search box added

I hope my reader notices that I've now added a Search facility to the blog, and, egad! - it worked instantly (in XP, anyway. Not in Windows 7, though. Buck up, chaps!)


Last night I remembered mentioning one Mary Jackson ages ago, and because I hadn't tagged her by name it took well over an hour of scrolling through Older Posts to find the one I wanted, with the link.


I do have trouble with all these new-fangled inventions like the electric telephone or moving pictures, because I was always a slow learner, even in infant school (they didn't let me move up to junior school until I was 23, and married).


But, dear reader - don't think the Search bar is for your benefit, 'cos it ain't.  It's for my one remaining brain cell, Horace.  He needs every bit of help he can get.


But back to the reason for adding the search bar - Mary Jackson.  She is an English writer of great wit and acumen who contributes to a learned literary journal, the New English Review -


http://www.newenglishreview.org/

(find her in the author archives button, pour yourself a large glass of something white and possibly Californian, settle back, and prepare to enjoy!)

and I say that Mary Jackson is an English writer because this particular New English Review is actually an American lustrous organ, emanating from Nashville, Tennessee, whence you don't expect emanations of this quality (revenge, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, is sweet!).


It seems that I've been unconsciously saving up Mary Jackson pieces for 14 months, and when I finally found the link again I had a wonderful wallow last night.


Mary Jackson weaves words like spells. She is also deliciously rude.  Her particular gift is to turn your life-held preconceptions and prejudices on their heads.  Read her on Samuel Becket or Jeanette Winterson, or on practically anyone or anything else that she turns her attention to, but be ready to get your grey cells all shook up.

Reluctant Organists - 2

(this article appeared in the August 2010 edition of the parish magazine)

I might have mentioned last month the rocks and sharp stones that bestrew the path of the Reluctant Organist, but I didn’t know the half of it then.

It was when I raised with the Treasurer, I thought quite politely, the matter of the customary Fee for services above and beyond the call of duty, that I was transfixed by a gimlet eye and informed in acid tones that the Fee for a Reluctant Organist was exactly the same, to the penny, as the fine for failing to sing in the choir.  In vain did I protest that I had hummed as well as strummed.  It cut no absolutely no ice.

I was particularly peeved because on Whit Sunday I had become the latest innocent victim of a cunning plan hatched by French organ composers to restore national pride after Agincourt.

French composers of organ music, you see, have a mischievous  streak, and they are never happier than when they are teasing the reluctant organist by starting a piece off innocuously enough on Page One in some easy key like F, with a nice tune and only the flute stop out, then introducing more and more sneaky sharps and flats after the first page turn, until suddenly, just as you’ve arrived at a really fast passage in six sharps and 11/16, you are expected to have enough free hands to pull out 19 more stops on the swell and 12 on the great while holding a nine-note chord with your feet, and the new ‘registration’ (as we organists call a particular combination of knobs and buttons) occupies half a page of extremely small print.  In French.

It is not surprising that ladies make good organists, because reading an organ score must be very much like reading a knitting pattern.  If you can translate K2, yfwd., sl.1, K2tog, psso, yfwd., K5, yfwd., sl1, K2tog. psso., yfwd., K1 into dexterous digital activity while simultaneously concentrating on daytime television then reading an organ score, even one by a French composer, must be an absolute doddle.  And it is worth noting that in a random sample of French organists, such as Olivier Messiaen (anag: “vile ear emission”) and Marie-Claire Alain (“a miracle alien air”), fully half are women.

The reason that there is so much French organ music is, of course, that French orchestras, like French farmers and French ferry operators, are always on strike, and churches and cathedrals there have learned the hard way to play safe.  Indeed, the great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (“calm is an essential”) got so exasperated that he wrote a symphony for Organ and Orchestra that still packs the concert halls because he cunningly fixed things so that nobody notices if the orchestra do not actually turn up.

But on one thing all Reluctant Organists agree – that the last word should come from their patron saint, perhaps the finest of all English-speaking women organists, the New Zealand-born Gillian Weir – 


“I are willing.”

Caveat emptor - 5

It does seem an awfully long time ago, but it's only, and exactly, a year since I last went mutton and cost the Notional Health Service a shedful of kiwi.

http://choirstalls.blogspot.com/2009/07/caveat-emptor-4.html

So - but only to bring the story up to date:


Same thing happened last week.  Mutton in the left toby.


Wiser this time, avoided the local health centre (or Lucrative Puncture Clinic) and phoned the walk-in centre in Blackpool.  That was 9:00am.


By 11:00am full hearing in afflicted doodle had been restored by a very competent nurse.


Thank you so much, Colette.  Please accept this huge bouquet of red cyber-roses and a big 'ug.

Reluctant Organists - 1

 (this article appeared in the July issue of the parish magazine.)

