Mein Vater, Mein Vater

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has died. He was wonderful. The story of his early life is a reminder that Germans, as well as other nationalities, suffered under the Nazis;

Trees Died for This

One of the more poignantly amusing sights I've ever seen was a toddler climbing onto one of the benches in our local park and trying to take a bite out of one of its slats, recently repainted a glossy dark brown. As his gums closed on the thing's unyielding texture, his face crumpled in disappointment. 'Choc', he lisped, looking around with a puzzled air. 'He's just discovered chocolate,' I heard his mother explain to her companion, almost unnecessarily.  'Choc', the child repeated, wistfully, 'choc, choc.'

That was some time ago. Things have changed since then and I fear such simple pleasures may not be enough for the children of more recent generations - not if what some young parents told me at dinner last night is true.

These parents have a two-year-old and they also have an I-Pad. Apparently, the I-Pad is the apple of the two-year-old's eye (apple, I-Pad, geddit? Actually, it was unintentional, so don't grind your teeth at me like that). When he wakes from an afternoon nap, his first - indeed, his only - word is 'I-Pad'. He utters it in a coaxing, hopeful, go-on-please-indulge-me kind of tone. 'I-Pad?' he says, 'I-Pad?' And when he's allowed it, he can zoom straight to YouTube. 'Apparently, that means he's actually reading - he can recognise the YouTube logo, and that means he can read it,' the proud father assured me.

The child's mother seemed more ambivalent. According to her, her little son found a magazine in the kitchen yesterday. Rather than leafing through it, he tried to use the action you use on an I-Pad to move on to the next screen and looked up at her with wide eyes when the thing didn't behave as he expected. He was clearly concerned that the I-Pad was broken. The concept of a paper page was beyond his ken.

All this suggests to me that we're headed for a paperless future, which should please the hippies a friend of mine used to share a house with, who tossed away her box of teabags once in outrage, preserving a single specimen from the 80-odd the box contained. This they sellotaped above the sink, together with a post-it note, on which they'd scrawled an arrow pointing at the offending item, together with the furious message: 'Trees died for this!'

Canberra and Velasquez

Overnight, a tree dropped all its leaves in Ainslie:

Or almost all - there's a couple of recalcitrants in every crowd (usually I'm among them, to be honest):

It was a striking sight and, as I looked at the bright carpet, I remembered being in the Metropolitan Museum in New York a month or two ago:

looking at a painting of some poor benighted infanta (Maria Theresa, actually, who didn't have, all things considered, too bad a time of it - only having to marry a first cousin, for instance, rather than an uncle):

whose 'butterfly ribbons' mirrored, it seemed to me, the shape of the fallen leaves in Ainslie:

There But

For some time I have been haunted by a detail in an article about Rwanda that appeared in the New Yorker several years ago. It hints at aspects of the human soul I would prefer not to acknowledge. It is this comment by one of the people who took part in the massacre of Tutsi:

"For me, it became a pleasure to kill. The first time, it's to please the government. After that, I developed a taste for it. I hunted and caught and killed with real enthusiasm. It was work, but work that I enjoyed. It wasn't like working for the goverment. It was like doing your own true job - like working for myself ... I was very, very excited when I killed. I remember each killing. Yes, I woke every morning excited to go into the bush. It was the hunt."

I wouldn't mind so much, if I thought this was an isolated reaction, but what worries me is that the same potential is hidden deep inside every civilised soul, waiting for the right set of circumstances to animate it. I suppose that is what William Golding was trying to reveal in Lord of the Flies, but it is a very uncomfortable possibility to contemplate.. 

Nuance

Looking at the statistics that detail health outcomes and work participation and other kinds of benchmarks as they apply to the Indigenous population of Australia, it is easy to draw the conclusion that this is a nation jam packed with thoughtless racists. However, if you set aside the usual percentage of ignorant bigots, that is actually far from the case. The relationship between the bulk of the population and the original inhabitants of this country is complex, but the goodwill that is felt by most Australians towards Aborigines is real and deeply felt. It is possibly best exemplified by the reaction of most of us to Cathy Freeman's win at the Sydney Olympics, an event that even now I can't think about without getting a lump in my throat:

  

Peculiarly, it was a visit to a rural supply shop the other day that set me pondering these things. Because my mum's not been well, I've been helping her out a bit and this week she needed some salt for her cattle. As I didn't know what I was doing really, I asked a man at the shop for help. He soon found a heap of what mum wanted - bags labelled Himalayan rock salt, sold in 25 kilogramme lumps.

After checking that the bags contained decent-sized single lumps and not a whole lot of 5 kilogramme pebbles, the bloke heaved several of the best onto a trolley, which he pushed out to my car. As he hefted a couple of the sacks into the boot, I noticed that there was an address printed on the side of them. It proved that they really were from the Himalayas; they were not, as I had imagined called 'Himalayan' purely from whimsy or to create a romantic impression, (and, indeed, now I come to think of it, I realise trying to endow cow salt with romance would be an unlikely marketing ploy).

