Les Petites Vacances

Rugby World Cup 2023 is well and truly underway and the Overgraduate was in the South of France for an extended weekend of sport and general jollity. Before anything else is said I must thank AO, JRS, AW, AS, and BH for their company on the trip, most particularly to those of them who had a hand in the organisation. OG steered well clear of taking any responsibility in that regard - my role was to pay up when asked and to make as good a pass as possible at being acceptable company. A brilliant trip.

OG's chosen reading - quel poseur

We travelled by train - Eurostar to Paris and then on to Marseille by TGV. These trips were a reminder of just how awesome train travel can be. Reserved seats, no over-selling and clean toilets. On the outward leg I read Private Eye - is it my imagination or did this used to be much funnier? On the return I did my faux intellectual bit and tried to make sense of a copy of Cahiers du Cinema. A barely-scraped French A level more than four decades ago is not the best equipment for this task. Fun though. 

We stayed in the stunning La Ciotat, twenty miles outside Marseille. AO had harnessed AirB'n'B and come up with a ridiculously luxurious apartment. On arrival the suave owner told us we could use any of the building's three pools. As for La Ciotat, well what a nice place. This is a mild understatement.

La Ciotat Vieux Port

Even the moments of mild trauma that inevitably accompany such a trip turned to our benefit. On Saturday under the blameless, burning skies we walked to La Ciotat's quaint railway station (where the Lumiere Brothers filmed their famous steam-train arriving and ushered in the age of cinema) only to receive the news that there was a local train strike. How were the intrepid half dozen to get into Marseille for England's opening match against Argentina? Here that shitty A level finally came into its own. A fractured call to our property manager, Sarah (whose English was on a par with my French), somehow managed to convey that we needed a taxi for six to the Stade Marseille. Sarah came up trumps and we all crammed into a Skoda for the trip. Our driver even arranged our return trip with his mate Phillipe. This proved a turning point in the weekend - Phillipe and his absurdly luxurious Tesla (I take back all I have ever said about Elon Musk) became our transport of choice - he took us back into Marseille for the Scotland v South Africa match on Sunday, took us home that evening and carried us to the station at La Ciotat on our Monday departure. Bravo Phillipe. From this near-disaster it transpired that we had avoided all manner of tribulations with local public transport.  

France had been a joyous host, boosted into a good mood by their team's dismantling of New Zealand in the opening match of the tournament. I should however point out that the stradium authorities in Marseille got it badly wrong for the England v Argentina match. The arrangements for entry into the stadium were dire and dangerous. The goodwill of rugby fans rescued the situation as boisterous Argentinians and wary Englishmen (most of them expecting an Argentinian victory) demonstrated admirable restraint. Enough will have been written elsewhere about England's short-handed victory - they spent almost the entire match reduced to fourteen men after Tom Curry's dimissal. Suffice to say this was a spirited, stoic, professional performance.

I will finish on a vaguely sour note. Phillipe got us back to the apartment on Sunday in time to watch the thunderous game between Wales and Fiji. The sour note? Matthew Carley's refereeing. I had hoped we might have got past the institutional elitism that sees the mistreatment of the 'tier 2' rugby nations. Sadly we have not. Just ask yourself this - would the All Blacks have been as mistreated as were Fiji? No they would not.         
 

Laughter Is Permissible, But Not At The Expense Of Vigilance

In my world-weary way these things make me laugh even as I remember their significance. First some looky-likeys.

Trump

 

 

Mussolini

Silly I know (and not original) but it casts some light in the shade. Consider this, taken from the Afterword to Frank Dikotter's catalogue of twentieth century infamy, Dictators: the Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century:

Vigilance, however, is not the same as gloom. Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century. Most of all, dictators who surround themselves with a cult of personality tend to drift into a world of their own, confirmed in their delusions by the followers who surround them. They end up making all major decisions on their own. They see enemies everywhere, at home and abroad. As hubris and paranoia take over, they seek more power to protect the power they already have. But since so much hinges on the judgements they make, even a minor miscalculation can cause the regime to falter, with devastating consequences. In the end, the biggest threat to dictators comes not just from the people, but from themselves.

I buy books new and old and cannot resist a browse along even the dingiest charity shop shelves. In an Alnwick back-street I unearthed a fiftieth anniversay edition of Robert Penn Warren's novel of American politics, All the King's Men. Warren was a wise man and his novel is thick with insight, but I doubt that even a man so sagacious could have conjured up a character to match Trump - he would have found the whole thing too fanciful. We are cursed to live in interesting times. So laugh to scorn but remember that what you laugh at is real. 

