Petrol station rage

Scene: the crowded forecourt of a petrol station, late morning today, the Shell place on the A585 at Singleton, always crowded because it is also used as a cut-through by people driving from Blackpool to Fleetwood, not always in the best of tempers.

Lady driver wedged and unable to move forwards until customers in front have paid and departed. Loud blasting of horn from vehicle behind her. Obvious to us, and post office lady in front of her, that she is locked in, but not to vehicle behind her. Loud blasting continues until queue has moved forwards, and lady and loud-blaster are at last unlocked. Post Office lady now at pump. Loud-blaster, behind her, now has time to emerge from vehicle and scream in rage at middle-aged lady who had blocked him. He is over six feet tall, fat, and purple of face and language. He is so fat that his breasts wobble while he is raging. He returns to vehicle, male honour satisfied. Lady victim quite shaken, but fills up.

Several witnesses in queue to pay do the un-British thing and say something nice to the lady, who appears to be cheered up somewhat by the support of strangers. But it isn't enough.

Behaviour like this bully's dirties the day, not only for his victim but for everyone in earshot.

There are severe penalties for people who drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but not for an equally dangerous combination - ego and testosterone.

I didn't manage to get his registration number. But the next time anything like this happens the reg will go into the blog as a tag, and Google will pick it up, sure as eggs is eggs.

And the Yahoo can sue me.

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

If you missed last night's prom by Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan youth orchestra you can still catch it for a week on the BBC's iPlayer. It wasn't so much the concert that riveted my attention but the conversation broadcast in the interval, in which two people brought together in friendship by the orchestra, a female Israeli violinist and a male Lebanese Arab cellist, discussed with Sara Mohr-Pietsch what membership of the orchestra meant to them.

To hear the conversation go to iPlayer, select Radio 3, select BBC proms 2009, open up the "other proms" pane and click on prom 48, the Berlioz. Use the slider to advance about 67 minutes. The conversation started after Daniel Barenboim didn't make a speech (and if that sounds Gilbertian, it isn't - he turned to the audience and said "No speech.")

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There is plenty on the Web about the orchestra, a joint vision of Daniel Darenboim and the Palestinian Arab scholar Edward Said that has been in existence since 1999, so I won't say anything here. But you can hear something of the vision and its realisation from Barenboim's own mouth when he talked to Ed Stourton on the Today programme here.

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But being a word-bloke, I was curious about the use of the word Divan in the orchestra's name, and while googling yielded references aplenty to Goethe, which looked promising, he being, or rather he having been, a scholar of Arabic languages and literature and author of a book of pomes with Divan in the title, not surprisingly, since one meaning of the Arabic word is "collection of poems by one author", it also generated thousands of other hits which mostly repeat each other or try to flog me a sofa, leaving me none the wiser.

The best I can come up with as a translation of divan is "assembly", with its underlying meaning of "council chamber in which differing views are resolved" (and excuse my hollow ho-ho-hos, for most council chambers I have known are places where differing views become even more cemented as differing views.)

Any scholars out there who can help?

PS, and a most unworthy aside. Assiduous readers will know that I enjoy accidental associations of ideas, so try this one. Day 1 - start reading Hannah Arendt, after British public library system yields The Human Condition (thank you, Camden) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (thank you, Cheshire), as instructed by the intellectually delectable Monika Maria Trost. Day 2 - listen to the Divan prom. Day 3 - spend six hours singing Graham Kendrick stuff to the accompaniment of an enthusiastic gee-tar in a church designed by a Mason.

Enough there for another book by Koestler, I would think. Or Freud.

PPS. Oh God! Not another book by Dawkins? Must cancel The Times and subscribe to The Sun instead. Thinking is such hard work.

Philosophy, Hypocrisy, and Public Libraries - II

You will remember DulcieDora, the junior library assistant (8th grade) employed by every public library in the land to weed the old boring bookstock when she is not not required for tea-making or Enid-Blyton-banning duties?

She has done me a great favour, and I really must stop making fun of the poor dear girl.

