Tommy

I try to keep at least one non-fiction book going at any one time, alongside a couple of fictions. In this, as in so much else, I find myself inadequately mimicking the learning habits of my late father. I have just finished Richard Holmes's Tommy: the British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918. I have just noticed that Dad had written a Christmas message inside the cover when he and Mum gave it to me. How he would have loved Helen's wedding last weekend.

I commend Tommy to you. It is compendious, seven-hundred plus pages, but never tedious. It is impossible to read of WW1 without wondering just how you might have responded if you had been called to arms. One-hundred-and-twenty-three of the Aston Old Edwardians who went to war would never return. To this day we play our rugby on the ground bought in their memory. My generation has been spared.

Holmes quotes C.E. Montague whose war memoir was tellingly titled Disenchantment, but the power of the quoted words is not in that disaffection but rather in that agnosticism that is a necessary shield for all but the most gifted/afflicted:

But the war had to be won: that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties. 

A Warm Little Hand - Love And Letting Go

Last Saturday at the Fitzrovia Chapel (beautiful) Helen Frances Eileen Roberts (better known to you as Daughter Number One/DN1) was married to Christopher William Larkin. It was an altogether splendid occasion - she, of course, looked beautiful; he, of course, looked proud as punch. God bless them.

It was a celebration to reaffirm your faith in the younger generation. Helen, Chris and their friends partied joyously but properly. The weather was kind, the venues (the aforementioned Chapel and, afterwards, The Coin Laundry) excellent, and all of this suffused with that mightiest of human emotions - love. 

Big Fat Proud Father Pig made a speech at the reception. Alongside the eulogy at my father's funeral, this rated as the public oration about which I was most nervous. It went well. I took as my Proustian trigger the cherished memory of DN1's warm little hand in mine: when she first came to the hospital to meet DN2; at her first visit to the cinema (the Regal in Wadebridge to see The Jungle Book); as we skimmed stones over a frozen tarn. Now that hand is released and entrusted to Chris. God bless them.

Please Pander To My Vanity

If you type 'Shakespeare and Bagehot' into Google, the top result will take you to my doctoral thesis, now deposited in the open access area of the BCU Library. If that sounds like too much work, don't worry, here is the link https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/15794/

Thank you and goodnight.

Epic As An Adjective And Other Exercises In Writing

A weekend of sunshine on the island as the Pig enjoyed a brief break at Plas Piggy. Now as you know, the Pig is well down with the kids and he therefore wants to describe the weekend as epic.

Those of you who have been paying attention for the decade and a half that the Pig has been writing this guff, will know that another adjective is also pretty important - 'precious', as in the Precious Jag, the Precious Petrol Mower, and the Precious Bike. Well here's another entry to the Piggy Hall of Fame - the Precious Drain Rods. These got an ultimately epic outing on Friday evening. The enjoyment of using rods is in direct proportion to the scale of the blockage under attack. Unless you have done it, you cannot comprehend the adrenaline rush that comes at the point of rodded release of a major shitberg - though prose of the same quality as what this sentence is, gives you a pretty good idea. The Pig even made a trip to Screwfix in Llangefni to add a new tool to his set of Precious Rods. Behold the Bailey drop scraper.

 

Pretty exciting I'm sure you'd agree. But there was more and here you will see how clever the Pig is being with his vocabulary - because as he enjoyed an epic high tea of tinned hot dogs in appropriate finger rolls, he watched a film that can accurately be described as an epic - you see that's a noun! The film in question is not epic in its artistic attainment but is epic in scale and ambition. Nicholas and Alexandra may be a tad plodding at points but as a dramatic primer on the retreat of Mother Russia from the divine right of kings it seves very well. 68/100. 

And on the way home the Pig listened to Steely Dan. Epic.

Interim Report On The Great Oleaginous One

I refer, of course, to Sir Keir Starmer. I suspect, much to my regret, that I am one of those people he refers to as having 'the broadest shoulders' and that I will be paying more than a proportionate share of the price of rescuing the country's economy. It's all blather of course, economically illiterate and powered by that great engine, envy. Don't get me wrong, I count my self blessed to have what I have but just in case his ridiculous class-warrior deputy, Angela Rayner, has missed the point I would point out that all that the Pig and the Groupie have attained has been through taxed income and that neither of us has ever had even a day of private education. I agree that the country is in a mess and that the Tories are a shower of shit but this is not the way to put us back on track.

Oh well, at least we don't live in America. For the sake of what is left in the way of societal decency, Kamala Harris must please defeat Trump. The difficult part is that after she has done this great service to the world, she must eschew the hare-brained poilicies she tends to offer up on those rare occasions when she is tempted to talk turkey. Government price caps anybody? 

By the way, if you want to see some relatable rugby unon on the television, seek out New Zealand's National Provincial Championship on Sky.

Distinguishing The First Rate From The Great

No sooner have I immersed myself in the murky waters of film rankings and pulled myself out than I find myself volunteering to dive right back in again. The reason - Richard Atennborough's seminal work, Ghandi. 

This is a stately and properly sympathetic biopic about Mahatma Gandhi, whilst also giving the viewer a balanced overview of the sacred wonder and worry that is an independent India. It is masterful. But is it a great film? Ben Kingsley's central performance is magnificent, compelling even. I would say on a par with Peter O'Toole's tour de force in Lawrence of Arabia, but the movie that contains it arguably falls just shy of the greatness of David Lean's masterpiece. Don't get me wrong, Gandhi is, by a comfortable margin, a first class film but it is, perhaps, the undoubted saintliness of the central character that contains the germ of the film's slight defect. Lawrence was no saint and in his neuroses we have the stuff of great drama. So that leaves me perching on the edge of a designation of greatness for Gandhi. In the final analysis the film leaves me awestruck but not anxious to see it again soon. 89/100.   

The Impossibility Of Rankings And The Irresistibility Of Doing It Anyway

I'm on about films again. Those of you who have been with me since the beginning (for which thanks) might recall that my film reviews were intially accompanied by gradings out of 10, with half point demarcations. At some point I refined this to marks out of one hundred with single point separations. When I took this revolutionary step it was underwritten in my mind by the grading (to which I had become accustomed) applied to undergraduate essays, that is to say, sixty betokens a 2:1, seventy a First. Belatedly therefore I admit that when I award a mark of seventy or more, I am classifying a movie as first class. I have also to admit that, because I do have a life outside the blogosphere, I do not go out of my way to watch films that are likely to prove crap. There may therefore seem to be a surfeit of Upper Seconds and Firsts. 

Explanation out of the way. Now, about the impossibility of such rankings - hardly needs any explanation does it really? So often one is comparing apples with pears. But fun anyway and this was all brought back to me yesterday when greatly enjoying watching Mrs Harris Goes to Paris. This is a confection of the type that Ealing Studios might have made in the forties of fifties. Deceivingly slight but quite beautifully put together and faultlessly played. Not a text of soaring ambition but one crafted with quiet skill. First Class. It's on Netflix. 72/100