More cheery stuff to finish. Almost eight years after it debuted I have finally got around to watching the twenty pacy episodes of Dickensian. Pacy and clever, bloody clever. Derivative, of course, almost by definition, but bloody clever. I really enjoyed it. It is on iPlayer. Just when I'm going all free-market I find something that makes me fall in love with the licence fee all over again. How gleefully annoying.

 

Le Retour Du Chien Blanc

It sounds so much more melodramatic when I say it in French. Forgive me but yesterday I felt like an extra in one of those sullen art-house movies they used to show on BBC2 on a Saturday night. That plague-dog depression had made one of its (thankfully infrequent these days) returns. All of which makes my last blog entry seem ludicrously optimistic. Hey Ho. Anyway I feel much better today which rather serves to confirm that one of the key ingredients to my condition is stupidity. Keep taking the pills.

So having got that self-indulgent paragraph out of my system, now we can turn to the serious business of the palette of film noir. I saw something on Sky Arts recently that ventured the opinion that Billy Wilder invented the colour palette for film noir in his brilliant Double Indemnity. I beg to disagree. The palette predates the genre. I was reminded of this when re-watching Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece Metropolis. The threatening deployment of light and shade and the dagger-like intrusion of shadow are there. The tale itself is a dystopian melodrama with an incongruous happy ending. It is rightly lauded and makes an important companion piece to another Lang masterpiece, the indisputably noir The Big Heat - this my second favourite film noir (ranking only behind the supreme Touch of Evil). As for Metropolis, 89/90. Mind you, there is a more modern restoaration of the film than the one I have and the mark might go up if I ever encounter this purportedly definitive version. Another good reason to look forward and not be depressed. 

 

A Temporary Attack Of Reason

Not, I suspect, that any of you are overly concerned, I do apologise for not subjecting you to much of my mind-dump (what an inelegant but apposite term) of late. As the world spins more and more crazily on its ethical axis, The Overgraduate (aka Big Fat Pig) finds himself moved counter-intuitively towards a sane acceptance of the terms of his existence. This may disappoint a majority of the audience (such as it is) but I must say it is a comforting position in which to find oneself.

But why this hitherto uncharacteristic ease of mind, whose major symptom is to neglect the bile-filled pages of this blog? Well, that's what is strange. The things that really get the Pig's goat are still out there, bold and brazen as ever. A Conservative government stocked high with mediocrities. An Opposition led by a second-rate lawyer who saw no shame in riding shotgun on the Corbyn express. Donald Trump still holding court. The menace of inflation still stalking us, most people seemingly too young to remember just how destructive it can be. Crap weather (no, that was a joke). The filthy rich (and I mean by this, the genuinely filthy). Virtue-signalling as a substitute for public policy. All of these are still extant. And yet the Pig is content.

I have come to an acceptance that I cannot put these things right. I reserve the the right to rail against them again in the future but just for now I am sustained by a conviction that it is time to tend my own garden. I am hopefully approaching a watershed in my life - finally putting academic study aside in favour of a less burdensome (to this second-rate mind) but useful curiosity. That junction in my time-line is part of it, but more salient is a a quasi-beatific mood that has settled on me. My family are healthy and happy. I am proud of them. I am flattered by a long and happy marriage. The Precious Jag is running smoothly. The Precious Petrol-Mower cuts satisfyingly (tending my garden - see what I did there with my earlier metaphor?). I have been firmly stoic about a hamstring/glute injury which has kept me from running and have rediscovered the joys of riding the Precious Bike. My golf is stuck in a manageable decline that is more than compensated for by the company I keep on the golf course. 

So nothing very earth-shattering but, in sum, health-giving. All of this passed through my mind last week as we said earthly farewells to my brother-in-law. We were not close, indeed he had long-since escaped Birmningham to a new life in the unglamorous environs of Weston-Super- Mare. He was brought home for his funeral, organised with typical care and attention by the Groupie. He was only fifty-nine when he passed. Yet his funeral (and all its catholic fripperies) turned itself into a respectful but joyous celebration of his cheery life. He had, by quirk and misadventure (something to which he was prone) attached himself to a new family in Weston. They clearly loved him and the mystery of faith helped to salve the grief of all at a young death. I struggle on a daily basis with my religion but you do have to grant that a good funeral goes a long way.

As I wrote that last paragraph, the sun came out. So that is enough. I cannot always promise to be so cheerful but for now it is a nice feeling.         

I Went To Manchester And It Didn't Rain

All of which was a pity since after my return to good old Brum, the rain has hardly left Manchester alone. I was there for the cricket and it looks as if the destiny of the Ashes will be settled by the intervention of the weather. England have utterly outplayed the Australians in this match but you have to have a poor medium-term memory to be oblivious of previous occasions where England have got away with it. So no complaints from this quarter - those should be reserved for the gratuitous gifting of the first test to the Aussies - see earlier grumpy entry.