I don’t trust Church Organs.  Unlike the Church Piano, which has long been domesticated, the organ is a feral creature, apt to assert itself in unpredictable and possibly life-threatening ways.  The Church Piano comes equipped with a single keyboard, and makes only three sounds – plonk on the left, plink on the right, and a sort of muffled plunk in the middle (where it gets the most wear.)  The Church Organ comes with a bewildering array of keyboards, five in some instances such as Cathedrals, where the poor organist must need either a couple of assistants or at least a stepladder to use the one at the top.

The piano has two pedals – the left one and the right one, and is easy to remember which pedal does which job. The left one is the clutch, the right one the accelerator, I think, or it might be the other way round (pianos do not need a brake pedal, because they do not move about much or they go out of tune.)

The organ, in contrast, has dozens of pedals, whose function is not quite the same as the function of the pedals on the Church Piano, as every Reluctant Organist knows to his (or her) cost after stepping on one by mistake in a quiet bit of the service.

But it isn’t the pedals on the Church Organ that cause most trouble for the Reluctant Organist, who can always tie his or her ankles to the legs of the organ stool so there is no risk of an accident – and it isn’t even the keyboards in their manifold multiplicity.  It is all those knobs and buttons and things.  I’ve managed to work out that the one that says START turns the organ on, and the one that says STOP turns it off so you can hear what the Vicar is saying, and I’ve found the light switches, because they look like light switches, but as for the rest I confess that I am completely baffled.  The knobs, which you can pull out or push in, are supposed to change the sound that the organ emits, and to help you, they have labels on them, like Flute, or Trumpet, or Oboe, or Salicet, whatever that is (it sounds to me suspiciously like something you buy discreetly at the chemist’s.)  The problem is that if you pull one out either nothing happens or the organ just carries on sounding like an organ.   The trick is to pull them out in different combinations, I am told, and to help the Reluctant Organist at St Oswald’s there are five presets.  Well, I have tried the five presets, and in ascending order they sound like this: 1) very very quiet indeed; 2) very quiet indeed; 3) jolly quiet; 4) pretty quiet; and 5) absolutely deafening.

So I thought I’d look up ‘organ stops’ on the Internet, and apart from two returns which said ‘and thank heaven for that’ all I got was an advertisement for a DIY quadruple-bypass kit.

Anxiously, with a looming service to play for, I phoned a friend.  “Ah!”, he said.  “Presets start you off, but then you have to twiddle a bit.”

So I started twiddling a bit.  And bingo!  He was absolutely right.  I was thrilled.  When I found a combination that worked I wrote it down in a little notebook so that I could reproduce it.  I did it for all seven hymns and both voluntaries, and sat back, satisfied, then took the rest of Saturday off, confident that Sunday would be fine.

Well, evidently somebody changes the combinations daily for security reasons, which is why you were blasted out of your seats by Veni Creator Spiritus, and why Shine Jesus Shine sounded as though it was being played somewhere across the river by a kazoo band with mutes on, so it’s back to the drawing board.

I’ve got two more services to play for in August.  But I’m not sure I’ll have got the hang of the thing even by then, so it could well be back to the piano.  Must remember, though, to work out which pedal does what.  Oh, and book an oil change.

Hosepipe ban? Batten down the hatches...

Usually it rains just after I've washed the car.  All I have to do is creep up on the old Nissan with a foaming bucket and the neighbours groan and whip the garden furniture into the garage double-quick.  Every six months that car gets washed, whether it needs it or not.


But it wasn't me this time, honest.  After weeks of glorious weather, the local water board announced a hosepipe ban last week, since when it's been chucking it down, and I'm getting very suspicious about any outfit with 'United' in its name.


I was going to write one of those pieces that has my reader splitting his sides with mirth, but blow me!  I've been beaten to it.

http://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/jacqui-morley/Look-at-it-this-way.6411470.jp

I read it and uttered a hollow laugh.  We've got a garden like that, too.  It's so wet that all we can grow is rice.  From the plum trees at the very top of the garden, which you need a wet suit to reach in August and September when the fruit is ripe, to the house there's a fall of about two metres (more than six feet, grandad), and boy, does water move downhill or doesn't it?  

This was our local Victoria Plum Falls in September two years ago - rather more water coming downhill all at once than our 10cm main drain (4", pops) can cope with.  We wouldn't mind so much if it was the sea that had breached the sea wall, or the river that had burst its banks, but for heaven's sake, this was just rain.


Hosepipe ban?  Pshaw.  The next time it rains I'll ask United to get round here pretty sharpish with a portable reservoir.  Fill it no time, we could.

Scams and Very Honourable Companies Indeed

Gosh! We won £23,500 today!  Brill!  We can get the central heating fixed, repair the leaky roof in the sun-room, and pay someone to sort out the noisy valve in the cistern that wakes everybody in the street up at 5am and because of which we are now permanently constipated.