If you wanted to buy a first edition of Anthony Burgess's "A Vision of Battlements", even mildly shop- or reader-soiled, you would be talking £27-£250 (check going prices at http://www.abebooks.co.uk.) So much better, then, to purchase same at your local Public Library for 1op, as I did. It lacks a TP, of course, because the very people who fine you for writing in your library book have no qualms when it comes to destroying the integrity of said book by ripping it apart so as to sell it for 10p, No Questions Arsked, Know Wot I mean, Guv?

I must check the value of that Barbara Hepworth catalogue raisonné (illus. on fine rag papers) that Dulcie flogged me for 50p, now estimated (by me) to be worth £3,000 if I could only find a buyer.

Dulcie, dear, keep on weeding! When the brown substances hit the fan I will be there to defend you and the ignorance that is no fault of yours.

(And while you're about it, there's a book about John Dowland I would like to get my hands on. It disappeared from the shelves of Oldham Public Library in mysterious circumstances, and I must have missed it when it was sold off for probably15p or thereabouts. Dulcie, if you could put it my way it's worth a fiver to you, and the usual bag of chips, OK? And sod the council-tax payers. They don't know what's going on anyway.)

Shalom!

(click image to open a printable, copyright-free jpg)

This is an 8-voice round to be found in the Evangelisch-reformiertes Gesangbuch, the hymnal widely used in the Lutheran Church in Switzerland. The hymnal also gives a German underlay - Der Friede des Herrn geleite euch, schalom, schalom (bis), roughly The peace of the Lord be with you.

I am sure I will be told that I've got the next bit all wrong (probably by a Welsh Jacobite...), but the Hebrew text seems to translate, minimalistically, as "Greetings, boys; greetings, girls; bye-ee!"

But, as they say, whatever.

It is great fun to sing, and a useful training exercise for congregations as well as choirs - do it first as a four-part round and only then, if there enough voices, do the full 8-voice job.

So as not to breach the typographical copyright of the hymnal, I've reset the music and anglicised the transliterated Hebrew text, and I waive my typographical copyright, so print, copy, and sing away!

Camels and Needles' Eyes

And while on the subject of James Berger's book The Moses Stone, can we lay to rest another myth? One of Berger's characters debunks the biblical reference to rich men, the Kingdom of Heaven, camels and the eye of a needle by claiming that in the King James Bible the translators had misread the Greek for "rope" for the Greek for "camel".

It is a nice conceit, were it not for even earlier texts, the Aramaic ones, which have not a camel, but an elephant, the likelihood of whose ability to pass through the eye of a needle is considered to be of the same order as that of a rich man's to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And since elephants were common enough in the lands where Aramaic was the lingua franca, but pretty rare in the Greek colonies, where the camel was about the biggest beast likely to be encountered, isn't it likely, with the gentle application of Occam's Razor, that the King James Bible has the proper translation of this curious but powerful metaphor?

And here, m'lud, I rest my case.

Word of the Day - Gribble

One of the great things about being a ranter is that you can rant about just about everything, whether you agree with yourself or not. Ranting is its own reward. The true ranter eyes any head that is lifted above the parapet with the same enthusiasm as a cannoneer who has just taken delivery of his, or her, first consignment of grapeshot and is eagerly awaiting the order: Fire at Will.

This piece in The Times on Saturday last was a case in point, though Will on this occasion was actually Dan - Dan Brown, author of that much-loved and much-detested book The Da Vinci Code, and though Fire at Dan doesn't have quite the same ring to it, the grapeshot was still very much in evidence.

Having just finished James Becker's The Moses Stone, a rattling good yarn about BC and its unsolved mysteries, I felt a rant coming on when I read the The Times piece, for I'm obviously one of the thickos that lap this stuff up and upon whose heads the highly educated hacks who pen this pretentious prattle are so fond of heaping the old contumely.