Anyway, I was so surprised that I made a comment. 'They really are Himalayan', I said. The bloke from the shop dumped the second bag into the back of the car and straightened up before turning for the next one. 'Yeah', he said, pushing back his hat and wiping his forehead. 'I suppose there's some poor little bugger up there on the top of Mount Everest, pick, pick, picking away.' He bent over and grabbed hold of the corners of the next bag. 'It'd be a long hard way down with 25 kilo', he grunted, as he hurled it after the others.

It seemed to me that in that comment you got all the nuance of Australian attitudes towards people less fortunate than ourselves. The phrase 'poor little bugger' encompassed an affectionate if somewhat Olympian sympathy. The man recognised the salt miner in the Himalayas might be having a tough a time of it and he also recognised that that wasn't really fair. All the same, there was in his words an implied acceptance that, looked at practically, that was how things were. Just because he didn't have any ideas about how to improve that situation, it didn't mean he didn't recognise it was far from ideal.

In the same way, our governments - state and federal - willingly hurl money at the disaster that is Indigenous education and welfare, and we are happy that they keep on doing so, because we are all aware that the situation is dire. None of us wants people to feel driven to extremes such as petrol-sniffing, but equally none of us has a clue about how to solve the myriad problems that lead to such activities. Thus, while we may appear to be uncaring, really we just don't have a clue about what to do.

Luxury

I don't listen to the BBC's Desert Island Discs much, mainly because, in a rather aunt of Woody Allen, ('This restaurant is so bad', 'Yes and the servings are so small') ,contrary manner, I'm not very interested in music and I hate the way on the programme they don't play the chosen pieces right to the end.

The thing about the programme that I do find appealing though is finding out what luxury each desert islander  chooses to take with them. Nicholas Parsons, I remember, tried, very sensibly - but unsuccessfully - for an unlimited supply of fresh water. Boris Johnson, on the other hand, demanded a huge pot of Dijon mustard, which he seemed to think would hide the taste of any nasty food he found to eat.

A bed I suppose would probably be the most useful of all items, but when I try to imagine what I'd choose I discover a streak of frivolity always getting the upper hand. Sometimes I think an endless supply of crisps would be perfect or never-ending plates of toasted cheese; at other times, I prefer the idea of an inexhaustible bottle of a scent called Caleche, or this soap, which would not only remind me of comfortable houses but give me hours of pleasure (pleasure?), thinking about the British royal family washing themselves:

; usually I return to my mainstay though, which is the self-portrait of van Eyck that they have in the National Gallery in London. I have the impression that I could look at that forever - I certainly never get sick of visiting it, but as I write this I begin to wonder whether living with it might actually be too much of a good thing. A question I will possibly never know the answer to in this case is: would familiarity eventually breed contempt?

And speaking of contempt, even though I seem to spend more of my time than is sensible engaged in housework, it has never crossed my mind to select a vacuum cleaner or a steam iron or anything to do with cooking as my luxury, (not, of course, that anyone has actually ever asked me either - but I like to be prepared). I realise too that a really comfortable pair of shoes would probably be terrifically handy, but I'm banking on the possibility that I'll be wearing those already, when I arrive.

When the chips are down, (or the toasted cheese and scented van Eyck portraits), I recognise in the end what would really be  the best thing to take of all - a horse, because horses are a) such nice personalities, (on the whole - it would be bad luck if one got a mean one), b) useful for gardening and c) we could canter about from place to place, if the island turned out to be big.

What would other people choose? I'm sure there are much more exciting things I should be packing that I haven't even thought of. Ooh and look, how riveting - here's a comprehensive list of everything anyone who has ever actually been on the programme has decided they couldn't live without.

Confessions of a Visual Illiterate - Two for the Price of One

When I lived in Vienna, I used to go and gawp at the big Brueghel canvases they have there. Like Michael Frayn, I always thought a novel could be made from imagining how on earth one in the seasons series could possibly have been lost. Unlike Michael Frayn, I never did anything about it.

Anyway, I hadn't absorbed the fact that the painting in the series that depicts summer is part of the collection at New York's Metropolitan Museum. And so it came as a wonderful surprise to walk into one of the rooms in the museum and see the painting:

I have to say one of the things I admire about the picture is what good value for money it offers. If I'd commissioned it, I'd have been thrilled, for there are dozens of pictures within this one frame - it's not a case of two for the price of one, but several, which I suppose makes Brueghel an early precursor of Tesco's or Walmart on some level, (although no, not really)

There is the picture of village life with games being played on the green:

There is the landscape with travellers trudging down its deep lanes:

 There are three scenes of harvesters at work in seas of ripe grain:

There is an orchard, complete with apple picker:

 There is a distant coastal town, with the faint outlines of ships, hinting at possibilities over the horizon:

 There is another peaceful glimpse of village life:

 And there is me, all those years ago, stuffing my face, as ever: