their pages with lists of perfect Christmas presents for family and friends. My husband, for instance, has been convinced by the Sydney Morning Herald that the only thing guaranteed to make me happy on 25th December is a 'gift-wrapped' tube of 'self-tan lotion'. I suppose that at least it's a cheaper option than this:

Four hundred and ten Australian dollars! And for something that, so far as I can see, has absolutely no function! Am I out of touch or is that completely outrageous?

Neither of these possibilities - nor any of the others I've come across in the weekend broadsheets - appeals to me at all. Which is why I decided to make my own list, which did start off longer, but has unfortunately gone missing, so that now I can only present a list consisting of the two things I still remember from it. If I ever come across the scrap of paper on which all my other brilliant ideas were scribbled, I shall add them to this post.

In the meantime here are the items that I think will bring happiness to people if you buy them as presents. As further recommendation, I should point out that neither of them costs $410, which has to be a positive. The fact that both of them are books will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. Here they are:

1) For novel readers, I would buy The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. None of Eugenides's books has ever appealed to me before, but this story about three young university graduates in the 1980s is really enjoyable, even though I think Madeleine, the character Eugenides describes as the heroine of the book, is by far the least well-developed or interesting of the three protagonists and even though his proposition - that the marriage plot, (exemplified presumably by Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice), is, (since i. women attained equality - if indeed we have - and ii. divorce became easy), a form that is dead - is patently ludicrous. What is Bridget Jones's Diary, for instance, if it isn't a classic example of a marriage plot?

Nevertheless, the book is written beautifully, pulling you into a wholly believable universe, creating, through the character of Leonard, a really moving portrait of a brilliant, neglected, mentally fragile young man, raising, through the character of Mitchell, some deeply unfashionable but, to me, fascinating questions about religion and the best way to live, and providing a hilarious and depressing account of the insidious spread of the doctrine of Derrida et al through the academic world.

While none of this might sound, on the face of it, particularly entertaining, the book is very entertaining - partly because the marriage plot is still a very entertaining form. Above all, what made the novel so appealing, for me, is that it achieves that all too rare feat of managing to be simultaneously thought provoking and ultimately serious, while being enjoyable - not merely easy to read but hard to put down.

2) For poetry lovers, provided they are fit and healthy, (the book is extremely large and heavy), you cannot go past Australian Poetry since 1788, edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray. There are so many great poems in this volume that it will keep its lucky owner happy for years - even decades. Just as an example, opening it at random, I find this lovely one, by Jamie Grant: depending on your precise menu, it may serve as an ideal companion to anyone cooking Christmas lunch:

Social Behaviour of Minted Peas

Contradicting a proverb, the pot
I am watching boils, and resembles
the pool beneath a waterfall.
Then I pour in the frozen peas
an avalanche of green stones, and at
that the pan no longer trembles.
For a while the peas lie as still
as the stony floor of the sea,
or else like a mountain of skulls
in South East Asia; they wait as
rigidly as an audience
with numbered seats, afraid to move.
Then one pea, on an odd impulse,
breaks away, and, with a skater's
motion from side to side, ascends
to ride the surface far above
the others, a non-conformist
with a notion all its own.
Another, hesitant at first, glides
up to join it, and others still,
one at a time, cannot resist
the temptation to follow on,
behind the first one who derides
the common and conventional.
And then it is clear there's a trend,
and all those peas who had hung back
now clamour to be allowed in.
Anxiously they jostle and sprint,
needing to belong in the end
among the upward-mobile pack,
elbowing each other, crowding
up to the air which smells of mint.

The Wisdom of the Helpdesk

2011-12-16T13:43:00.000+11:00

Our telephone hasn't been working properly. As I can't make outgoing calls on it and do not want to waste time and money using my mobile telephone to ring, I sent the internet company that provides the telephone an email, explaining what the problem was. They replied to me today, suggesting I call them. Their analysis of the situation was as follows:

"With this issue, the problem could lie somewhere."

You can't argue with that, I suppose. It was only wild optimism that led me to expect anything more.

Unusual Occupations

2011-12-15T15:58:00.003+11:00

I've been reading Dubliners and, among all the other peculiar aspects of the stories, one I hadn't noticed before is Joyce's fondness for giving his characters unusual occupations. This intrigued me because, ever since my first child was born and the woman I shared a ward with in the hospital told me confidentially that, although her husband was doing carpetlaying at the time, his dream was, as she put it, 'to break into the lawnmowing world', I've been interested in alternatives to the unexciting office jobs that until then had framed the horizons of my employment ambitions.

Of course, in that case, it was the phrasing, rather than the occupation itself, that lent an aura of glamour to the way of life that was being aspired to. In the same way, when Joyce mentions that a character is 'in the church decorating business', I don't actually immediately think, 'Ooh that's what I want to do' (apart from anything else, I am still harbouring residual gargoyling aspirations) . What I do think is, 'Ooh, I suppose that must be an actual thing - I'd never really thought about it before, but I guess someone does have to do that.'

Then, in the story called The Sisters, Joyce includes this detail: '...a notice used to hang in the window, saying: "Umbrellas Re-covered"'. Again, here is a way of earning money that is new to me. Mind you, while I assume church decorators are still needed, I suspect umbrella recoverers are all but vanished - and, in fact, Joyce was probably implying that they weren't exactly thriving even when he was writing, before the advent of two bob umbrellas, or of umbrellas given away with evening papers (and, of course, any occupation involving evening papers or newspapers of any kind - but this sentence is getting much too long.)

Anyway, from now on I'm going to collect odd occupations that crop up in fiction, in the hope that one day I'll have a long list that I can put on this blog. That's one of the problems with blogging (which is, when you come to think of it, among the very oddest of all odd occupations [and unpaid, to boot]) - you have to keep stoking the thing, feeding it more and more delicious and tantalising bits and pieces. I didn't realise that when I started. At the time, I challenged myself to do it for a year. Then I read about Mark Watson and his vow to blog every day for a decade. After that I thought I'd maybe set the bar too low. It's a pointless activity, of course, but I'm hoping (as I suspect Mark Watson may also be) that in some obscure way it's good for my soul.

Mind you, ten years? And every day? I can only say I take my hat off to young Watson. What a plucky lad.

Ely Loons

2011-12-14T16:10:00.002+11:00

When I was very young, we spent a particularly happy summer in a cottage in Suffolk. I don't know if that part of England is generally sunny but, at least in my memory, for the weeks we were there it seemed to be always bright and warm. It also seemed to be wonderfully empty, its flat golden landscape quite undisturbed by traffic, unless you counted the Massey-Ferguson combine harvesters that moved steadily across the fields.

I divided most of my time between a) bicycling to the local village shop to buy boiled sweets and toffees, b) lying on my bed and reading while sucking the boiled sweets and toffees and c) developing a peculiarly intense relationship with the cottageowners' hamster, until he escaped my over-zealous attentions by disappearing down a burrow in the garden, (and was replaced by another rather more likeable and therefore less interesting specimen, bought from a stout woman with bad teeth who sold all kinds of vermin from a stall in Ipswich market).

There is no such thing as paradise on earth, of course, and therefore I was dragged away from sweets, books and furry animals from time to time, in order to be taken on 'excursions'. One of these was to Ely Cathedral.

I remember the place as very beautiful. Strangely, I don't any more. Nothing has actually changed in the intervening years, except that the Church of England has become revoltingly rapacious. Therefore, instead of entering the cathedral and being struck by the loveliness of the building's interior, you walk in and find yourself face-to-face with a large wall-mounted flat screen TV.

On the television, the absurdly large prices the church now charges visitors who want to enter the cathedral are displayed, together with information about the gift shop (which has been slotted into a space that I suspect was once a pretty chapel for private prayer). Somehow, this ugliness took the gloss of Ely's flying buttresses when I visited a couple of months ago, even though they're really just as lovely as they ever were.

And, in fact, even the tackiness of the interior redesign couldn't dim my enthusiasm for one aspect of Ely Cathedral - the gargoyles. They were the first gargoyles I'd ever noticed, and I remember thinking as I gazed up at them, 'Ah, at last I understand what I was put on earth for - to be a gargoyle-maker'. Sadly, it didn't take long to discover that I'd been born far too late. Never mind - sometimes dreams are better than reality: I'd probably never have been able to match the sheer character of some of the works that adorn Ely now:

Mine Wouldn't Dare

2011-12-13T09:13:00.002+11:00

Every morning when we lived in Vienna, I would take my younger daughter to school on the bus. And for many months, when we got off the bus we would be confronted by a huge campaign billboard on behalf of the Freedom Party, which at the time was run by Mr Jörg Haider (who has since come to a sticky end.)

The poster on the billboard featured an enormous picture of Mr Haider, surrounded by adoring peasant types. Their ruddy, open faces were all turned toward him, but he looked beyond them, staring out instead at passers-by, displaying his dazzling white teeth in an alarming grin.

The slogan beneath the picture of Mr Haider read, simply, 'He says what you only think.'

If Mr Haider was the brave articulator of the peasants' most secret thoughts, then I suspect Lesley Beckhouse's daring husband in Queanbeyan performs a similar function for my husband - and perhaps for many other husbands around the world:

Make Copies

2011-12-12T09:16:00.001+11:00

In an article by Peter Robb I read the other day there was a reference to a friend of his called Paul Hoffmann, who held the chair of German at Cambridge University. Robb mentioned that Hoffmann gained a doctorate from the University of Vienna although his 'original doctoral thesis for Vienna, having been sunk at sea on its way to New Zealand in 1940, he'd written another on a different subject after the war.'

When I read this, I'd just watched the first episode of Simon Russell Beale's television series on the development of the symphony. In it, he mentions that Haydn lost a symphony in a similar kind of accident to Hoffman's, although the ship was travelling different seas. According to Russell Beale, Haydn also sat down and wrote a completely new piece of work to replace the missing one. This started me wondering whether this losing and then just whipping up a quite new work is a more common occurrence than I'd realised.

I know TE Lawrence lost his manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom by leaving it behind on a railway station platform or, in the manner of modern-day British intelligence officers, in a train compartment - I don't remember which - but, as I understand it, Lawrence merely set about rewriting the original text, so his experience was a) less dramatic than loss at sea, as it left open the possibility that the original manuscript might eventually be returned intact and b) less extraordinary than the others, since they cheerily started all over again, creating something entirely new, whereas he just tried to remember what he'd written the first time.

Patrick Leigh Fermor had his notebook stolen in Vienna and left one behind at someone's house. While the one he left behind eventually found its way back to him, I still wonder what became of the one that was stolen. Is it possible it still exists, hidden away in someone's attic?

Are there other famous examples of similarly miserable losses - or, more sadly, are there many other unknown instances, which have put paid to potentially great artists' careers? Have countless gifted people, having poured their souls into great works they have lost subsequently, given up forever in complete despair?

There may well be more, for already, after only half a minute's thought, I've remembered another - I'm not sure of the details but didn't Thomas Carlyle's maid use a huge book of his, the product of years of labour, to light the sitting-room fire one afternoon? I have an idea that that happened and that, like Lawrence, Carlyle rewrote the thing, which also seems sad in the context of today, since so few people read anything he wrote anymore.

Beautiful Sydney

2011-12-11T11:19:00.001+11:00

My Australian family come from Victoria and therefore I was brought up to believe that Sydney was a place not to be admired. Since I've got to know Sydney for myself, I've been forced to recognise that this attitude must in large part have been fuelled by jealousy.

There is so much to love about Sydney. To start with, there is its old domestic architecture:

(all these just within one block in Newtown).

Then there are the countless little reminders of forgotten histories, like this one commemorating a 'prince of charity organisers':

The harbour, of course, is magnificent and what better form of transport can there be than the ferries, named after the ships of the First Fleet (and, when those ran out, the wives of the governors of New South Wales)?

Perhaps my favourite is the Manly Ferry whose original slogan - 'Five miles from Sydney and 1,000 miles from care' - is a rare example of truth in advertising. Half an hour from the city you step off into another, calmer world::

Mysteries of the Post Communist World

2011-12-08T06:45:00.001+11:00

Wherever you walk in the cities of post-Communist Europe, you pass buildings like these, where great chunks of the stucco have fallen off the facades:

Yet you never see any of it falling. You never come round the corner to find chunks of stone hurtling toward unwitting pedestrians. You never discover flattened citizens lying under lumps of carved ornamentation that have crashed down onto the pavement. Is this just luck or is the stuff disappearing invisibly, draining away somehow, like sand?