And it's all thanks to a nice man called Friedrich Müller, who runs his philanthropic enterprise from an accommodation address in Belgium, at the premises of AMA, an advertising company who specialise in the gentle art of giving away shed-loads of money. N't.


But if you too have received this wonderful promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, don't phone the plumber just yet.  Fill in the claim form by all means, to be sure of your £23,500, but don't be surprised when you receive a discount voucher for £1.50 which you can trade in with a company called Vital Beauty against a £32 bottle of cod-liver oil.  Just write them a letter pointing out their mistake.


Scammers are parasites.  They operate just within the law so that they can carry on conning people - usually elderly and vulnerable people - but we can't call successful scammers devious, cheating, rapacious crooks when they do operate within the law.  Just.  It would be libellous. And to call them evil, scheming scum who want to cheat your grannie out of her life savings would be very wrong indeed- because many of the companies that use game-show techniques to sell goods from little catalogues operate wholly and entirely within the law.  Just.  So I am sure that Vital Beauty is a bona-fide trading company, just the same as Swiss Home Shopping (a sister company) is, and the Office of Fair Trading is of like mind. They drew attention to some trivial little matter about the size of the wording in the bit about the promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, and Vital Beauty responded immediately (Google Vital Beauty and see that it is indeed a company with a considerable reputation.)


So I am convinced.  I shall return the forms and book that plumber. The cheque should be with me in a few days.


Less honourable companies may deserve to be made to run their businesses from a small room in Strangeways, but if the OFT say that Mr Mueller's empire is entirely above board, who am I, a mere OAP, to doubt it?


Cough up, Herr Mueller.  I am sure your £32 bottle of cod-liver oil is worth every penny. And with your kind promise of £23,500 I can now afford it.

Irresponsible journalism

You’re sitting there about to have your tea, and having survived the public self-humiliation of a load of brain-dead would-bes whipped on by a fantasy S/M madame, you keep the little telly on for the relative sanity of the informative 6 o’clock – news?  News it isn’t. Every night it is the same tired old formula. It is red-top tabloid telly at its worst - sex, crime, scandal, Europe-cut-off-by-fog xenophobia, celebs and bloody football.

In this household football is regarded as being just about as interesting as string, yet a fixed percentage of 6 o’clock programmes’ air-time just has to be devoted to it, whether or not anything has actually happened in this game for little boys with nothing better to do which telly has turned into a multinational industry, so we have to endure gobfuls of padding and gobbledygook from lounge lizards who haven’t shaved for three weeks and who obviously don’t own a tie between them.

And the troubles in Northern Ireland have erupted again, as they will continue to do while tribes think it is perfectly normal to taunt each other in provocative fancy dress parades.  Northern Ireland’s troubles have produced many wonderful, brave women, but it is still a mediaeval, male-dominated society where fathers give their little boys guns and tell them to go out to play and women are supposed to know their play-ass (and where even vowels get tortured to death.)

And that is about the only positive thing I can think of to justify the colossal social cost of football – that it ritualises tribalism, puts bromide in its tea, and acts as a safety valve.

..ooOOoo..

And don’t stop me in full rant, because another thing that is sickening is the air-time that these wretched programmes devote to sentimental stories about ‘our boys’ killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a brutal fact, but if your son or daughter joins the army there is a distinct possibility that they could be killed.  The risk of being killed is part of the job. If your offspring were not willing to take that risk they could have found themselves a nice,  safe job in a supermarket or a library or doorstep selling the stupor-inducing joys of Sky TV.  But they didn’t. They volunteered to do a job that they thought could make the world a better place.  The really sad thing about war is that so many altruistic genes never have a chance to reproduce because of an accidental bullet or an enveloping  wave of mustard gas. And what are we left with?

Losing a child is awful.  I do know.  What bereft parents need at times of great shock and grief is comfort from loving friends and family – an enfolding arm of genuine human compassion, not some minor telly celeb reading a script written by a semi-literate who has never heard of the subjunctive and wouldn’t recognise it if it bit them on their media studies PhD.

What bereaved parents and families do not need is the vicarious tears that these abject reporters – no, not reporters, ‘presenters’ of scripted current-affairs human-interest magazine shows – invite us to shed.  They are crocodile tears, and they do us all a disservice.  They invite us to be participants in the sort of sloppy sentimentalism that surrounded the death – in an all-too-ordinary tragic car accident – of somebody who was probably originally a normal, happy, even if rather privileged young woman until she got pushed into an unhappy marriage.  We allow our press to build Disney figures out of people so that we can rejoice when they don’t live up to cartoon perfection, and it is this same social cancer which throws up people – and, God help us, voters – who think that a psychopath like Raoul Moats is a folk hero.