If I cast my head a little to the left, I see three more Dan Browns jostling on the bookshelves with Golding, Eco, Pound, Eliot, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Shakespeare, Burns, Borges and Blyton, not to mention Collins, Christie, Fleming and Maclean. There are usually four (soon to be five!), but the fourth isn't on the shelves because I am reading it (well, after three Dürrenmatts in two days one is entitled to a little relaxation.)

And it was the fourth, this temporary absentee from the bookshelves, Dan Brown's Deception Point, that offered this gem of prose (p127, if you really want to be pedantic):

"This species is clearly a louse: it has a flattened body,

seven pairs of legs,and a reproductive pouch identical

in structure to wood lice, pill bugs,beach hoppers,

sow bugs, and...

(wait for it, wait for it...)

... gribbles."

Now gribble is a word I have not encountered before, not even in an Azed crossword or Spike Milligan's excellent war memoirs or the poems of Ivor Cutler, where it surely belongs. Gribble is a member, surely, of that class of words which ought to exist, but don't (yet) , like stromp, arbuley and scrotchet.

This is a gribble -

a beastie which hates sunlight, and is at its happiest when nibbling away at the sort of soft wood that people use when building wharves or piers in, for example, coastal parts of the Isle of Wight, where gribble nibbling is a bit of a local worry (see, for example, this piece from the highly literate and not-at-all-chummy Ventnorblog)

So there you are. Your vocabulary, and mine, has (or have) just increased by one.

I give you the Gribble. Do look after it.

Old Ham

Oldham is a strange town. By day it is occupied by people who hold doors open for you if you are burdened with parcels or bags of shopping, and the old-fashioned politeness of Oldhamers was a vivid contrast to the rudeness of Rochdalites, who think nothing of slamming doors in your face.

Oldham is a strange town. By night is a different place, as I found every morning for 20 years as I picked my way from Mumps station to the Office across pavements strewn with broken glass.

Oldham is a strange town. It has a football club as its saint, to whom allegiance you have to swear if you desire to become resident in the borough. Oldham also had a composer of classical music once, but he couldn't stand the place so he left, and the snub was so great that all memory of him was erased from the municipal record.

Oldham is a strange town. It has extremes of poverty, too much grubby and snivelling petty crime, and a higher proportion of people of Asian origin than a lot of other towns, and occasionally local tensions break out in the form of riots.

Oldham is a strange town. Its municipal fathers and mothers noted the falling revenues in council tax, and instructed their salaried minions to find a solution. Easy! said the salaried minions. The answer is more boozers and night clubs, so that our hope for the future, the young people of Old Ham, may enjoy great merriment and sow their wild oats, meanwhile filling the municipal coffers with gelt. And so every bean shop or run-down pub applied for a night-club licence, and was granted it, for the lure of the 24-hour society with its promise of endlessly renewable loot-bags was too great to resist for the rulers of this borough, whose brains, were they put into the scales and measured, would have had problems if they were pitted against a pea.

Oldham is a strange town. Its municipal fathers and mothers are now reaping a whirlwind whose seeds they didn't understand that they had sown. Drunkenness and violence are now endemic on Friday and Saturday nights in a town where every other premises is a pub or a night club, and the salaried minions have now been instructed to find solutions, such as making everybody queue for two hours in a snake and only allowing them two drinks.

Oldham is indeed a strange town. And it is run by an exceedingly strange bunch of people, who all appear to be suffering from terminal short-term memory loss. But they sowed the wind, and now they are reaping the whirlwind.

The Digital Switchover

Nice to see the versatile and vivacious Sue Johnston on the telly tonight, in an advertising playlet in which she banged on in a well-modulated, even posh, voice about the virtues of SkyTV in readiness for the great switchover to digital later this year.

Sky is of course all things to all people - entertainment, information, education - just what the doctor ordered for your dear little kiddies. Safe in Sky's hands, the little darlings are.

Sky is spending a fortune on these ads, all designed to wean us off Freeview by pretending to be respectable and literate.

What an own-goal for Sky, then, that its final punt, from someone who sounded like a professional boxer from Dudley, was

"SO GET YOUR HAITCH-DEE SKY BOX TODAY"