Why Do We Do It

2011-12-07T08:15:00.003+11:00

I took the train from Vienna to Budapest last month and, as generally seems to happen when I take that train by myself, I met an extraordinary person. This time it was a 21-year-old girl from Koblenz in Germany who was travelling back to Csikszereda in Romania (also knowns as Miercurea-Ciuc and, sometimes - or formerly - as Seklerburg). She was spending a year there, taking care of disabled people. She'd already spent six months doing this but had had to return to Germany because of the death of her grandmother - her journey, sitting up in what was, I'm sorry to say, a rather rackety Romanian compartment, had already taken nine hours when I got on at Vienna at about seven thirty in the evening and was going to continue until afternoon tea time the following day. We talked until I had to leave her at Budapest and, when she asked me for my email address, I gave it to her with pleasure. I have rarely met anyone so young who was so unselfconsciously good and thoughtful - and wise.

Anyway, the other day she sent me an email which had attached to it a little report she'd written about her time thus far in the part of Romania where she lives. I showed it to my husband and, in his usual alert way, he said, after reading it, 'How odd it is that non-English speakers so rarely change their language to fit in with political fashion.' When I asked what he meant, he pointed out that the German word my friend used to refer to her charges, 'behinderte', doesn't really beat about the bush in its meaning. There is no equivalent, as far as I can tell, in German usage, of our new phrase, 'differently abled'.

Then my husband pointed out that non-English speakers also don't change their language when it comes to place names in the way that we so slavishly do whenever political circumstances faintly suggest it*. If you read Le Monde, for example, you will find no references to Beijing. While we retain the word Peking when referring to the delicious duck dish, they retain Pekin in every context.

Why do we English speakers so readily alter our language to suit the demands of others - or to cloak the meaning of what we are expressing, in a way that slightly reminds me of the unpleasant habit of spraying air freshener about in a house? Does it indicate something good about us, or is it a sign that we confuse language with what it stands for?

*In this context, my husband also points out, it was interesting to observe Hillary Clinton on her recent trip to Burma. Presumably not wishing to appear to support the current regime, she avoided 'Myanmar' wherever possible, while also steering clear of the old name, 'Burma', which is considered to exclude other constituent nationalities, in the way 'England' does when referring to the whole of Great Britain. Clinton did this, apparently, by using vague phrases, such as 'your beautiful country' et cetera, wherever possible).

From the Past

2011-12-06T09:24:00.002+11:00

For months now I've been resisting the impulse to give Les Murray another airing, but after coming across this photograph the other day, while looking for something to do with my grandfather's diary, I think I've found the perfect excuse:

It's 1960, just around Christmas, and, okay, that car probably isn't a Rolls Royce. Same diff, though. It still qualifies, I think, as an example of what Murray describes as 'sprawl':

The Quality of Sprawl

Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.

Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
It is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes:
that's idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
Nor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds.

Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised
nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That's Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth.

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official's desk with a chain saw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,
though it's often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
Knowing the man's name this was said to might be sprawl.

Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner's glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl -
except he didn't fire them.

Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don't include it.
Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.

Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours' best bed in spurs and oilskins,
but not having thrown up:
sprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it's Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would thatit were more so.

No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl

Fill in the Dots

2011-12-05T11:58:00.001+11:00

Early each morning, I trudge up the small mountain near my house. I do this partly for the pleasure of reaching the top and stopping, (yes, the old head-banging motive), and partly because I've been brainwashed by the health fanatics whose mission in life is to plague us with 'information' about 'heart health' and 'aerobic capacity' and so forth and so on.

And, of course, steeped as I am in the self-punitive pleasures of Protestantism, I do not take an MP3 player or any other kind of listening device to ease my journey. Instead, I stagger along, my face growing progressively redder, contenting myself with any crumbs of entertainment that may come my way.

Sadly, there are usually only slim pickings. I mean I suppose it is mildly thrilling the first time you hear desperate wheezing gasps behind you and then see some poor soul, who has made the - in my view foolish - decision to run rather than plod up the slope, lumber past in a blur of sweaty Lycra. It is not long though before even this ultra-modern spectacle loses its power to excite*.

All that is left then is the hope of picking up some snatch of conversation and, on this front, today I was lucky. Two women, on their way down, came hurrying past me, and, as they did so, one said to the other: "We have stacks of money but ..."

It was all I needed. I spent the rest of my walk trying to imagine the end of that sentence. Of course, I admit, it may have been a statement complete in itself; that 'but' may have been an example of one of my favourite usages - the Australian redundant 'but'- but I don't think so (but). It wasn't spoken with quite the right intonation, (but). There was more about to be said, just out of my earshot, I think, (but). These are some of the things I think I may have missed (but):

"...we're still not happy."
"...we took it all from the Monopoly set."
"...we stole it all."
"...we think it will give us germs if we touch it."
"...that's only because we haven't paid a bill since 1965."

Any other suggestions will be accepted with interest. But.

*Oh who am I kidding - it's not exciting, even the first time.

Whoops, I've Done it Again

2011-12-03T14:34:00.003+11:00

Got an attack of pedantry while reading the newspapers, that is.

Styles of European Art

2011-12-02T17:36:00.001+11:00

Children seldom show much compassion for their teachers, possibly because they rarely recognise them as fellow humans at all. This was certainly the case at the boarding school near Sydney that I went to. Mind you, many of the teachers there were, if not subhuman, certainly extremely odd.

There was Miss F-, the French teacher, who smelled of fags and whisky and regularly wore her dresses inside out (and also had a bristly upper lip and an exceptionally lavish but slapdash hand with makeup and usually snored throughout assembly, except on one famous occasion when the headmistress was listing the attractions of a planned fundraising fete – "Tombolas, apple bobbing, bring and buy and raffles", she was telling us, when suddenly Miss F-'s head jerked up and her scarlet slashed mouth opened to utter three words: "and mulled wine").

There was Miss S-C-, the choir mistress, who had spectacles like the bottoms of bottles, a wart on her nose and thick down like a duckling's all over her face, (her claim to fame was that, astonishingly - to me at least - she played the piano with her legs crossed.)

There was Mr B-, the history teacher, who confirmed all our prejudices about the English and the best place to hide money from them, by wearing the same clothes daily, growing progressively smellier as the term dragged slowly on, and who could be made to turn an eternally fascinating and increasingly brilliant beetroot colour, if skilfully needled over the course of a 45-minute lesson.

There was Miss G-, the drama teacher, who covered everything in her living quarters, including the lavatory paper holder, with bright pink frills. We knew this because she regularly washed all the different varieties of frill and hung them out to dry behind our boarding house - that is, until the day the whole lot got eaten by a gastronomically adventurous goat that had escaped from the nunnery down the road.

There was Mr H-, the science teacher, whose outward appearance was almost normal but who nursed a special gory obsession - resulting from an oft-recounted 'personal trauma'. The subject was one he unhesitatingly returned to in conversation and during lessons, no matter what starting point he launched from. I'm not actually going to go into any detail about what it was exactly he could not leave unsaid; it really was fairly sordid and I would not only be taking up his flame and running with it, were I to divulge any more than that, but also betraying other people very close to him. Oddly, my first ever visit to Sydney was made in the company of Mr H-, who took our class on a bus to the blood bank, where, inevitably, we watched him donate a pint or two of his own, (which, equally inevitably, led to him recounting, yet again, the story of - well, never mind, you really don't want to know, and we most definitely didn't either, although, sadly, we were very much a captive audience.) Luckily, the experience did not colour the city for me.

There was, originally in joint pride of place, although latterly solitary - her friend having died shortly after my arrival at the school, (although in no way as a consequence, so far as I know) - the school's co-founder, Miss C-. Reportedly, Miss C- was genuinely amazed when my best friend's mother, glimpsing her in Sydney called out, 'Hello, Miss C-', without a moment's hesitation, even though Miss C- was standing with her back turned toward my friend's mother at the time. 'How on earth did you know it was me dear?' my friend's mother claimed Miss C- demanded in response. She was hard-pressed to think of a reply that would not seem hurtful. After all, it would have been impolite to point out that a diminutive woman with a man's haircut, a hacking jacket, jodhpurs and well-polished riding boots was not a common sight in the ladies' section of Sydney's biggest department store.

Not all the teaching staff were, to put it kindly, eccentric, though. One - or possibly that should read, 'The one' - who wasn't was the art teacher, Mrs Chr-, a soft-spoken American, with shining, long, fair hair. Apparently she had once been married to a hotshot American art historian. At some point in the past though, he'd abandoned her – the rumour was that it had happened in the South Pacific, although, as he was an authority on European art, this didn't make a lot of sense. Anyway, wherever it was and whatever had been the cause of his departure, Mrs Chr- and her two fine-boned, blue-eyed, blond-haired children - who drove her to despair by huddling over her collection of slides of old masters, giggling pruriently whenever they found a nude - had washed up eventually at this snobbish unintellectual New South Wales school for girls.

Our lessons with Mrs Chr- always took place on Thursday afternoons. Sadly for her, our weekly trip to the tuck shop also always took place on Thursdays, immediately before her lessons. It was the highlight of our week - tuck shop that is, not art, (although I suppose you could argue that art benefited a little from tuck shop's reflected glory - we certainly hated it less than many other classes).

Directly from lunch, we would rush to the tuck shop staircase and there we would form a long and impatient queue. Eventually, a wizened member of the kitchen staff, (all of whom, as a result, presumably, of a collective rush of blood to the head, made the extraordinary decision to stage Salad Days one year - the resulting performance was one of the odder theatrical experiences I've ever had), would throw up the shutters that protected the tuck shop and we would instantly surge forward, jostling to hand over our sweaty coins and receive paper bags filled with sugar-based products in return.

Only then, once we had loaded up with our cloying booty, did we start to move in the direction of the Art block. Staggering under the weight of our purchases, (actually that's a bit of an exaggeration), we trudged up the steps of the building and into the airy wooden-floored studio where Mrs Chr- spent her days. Crunching on freckles (large chocolate buttons covered in hundreds and thousands) and nibbling at milk bottles (no, not the glass kind), we would find our places at the big paint-splattered work tables, taking our time to arrange our delectables and make ourselves comfortable, too drugged by sugar to realise how rude we were being to our teacher, too thoughtless to see that our behaviour betrayed our lack of respect for her.

Finally, either once we were settled or when she ran out of patience, Mrs Chr- would get going, each week making a fresh assault on our indifference to European artistic achievement. She never seemed to lose faith that one day we would ignite with excitement, provided she reminded us often enough about the engineering feats of Brunelleschi, (wow, those hidden chains), and the wonders of Ghiberti's dazzling gates. Sadly for her, though, that never happened, at least not in my time. Week after week our attention was exclusively directed not to the marvels of the Renaissance but to the contents of our bulging paper bags.

In our defence, I should point out that we were at least a docile audience. We never interrupted Mrs Chr-, which was, I hope, a small comfort. I admire her now for keeping going, when the only response she ever got was the sound of munching. She might as well have been preaching to a dairy herd - albeit one that that subsisted, judging by the mingled scent of licorice and something more sickly, on a diet of musk sticks and Choo-Choo bars.

I presume Mrs Chr- escaped eventually. I hope she did and that she did not regard her time at the school as entirely wasted. While the fascinating information on Fantale wrappers did occupy almost all of my curiosity during her lessons (to the extent that I somehow missed the information that Florence was a Renaissance city, leading me to ask my mother after a trip to England during which I went to a dance and met several girls who said they were going to Florence after their O levels, 'Is Florence a finishing school?' [to which my mother replied, correctly, 'Sort of']), thanks to her I discovered for the first time the artistic styles called Baroque and Rococo.

I'd never heard of either of these until Mrs Chr- introduced them into one afternoon's eating, I mean lesson. Perhaps that is why, even to this day, they've stuck in my head exactly as she said them. Even now, even though I have been told countless times - mainly by my mother, through clenched teeth - that this is not the correct way to pronounce them, in my mind they remain Baroque as in Coke and Ro-co-co, as in the first syllable of rowing plus cocoa with a final stress. Meanwhile 'genre', whenever I encounter it on the page, will always sound exactly as Mrs Chr- first introduced it to me - like jeneer, (pronounced to rhyme, more or less, with Vermeer)* .

I wonder if Mrs Chr- is still out there somewhere. I think she was only in her thirties then so by rights she should be. I hope she doesn't think that during her time at that school she achieved absolutely nothing. After all she left this lasting, if not entirely satisfactory, legacy with me.

*Now I come to think of it, could these little habits of pronunciation provide the key to her husband's mysterious disappearance - did his exasperation lead to the downfall of her marriage? Is the puzzle solved at last?

Battered Penguins XV

2011-12-01T16:41:00.002+11:00

I am always happy to read books that tell of murders in English country houses. I understand that the current theory has it that country houses are symbolic of Eden and stories that present the reader with murders that take place in them, complete with investigations leading to the murderer or murderers being brought to justice, are soothing to the spirit, because they suggest that order has been reintroduced into a briefly unstable world. By the end, all is restored to calm, and God - in the shape of the detective - is taking care of things once more.

Possibly that theory does go some way to explaining why I find these kinds of books pleasurable. However, after reading Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes, I realise that, while it is satisfying to see God put back in charge in the final chapter, I also like to get to know a few appealing human characters along the way.

Michael Innes was an English Literature scholar at Oxford University, and I suspect that Hamlet, Revenge! reveals an extraordinarily neatly devised Hamlet-related structure, if you are familiar enough with the play to recognise that it is there. Certainly the setting of the book, a huge house called Scamnum, in which an amateur production of Hamlet is being mounted, is presented from the perspective of a person steeped in literature: "Mr Pope though he went away to scoff in twenty annihilating couplets, came secretly to admire; and Dr Johnson, when he took tea with the third duke, put on his finest waistcoat ... Thirty years before the birth of Shakespeare " et cetera et cetera.

The book only really gets going when a murder occurs during the first performance of Hamlet at Scamnum. From that moment on, Giles Gott, a writer of murder mysteries, joins forces with Innes's trademark detective, Appleby, to solve the mystery. Sadly, to my mind, the introduction of a writer of detective stories into a novel that is a detective story, a device that I suspect Innes thought was marvellously clever, is just one of the ways in which the book fails through being too clever by half.

For Innes's concoction is utterly brilliant, in the way that a really clever chess game is brilliant, but the dazzling ingenuity of its construction, the (quite possibly to others) glitteringly witty ploy of having a mystery writer within a mystery novel - and characters who make veiled references to other fictional detectives as if they were actual: '"... in my opinion the Duke should send for a detective." "A detective?" said Noel politely from across the table. "You mean a real detective - not like the police?" "Exactly - a real detective. There is a very good man whose name I forget; a foreginer and very conceited ..."' - such things do not provide enough sustenance to make the reader feel especially warmly toward the novel, in the absence of rich characterisation.

The book does have some quite funny moments - one about advertising, the other about the usual readers at the British Library - and is full of insights and lovely descriptions, such as the ones that follow:

"Moving about Scamnum ... was like moving in a dream through some monstrously overgrown issue of Country Life"

"Some unidentifiable South London common was slipping past, at once banal and mysterious under the garish London sky. Far to the east a train whistled - the profoundly disturbing whistle of a train in the night."

"'Quite so,' said Gott - and assumed that charming, charmed and tentatively understanding expression which is the Englishman's defence .."

"In the farther park two textures of moving grey were sorting themselves out: mist drifting, eddying, dispersing; sheep beginning to move in the dewy feed. Already the day declared its season; already the scent of the syringas, heavy as orange-blossom, was blowing up from the gardens. The hubbub dawn-chorus had tuned to distinguishable notes: willow-warblers montononously tumbling downstairs, chaffinches as unvaryingly revving-up, and suspense provided only by the wrens, who pleased themselves as to whether or not they should add answer to question."

It also includes one passage of such amazing prescience that it is difficult to believe it was really written as long ago as 1937:

"Appleby drew deep breaths of June air as he went briskly down the drive. The summer was advanced in this southland country; from somewhere came the scent of the first hay and already the oak-leaves were darkening. Over his left shoulder he looked up at Horton Hill. Across the crown there must be some right-of-way, for no attempt had been made to eject the people gathering there. It was quite a crowd now: idlers in the neighbouring towns, reading the stimulating news in their morning paper, had hurried to get out the car and motor over to see what they could. And soon there would be similar arrivals from London; people 'running down for the day'. And portents these, thought Appleby, of a society running down in another sense: clogged by its own mass-production of individuals who, let loose from a day's or a lifetime's specialized routine, will neither think nor read nor practise any craft, but only gape."

What it doesn't have though is characters one can care much about. The Duke and Duchess are not merely cardboard, but rice paper, the young female love interest appears to have barely any interior life and the cast of extras are caricatures mainly. Of the two male leads, one couches a lot of his interpretations of what he sees within the framework of the ballet he'd been watching before being called back to work, (which, as I hate 'dance', is not a trait that endears the man to me), and the other is perfectly nice but lacks any especially charming or interesting trait, (unless you count the writing of detective mysteries), that might give the reader an insight into his soul or a reason to feel some sympathy with him.

Where Albert Campion, in Margery Allingham's books, remains constantly intriguing and Gervase Fen, in Edmund Crispin's, is consistently absurd, Gott, although somewhat worried about whether he will get the girl he wants to marry, is essentially unneurotic and very self-confident and Appleby seems to be equipped with few emotions. As a resul,t it is hard to feel particularly involved with either of them. Consequently, the book gives readers the sense that they are observing a pretty puzzle clicking neatly into place, a puzzle devised by an academic mind that hopes to entice with country house furnishings but is unable to bring the puppets he's invented into true, lovable life. The repeated arch references to fictional detective novels within this detective novel, although perhaps intended as some kind of mirror to the play within a play in Hamlet, do nothing to add to the work's charm. Although there is a great deal to like and admire in Hamlet, Revenge! - the plotting, in particular, is immensely clever - what is slightly lacking, sadly, is the warmth that might bring such a well-engineered machine to life.

My Taxes at Work

2011-11-29T11:48:00.001+11:00

Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory had a local government foisted upon it, despite, when asked to vote to decide whether it wanted one, responding with a resounding 'No'*

Since receiving the gift of our own local government, we have had plenty of opportunities to recognise how right we were to say, 'No', but Saturday's Canberra Times unveiled possibly the most vivid demonstration of our good sense yet:

The only silver lining to this nuttiness is the effect the news may have on the attractive, non-criminal classes. Possibly, on learning that tattoos are so eagerly sought among the inmates of penal institutions, they may reconsider their own aspirations to have their bodies covered in indelible daubings. Instead of defacing themselves, they will seek other avenues of pleasure, such as helping their elderly parents to do the washing up.

Actually, now I think about it further, perhaps I should support Ms Gallagher's initiative, for, if it does result in non-criminals eschewing tattoos, tattoos may soon become exclusive to the occupants - or former occupants - of jails. This could, in fact, turn out to be an extremely good thing: in the future, thanks to the ACT Labor Government, it will become extremely easy to work out exactly who is who.