It must have been blindingly obvious to the editors of these programmes from Day 1 that soldiers were going to be killed in the Middle East, just as they were killed in Northern Ireland, and just as they were killed in Ypres or on the Somme or the beaches of Dunquerque, and that by committing themselves to covering the first deaths in detail they had hung a millstone round their necks.  When does the air-time run out?  500 deaths? 1,000?  In the Battle of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers died in one day.  Difficult to fit the reely reely exciting football news in that day, hey?

..ooOOOoo..

Uncontrolled social networking and low standards of journalism encourage us to live in fantasy worlds. Older people may have the wisdom to resist it, but for a new generation of children this cartoon, Facebook world is more real than boring old school and boring old parents.  It isn’t only the pervert in the shabby raincoat at the school gates that parents should be worried about.  It is also the sort of brainwashing that children are being subjected to by forces that parents have no control over.  We live in a society in which ignorance and stupidity are regarded as virtues: a society in which newspaper editors can run campaigns against paedophiles and not care very much if their bumpkin readers bash up paediatricians by mistake. Well, it sells newspapers to people who never learned to think.

The next time you are tempted to lay a £2 bunch of flowers at the roadside where a life was extinguished ask yourself what you think you are doing.  It is a gesture as cheap as it is contemptible.  It says ‘O look how hearing about this death has affected me’.   It says: ‘O watch me beating my breast in woe.’  

The vicious me-ist ideology of a grocer’s daughter from Grantham led you to believe that you were the centre of the universe. But ask yourself how this little death of someone you'd never even met, let alone known, has really affected you.  Did it make you cry?  Oh poor you. 

It would be such a great comfort to the bereaved, knowing that.

A Bonfire of the Inanities - please!

Imagine the scene.  You arrive early to make sure of a parking space.  You go into the foyer, mingle, show your tickets, and buy a programme (for Sweeney Todd, actually.)  Then you enter the auditorium.  It is dimly lit.  It is full of theatrical smoke representing fog.  The curtains are open ready for the prologue, so the first set is ready, though on stage time is standing still, just waiting.  You are shown to your seats by somebody who appears to be in costume and in role, and you are momentarily confused - am I late?  Has the show started?

The idea of getting rid of the first big barrier between players and audience - the proscenium arch (itself a relatively modern invention) - goes back at least to the 1960s, when rival telly adopted the proscenium arch (which it still hasn't learned to let go of).  Apron stages, theatre-in-the-round became popular because they were theatrical devices to draw audiences into the drama, instead of  just spectating  it.  And the curtain - that big symbolic barrier - went at the same time.

Theatre is all about engaging an audience's attention, and preparing them for that suspension of disbelief which is at the centre of that magical world.

And directors are very good at their job.  They know that audiences have learned all the old tricks, so they find new ones, which is why the best of them rise to the eminence of theatres like The Swan in Stratford-on-Avon.  Michael Bogdanov's production of Howard Brenton's new translation of Faust in 1995 threw out the fixed, eye-level stage as the common factor in all theatre until then.  He used the space above the floor as well, so actors worked from platforms suspended from ropes. and even from trapezes, so that the idea of 'set'  itself was no longer a certainty to hold onto.

The production of Sweeney I went to wasn't at the Swan, however.  It was in our village hall.  But what it had in common with the Faust was the genius of a director who knows exactly what she or he is doing, has a very precise vision of what is going to take place on the night, and,  crucially,  knows how to achieve it.

If this sounds like a eulogy,  it is very far from it,  for the vision of directors has now been brought to nothing.  They can get rid of the proscenium, they can get rid of the curtain, but there's one thing they can't get rid of - silly, intrusive bureaucracy, and the 'ealth an' safety message that has to be read out to audiences before every show in case somebody in the theatre is totally illiterate or has just been smuggled into the country from Bolokistan and doesn't understand green or EXIT.

I had the job of introducing an evening of song by two choirs last week, and momentary madness took hold of me, and somehow the 'ealth an' safety announcement got sung (to an Anglican chant).  It seemed to go down rather well with an audience which by now has got rather piddled off having its intelligence insulted every time it goes into a Big Room.

And - I haven't been arrested yet!    So I am now working on a four-part version of the same announcement for unaccompanied choir, and a friend is setting it for female vocalist and small jazz combo.  Versions for comb-and-paper and full symphony orchestra will be available soon.  The 'ealth an' safety announcement is so important, to a bureaucrat,  that it really ought to be the star of the show.

But then,  as the Romans used to say: "ars longa - vita brevis" - fat arse, short life.

And quite right too.

PS  If you ever meet a bureaucrat, please give him or her a copy of Bleak House.  It has some rather long words in it which they will love, even though they won't know what they mean.