All is forgiven

Our day at Old Trafford was a real treat. We saw Jonny Bairstow at his pugnacious best and we saw the Aussies reduced to pleasing dishevilment. Gratifying. Sadly one has to comment on the truly shocking toilet provision within the ground. Half hour queues to avail oneself of a squalid sewer is not acceptable. I feel a strongly-worded letter coming on.

So what else? Not much to be honest. I was having what I hope will be my last examined encounter with Shakespeare and Bagehot last week and found myself mentally drained as a result. Then a day on the quasi-lash at Old Trafford left this poor little poppet physically empty as well. Time for the Pig to act his age not his shoe size.

A thought - Italian red wines. Yes please.   

A Great Film, A New Calculus, And The Story Of Three Yorkshiremen

I am always careful not to bandy the word 'great' about too careleesly in my frequent opining on films. But you will have to indulge me in the context of His Girl Friday. Even my Halliwell agrees, describing it as quite possibly the funniest film ever made. I'm not quite sure I'd go that far although I can't, off the top of my head, suggest a better candidate. It is a lightning-paced verbal firecracker of a movie. Based on Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur's stage play, the film takes the daring (and outrageously successful) risk of changing the sex of one of the leads into a woman - Hildy Johnson, played superbly by Rosalind Russell. Her co-star is Cary Grant, possibly more briliant that in any other role and, yes, I have seen Philadelphia Story. 94/100. 

Next, that new calculus. I refer to cricket and the much discussed 'Bazball', itself a nomenclature not loved by its principal practitioners, Messrs Stokes and Brendan McCullum. Mind you Stephen Greenblatt has never taken to 'New Historicism' even though any fule kno that he invented that critical method. Well, Bazball has been worrying me a tad. If we ignore (as we should) the test against Ireland, England, by their own generosity had thrown away two successive tests - the last against New Zealand in the winter and the first in the Ashes at Edgbaston. I like Zac Crawley as a batsman and I find supportable the view that he will become a worthy test batsman. However he gave a completely pudding-headed interview after the Edgbaston debacle in which he parroted the rot about the result not mattering and being in the entertainment business. I've been a sports fan all my life and I can tell you Zac that most of us regard the pursuit of victory as the foremost requisite of professional sport. Yes, you can take risks (including that of defeat) where they open up greater prospects of overall triumph, but throwing international matches away on the basis of a sense of theatre? No, that's professional wrestling and that is not sport.

Anyway, I can forgive the defeat at Lord's, just as I can forgive Carey's dismissal of the criminally negligent Bairstow. Such things tend to come back and bite you and Carey duly endured a tough time at Headingley. Mind you there was no redemption for Bairstow who kept wicket poorly and contributed bugger all with the bat. Which is not to say that Bairstow doesn't have plenty of credit in the bank after last season's heroics.

The Headingley test was almost too tense to watch but I managed it. Good to see one of the nice guys, Chris Woakes, a proper Brummie, scoring the winning runs. His boyhood cricket coach was my great mate ICW at Aston Manor CC. Fame by association!

Nice guys do win.

So those three Yorkshiremen. Bairstow is one and, England's victory notwithstanding, he had a poor match, as did, quite untypically, Joe Root. His droppped catch off Marsh in the first innings nearly cost England the match. Root owes us nothing. Which leaves the third Tyke. The old saw is that when Yorkshire cricket is strong, so is England's. In these days of a criminally diminished County Championship, this is harder to support but in the credit column we have to list Harry Brook. He batted with all the sureness of the infant Bambi in the first innings but then was lion-hearted in the second. Better to be lucky than good. Brook might just be both.  

I'm Not One Of Those People ... But

I'm not one of those people who puts photos of what I'm eating on social media ... but here is an exception that proves a rule.

If you ever wondered how there come to be shortages of cod stocks, well take a look at the size of the portion that the Groupie enjoyed at The Anglesey Arms in Menai Bridge on Saturday. Bloody brilliant. There was even enough for Big Fat Pig here to have to polish of the remnants.

 

And in the background you can catch a glimpse of the Pig's tower burger. Also bloody brilliant but just in case you are not convinced here is a close-up of that meal as well.

All part and parcel of a short but enjoyable visit to Ynys Mon. We had worked up an appetite for these gargantuan portions on a long walk around Trearddur Bay. Stunning. The only cause for complaint is the level of parking charges that Mon Council see fit to levy - bang out of order and yet another example of political small-mindedness. Don't start me on punitive Council Tax.