* Here's the history, from Wikipedia: "In 1978, the Australia Capital Territory voted at a referendum on whether the ACT should be granted self-government. Voters were given the choice of becoming a self-governing territory, a local government or continuing with the Legislative Assembly being an advisory body to the Department of the Capital Territory. 63.75% voted to continue with the then current arrangement.[3] Despite the outcome of the referendum, the Parliament of Australia passed the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act in 1988 and the ACT became a self-governing territory in 1989."

Easily Missed

2011-11-28T06:26:00.001+11:00

If you walk up the Duke of York steps,

ignoring the sight which always makes you wistful - policemen on horses, the job you dreamed of as a child (you saw a television programme about it once - it appeared to involve cleaning tack all morning, plus grooming, then ambling around London's streets on your gleaming horse for the whole of the afternoon):

Look at them, lucky sods - living the dream.

Anyway, as I said, if you ignore the mounted policeman and also don't get distracted by heading off toward Admiralty Arch and the poignant statue of poor old Captain Cook that stands down there on the right, hidden by those trees:

but instead climb the Duke of York Steps:

and turn sharp left at the top, you will see some railings:

and behind those railings you will find a tiny tombstone:

which you might easily have missed, if I hadn't pointed it out to you. And, if you do find it and you want to know what its story is, you can find out here - where you will also see some fairly startling photographs of a 1936 funeral - although not of the funeral of Giro.

Expectations

2011-11-27T07:30:00.000+11:00

I blame my father for the negligible impact I have had on the world so far. He called me Mrs Mop throughout my childhood - and, indeed, throughout that part of my adult life that he survived to see. The reason he called me Mrs Mop was because, he said, he believed that I would grow up to become the cleaning lady in the public lavatories at Waterloo Station.

I remembered his prediction when I saw a cleaning lady in the window of a smart shop in Mayfair, animatedly advising the girl who was laying out the wares:

Imagine the pride in my father's eyes, if I'd managed to transcend the transport system and landed a post wiping down surfaces at Lalique.

Speaking as a Sog*

2011-11-25T12:23:00.000+11:00

Sometimes there is an attempt to argue that Canberra is no longer a public service town but actually a vibrant artistic hub or a centre of enterprise (or even of excellence - but not a multi-function polis, that much beloved chimera of the late 1980s).

I don't believe such nonsense, nor will I - not while it is still possible to turn on the local radio, as I did just now, and hear exchanges like this one:

"Interviewer: 'Do you think there's a need for more APS* 4 and 5 positions?'
Person being interviewed, after a gasp and a pause: 'Gosh, that's a big meaning of life sort of question.'"

As long as anyone exists in this city who regards that as a 'big, meaning of life sort of question', Canberra will continue to be, warp and weft, a public service town.

*A SOG is an acronym for some kind of public service position - as you walk the streets of Canberra (provided you don't get certified - it is a town where you are allowed to jog or drive [or drive somewhere to jog {or even, if your car has a bike carrier, to drive somewhere to bicycle while wearing lots of lycra, an activity that always puzzles me - surely it would be better simply to bicycle somewhere, without first transporting your transport in another dirtier, noisier bit of transport?}], but strolling is regarded as evidence of mental instability) you will often hear snatches of conversation that go something like this, 'He's a SOG B, but he's only acting up,' or 'She's hoping to get a SOG C position in Defence' or 'They're both SOGs in PM&C', et cetera et cetera. I haven't actually ever been a SOG, perish the thort. I think I was once a Clerk Class 4, which sounds quite Dickensian, but, disappointingly, lacked any of the grotesque semi-Gothic splendour that I associate with the great man's writing. In fact, I would have to admit that from what I can remember it was uninterruptedly dull. Perhaps that's why the designation was deleted - it was probably deemed misleading under the Trade Practices Act, or maybe it caused problems with recruitment, attracting all sorts of wild-eyed fans of Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby et cetera, eager to scratch out their livings perched on high stools in dimly lit offices or hoping to emulate Melville's Bartleby Scrivener, literature's most enigmatically heroic clerk.

*Australian Public Service

Overnight Conversion

2011-11-24T09:51:00.000+11:00

We are meeting friends we haven't seen for ten or twelve years and suddenly Islamic head-to-toe covering seems a highly appealing idea. Greying streaks of hair, forehead criss-crossed with two-inch deep indentations (also known as wrinkles), all rendered invisible by forgiving folds of hijab, (or burqa or whatever the correct term is - I'm sure I've got it wrong, but I don't really care), only the ever youthful personality still on view.

What lies beneath the intriguing layers of fabric can still be constructed by the imagination of the viewer, who one hopes will be kinder than daylight. Mind you, it is that element of Islamic garb that always seems to me to defeat the thing's purpose - my impression is that, in earlier days, when women's dress was much more modest than it is now, almost anything became erotic, because forbidden. I suspect there is something far more alluring, tantalising and all round exciting about a woman's form that you can only picture in fantasy than there is about one whose body - or reasonably large expanses of it - is revealed for all to see.

This Must Be a Fake

2011-11-23T22:08:00.000+11:00

A friend via another friend sent us this photograph, which supposedly was taken at one or other Wall Street protest. If it is genuine, it is hilarious, in a poignant sort of way:

But it can't be genuine. Please tell me it can't be genuine. No, of course it's not genuine. Someone somewhere is definitely having a laugh. The 'Hispanic' element is the gilding of the lily that uiltimately reveals the whole thing's a fraud.

And yet I am torn between thinking that it's a sign of my cynicism that I've worked this out and wondering if it's actually a sign of my naivety about exactly where we've reached that I don't believe the photograph's real.

In my experience, though, cynicism can usually be trusted (I hope that statement makes somebody laugh, besides me).

Care in the Community

2011-11-23T10:39:00.001+11:00

After a long discussion with a Polish friend the other day, in which she insisted that the Germans' persecution of the Jews was a direct result of their concept of 'Pflicht', which she claims makes the events of the Second World War uniquely German - a discussion made longer and considerably more muddled by my confusion of the word 'Pflicht' with the word 'Pflege', (although, even now that I've cleared that up in my own mind, I still don't believe a word of her argument) - I was interested to come across this article on the wonderful Sign and Sight site, (although this excellent book, rather contradicts the statement near the beginning of the article that Jews were never allowed to enter the military).

Clearly, the Germans recognised that the Jews were beating them hands down, and they didn't like it. This is a universal reaction, when one racial group sees a group of fellow citizens of another racial group, (particularly a group who are regarded as incomers), excelling at their own game. For example, at Sydney Grammar just a few years ago, when the school's selective entrance tests seemed to be resulting in a preponderance of students of Asian origin entering the school, there was a push to try to weigh things in favour of 'the all round "more stupid party"' (to quote a quotation within the Sign and Sight article).

Any nationality can feel envy; only the Germans can feel a sense of 'Pflicht'. How nice it would be to relax and think, 'What happened was just something to do with being German; it wasn't an example of the potential nastiness of the entire human race.' I'd love to be let off the hook like that, but I don't think it requires much thought to recognise that envy and resentment can rise up anywhere and, when combined with the wrong economic circumstances and leaders, (and, in that context, I liked the story someone told me the other day about Kokoschka, who, supposedly, applied to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts at the same time as Hitler, but got in. In an interview years later, he made this comment: 'I sometimes wonder if it mightn't have been better if they'd accepted Hitler and rejected me. I know I would have run the world rather differently'), things can go horribly wrong.

*Incidentally, could one see this statement within the article - 'the intellectual superiority of the Jews was in no way eradicated by conversion to Christianity' - as one in the eye for Richard Dawkins and his ragtag band of zealots?

Tssk, Tssk, Tssk

2011-11-21T18:28:00.000+11:00

You should not speak ill of the dead and you should not eat lovely wild animals and, if you are a journalist who thinks pretty well of yourself, you should get your grammar right.

Who Were They

2011-11-20T17:08:00.000+11:00

Once, when we lived in Vienna, we had two sets of rather grand Austrians round for a meal - one lot the arty but still at heart snobbish son and daughter-in-law of my godmother, a woman who I overheard uttering this carefully-learned phrase to the new, Czech nanny of her grandchildren: "How do you do, I am Countess X, but you don't have to call me Countess"; the other lot, our landlord and his wife.

When the first set - the godmother's son and daughter-in-law - arrived, we gave them drinks and chatted. The wife asked who else was coming to dinner, and I told her the name of our landlord, saying that he and his wife would be there quite soon. 'Who was she?' was the woman's immediate inquiry, 'Who was she before she was married?'

I often think of this question as I look up at all the myriad faces on Budapest's buildings. 'Who were they? Who were they before they were transfigured into stone?'

Mine's a Cesspool

2011-11-19T09:46:00.003+11:00

I admit it - I do have 'flat hair'. Or, as a nice hairdresser of Armenian origin once - kindly? truthfully? ruthlessly? - described it, 'English hair.' 'Really, it's nothing to worry about', he went on to explain, (before diverting hastily to the more neutral topic of international jet travel and its many associated discomforts).

And I don't worry about it. I just envy people like my mother who have very thick hair. And, all right, maybe I do worry about it a bit when, sighing, she smooths mine with her hand, (as if it needed further smoothing), and says, "Oh darling, I'm so sorry - I'm afraid you got your father's hair." Now hold it right there, mother - my father was inches away from being completely bald for most of the time I can remember him, and things aren't quite that bad for me, just yet, thanks very much.

Peculiarly though, despite the fact that I've never mentioned anything on the Web about an absence of springy ringlets, somehow the Internet already knows that I lack massive hair. But then the Internet, it appears, knows everything. In fact sometimes I think that if we'd only had the Internet in the Cold War, none of us would have had to endure two and a half hours in a cinema in Bristol on a wet Friday night trying to work out what the hell was going on in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

For presumably it was quietly gathered intelligence that led the young Google chap - or possibly his partner in crime, the wicked Baron Facebook - to figure out, without even meeting me, that my hair is fine and lacking in body. Because, you see, it - or they - must have figured this out. Why else would they have decided to suggest so kindly an exciting new product that is guaranteed to rid me of my lack of hirsute bulk?

But, fie, Sir Facebook, your wicked ways are not as finely honed as you had hoped, sirrah. You forgot that intelligence, as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy so amply demonstrated, has limitations and infinite flaws. Curiously, what your fiendish agents appear to have overlooked is the childishness which is a central aspect of my character. Had they only recognised that glaringly obvious fact about me - which, after all, is something I've never made a secret of - they'd have saved you time and effort, Baron. They'd have realised that a product called Bumpits was never going to cut it with me, that the mere hint of the word 'bum', particularly in combination with the word 'pits', (speaking of which, did you hear the one about the man who went into a Swedish chemist, wanting deodorant - oh, stop, it, ZMKC, you know you've never been any good at telling jokes), was never going to do anything except make me laugh.

Of course, it's probably just the result of having been born in the sink of iniquity, but when I read on the company's website the phrase 'Hollywood Bumpits', I'm afraid that, instead of 'haircare', 'knickers' is the word that springs to my mind. And once knickers have sprung to my mind, all is lost when it comes to harnessing even an instant of my serious attention. I am - and I recognise that this is further evidence of my acutely infantile nature, evidence that will provide legions of Internet drones all the trigger they need to decide it is time to unleash upon me a tidal wave, (and, no, I'm not going to use the word tsunami instead, when there's a perfectly good English phrase at hand, thanks all the same), of offers for playpens et cetera - reduced to a limp state of hilarity by the word. And the warning on the Bumpits website that 'Bumpits are not edible', does nothing to improve matters. It does not help me pull myself together. It does not reintroduce solemnity into my heart. (Nor does this - although maybe it provides an insight into the linguistic origins of the problem: possibly bum is not a word that resonates in the US mind.)

So, until something else comes along, I suppose I'll be sticking with my flat, fine, wispy English hair. Perhaps indeed I should take pride in it, maybe daub it with red and white dye and hang it out a window, a hairy cross of St George, fluttering, defiant, in the middle of Australia's capital. Or perhaps I should just tie it back, as I usually do, and go and have a swim.

Mysteries of the Modern World II

2011-11-17T15:02:00.000+11:00

Why do designers have such a fetish with taps? What was wrong with the original design? Each time I use a new bathroom, I have to go into mental contortions trying to figure out how the hell the thing I'm almost certain is the shower tap works. Here is the latest contraption I've had to grapple with:

Is it a ploy to keep old minds nimble? But even young people strike problems: we once did a house swap with a young couple from Rome, when we were living in a rented place in Vienna. At the end of the swap, we discovered that our swapees, if that's the word, had never worked out how the taps in our upstairs bathroom functioned (although until then, oddly enough, we'd never seen them as particularly wacky - the taps, I mean). They - the swapees - spent three weeks in our house, unshowered and unbathed. I'm glad to say we only found this out over the telephone - they must have been quite pungent by the end of their stay.

The Theory and Practice of Balconies

2011-11-16T08:40:00.000+11:00

If you are going to live in a flat, I think it is a good idea to try to live in one that has a balcony. That way, you can get fresh air without having to hurtle downstairs and out onto the street, where you might have to rub shoulders with the riff-raff that mills about on the pavements of so many cities these days.

However, having recommended the possession of a balcony, I should point out that not just any balcony will do. You have to choose one that will suit your personality. For instance, if you want to appear before massed crowds in order to hold forth to them about your vision of the world, you will probably need balconies like these ones:

If, on the other hand, you fancy yourself as a waif-like Juliet and want a balcony for standing about and yearning, one of these is going to be the kind of thing you'll need:

If you are a smoker and live with someone who sends you outside in all weathers to indulge your pleasure, you should choose a flat with an enclosed balcony, like these ones:

However attractive the individuals supporting your balcony may be:

however pretty the balcony itself:

you should avoid balconies on the first floor, because they are too easy to climb up onto (unless you enjoy light-fingered, passing friendships).

It's also wise to give the flick to anything that looks as if its supports are slightly dodgy. If you have any even faint fear the thing might fall off the side of the building, don't go near it:

Ideally, your building should not be dotted with other people's balconies:

There's something very satisfactory about being the only person in possession of such a thing:

Personally, I should also avoid novelty drainage arrangements, where water pours out of the mouth of gargoyles, or any other parts of their anatomy:

and I'm not that keen on balconies that look like dodgem cars or fairground ferris wheel tubs emerging through the brick work

But, then again, they may be the answer to a dream for really keen fairground enthusiasts. That's the beauty of balconies - there are enough varieties to suit almost every temperament under the sun.

My ABC

2011-11-15T16:23:00.000+11:00

How marvellous to read the new ABC Radio National line-up. As a serious radio addict, it is a tremendous relief to discover that there will be even less to tempt me on the airwaves than there has been up till now. I mean, sure, I will now have to steadfastly resist the charms of not only those 'remarkable broadcasters' Philip Adams (you may not have heard his marvellous joke about gladdies, he is so sparing with it, sadly), Robyn Williams (I never knew a chip on the shoulder could be audible until I listened to him), Alan Saunders (the man who broadcasts as if he is giving dictation to a class full of English as a Foreign Language Students) and Geraldine Doogue, (her breathily eager head girl tones and occasional high pitched giggles are the ultimate ingredients to make Saturday morning perfect), but also those of Waleed Aly and Fenella Kernebone, both of whom have clearly insinuated themselves into the ranks of much-loved (by management) Radio National contributors, (no, I can't explain it either).

And of course there will be the all but impossible to tear myself away from new offering, 'The Shortlist', which threatens to 'unpack new ideas, trends and obsessions with a...sometimes cheeky look at the zeitgeist.' Presumably someone in publicity is saving the other 'z' word (i.e. 'zany') for an audio trailer. There cannot be any other reason for its exclusion from the blurb.

Also, I will have to ration my attention when it comes to 'The Body Sphere', 12 weeks in which contributors will 'discuss, critique and celebrate the human body' (with lengthy reference, no doubt, to the GLBTI community, if past form is anything to go by [not to mention including a repeat of the fabled series, 'Living with a Prosthetic Limb, Parts I-IV {oh goodie, I only ever caught a bit of Part 3, dammit}]).

So, thank you, ABC, for ensuring I go out and attack the couch grass instead of wasting my time swilling cups of tea by the wireless. I'm not sure it was quite the role the founding fathers imagined for the corporation, but who can argue against fresh air?

(The author of this blogpost would like to point out that she also hates 'The Slap' and 'Crownies', thinks 'Australian Story' relies far too heavily on sentiment and tear-jerking and is absolutely delighted that 'New Inventors' has been axed, so she is clearly a narrow-minded and impossible-to-please old bigot.)

Battered Penguins XIV

2011-11-14T11:56:00.000+11:00

For reasons even I no longer understand, (if I ever did), I once spent a weekend alone in a hotel in Chartres, with nothing except an old school satchel and a copy of Bertrand Russell's autobiography. In the decades since, I've sometimes remembered this interlude and wondered if a more creative mind than mine might have fashioned it into an award-winning, if depressing, (can't have one without the other, from what I can tell), short story. Sadly, after reading Martin Amis's comments recently, I had concluded that I am probably already almost too old to attempt to do the fashioning myself.

But now, thanks to my erstwhile Chartres companion, I've realised that I do, in fact, still have plenty of time to get cracking on dreary tales about my lost weekend and other similarly baffling episodes in my past. Bertrand Russell, it turns out, took up short story writing only after his eightieth birthday. The resulting volume does not overwhelm the reader with amazement at his talent, but it is not unentertaining.

The title story essentially describes in fictional form the truth that Charles Dickens so succinctly set out for his friend Miss Coutts: "All people ... are in a certain sense imaginative; and, if their imaginations are not filled with good things, they will choke them, for themselves, with bad ones."

The second story, although fairly silly, contains a truth I recognise, spoken by a middle-aged woman to a male visitor, after she has asked what has brought him to call on her: "Do not pretend that it is my charms", she tells him. "The day for such pretence is past. For ten years it would have been true; for another ten I should have believed it. Now it is neither true nor do I believe it."

The fourth and fifth stories (particularly the latter) are frankly idiotic, although they rattle along quite nicely while one is reading them.

The illustrations, by Asgeir Scott are charming:

As a curiosity, the book is worth a read. Other than that, on the whole it is not.

Doorways

2011-11-13T08:48:00.007+11:00

The first automatically opening doorway I ever saw was at the Science Museum in London when I was a small child. For a long time, it was the only one in the city. Now though, electronic doorways are all over the place.They are great if your hands are full, but they don't add much to the beauty of our surroundings.

As well as often being rather lovely, many doorways in buildings built before the technological age were so big and heavy that they needed a full-time employee to hold them open. Thus were livelihoods provided for numerous people. But what of their descendants? Unable to fulfil their ancestral function, they loll about in stinking highrises, watching Big Brother and stuffing themselves with chips. Progress, eh: