The Seventh Age Of Man - Day 1

The Boy Shakespeare knew a thing or two.

                                  Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

And so the Pig has embarked on his seventh decade. It is only a number but I must confess that this one has given me more pause for thought than any previous landmark. I am tempted to feel old. Is that a bad thing? Rage, rage against the dying of the light, as another poet of note put it.

If only more clients had cause to be that grateful

Sans teeth? Quite good on that score - despite close on forty years of rugby I have lost only one tooth. Sans eyes - well I am wearing my cheap reading glasses to write this but otherwise my laser-enhanced eyesight still does me proud. Sans taste - aye there's the rub. Nothing particularly wrong on that score, apart from the uneducated palate that has accompanied me all my life. I still fight against this handicap and as if to prove that there is life in the old dog yet, my last two nights' drinking ought to satisfy any oenophile who has strayed onto this site. On Sunday I blew the dust off a present from a grateful client from my former life, indeed a client at the heart of the best work I ever did. Dom Perignon Cuvee 1992. Yum yum; a delicate mousse, and a nutty smoothness.

Then last night for my birthday tea I had steak, chips and onion rings - my request. My other culinary favourite had arrived at lunchtime - my Mum's quiche delivered to the doorstep. Spoilt brat. Anyway, to accompany my steak (beautifully cooked by the Groupie) I opened the penultimate bottle of the La Serra Barolo 2001 from the cellar (alright, I admit it's a cupboard). The Groupie had got me four bottles of this divine stuff for my fiftieth birthday, having first encountered it at the Fat Duck. Yum, yum, yum. The odds are against the final bottle lasting to my seventieth. 

So after this a day of lethargy, I have resolved not to mope. I have been blessed to enjoy six previous ten year childhoods (the Bard got that bit wrong) so I am going to make the most of this one. Sans everything? Not bloody likely mate. Not yet.    

A Book; A Film

First of all the book. As my recent reading binge continued I found on the shelf a pristine copy of John Williams' Stoner. None the wiser? No, neither was I. I susect I must have bought it when using some book vouchers and what will have attracted me is the statement on the front cover of the Vintage edition, 'The greatest novel you've never read.' A big claim indeed and, of course, very silly and immeasurable. However having now read the novel, I have to say that there is something in that attention-grabbing statement. The text takes wilfully low-key material (the life of an obscure academic) and treats it without sensation but in doing so gets at the human condition. There is one mildly clunky (and temporary) change of point of view in the middle of the book but even that can be excused as it shines a piercing light on a domestic tragedy. This is altogether a beautiful piece of writing. It may indeed be the greatest novel you have never read, in which case I heartily recommend that you fill the gap. Mind you, it is always fun to hear the other side of the story so here is a review which denounces Stoner as middle-brow and snobbish - Not Everybody Must Get Stoner . So that's me told!

The film. Writer Richard Curtis is nothing if not a sentimentalist and Yesterday teeters on the edge of saccharine without quite plunging over into unbearability. The premise is an intriguing one - a musician wakes in hosital in a world where no one except him has heard of the Beatles. I won't spoil the rest of it. Amusing, sweet and a great soundtrack. 78/100.

Ooh and here's a thing. I'm sixty today so expect an outbreak of mature behaviour from the Pig. Yeah right.

Writers Write - Good Writing Has Its Own Necessity

By way of haphazard research I find myself reading a collection of C.H. Sisson articles, Anglican Essays. I say haphazard because I first came across Sisson because of his elegant but deeply felt animosity towards the work of Walter Bagehot. These very Anglican essays leave poor old Walter out of it. If you want to see Walter condemned then search out Sisson's The Case of Walter Bagehot.

Anyway here is a bit of Sisson that damns a lack of felicity in the written word. He puts it so well that you find yourself scared to go back to writing:

But these are large claims, and Good is a dangerous thing to be sure you are Doing. Moreover, good writing has its own necessity, a humble one no doubt, but even a divine should think carefully before he asserts that he is excused from it.

US poster

 Enough of this. Let me tell you about a nice film, underrated by the critics I think. Released here as The Perfect Catch, it is in fact (and as it was released in the USA) the americanised version of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. As with the earlier film of Hornby's High Fidelity the change of continent does no harm, indeed in the case of The Perfect Catch the switch from football to baseball adds to the fun - Boston's miraculous season in 2004 being intrinsically more dramatic even than Arsenal's 1989 league title. 77/100. 

Call For The Dead

My reading rush continues. As Blur didn't quite say, it gives me a sense of enormous well-being. I suspect that I wasn't really concentrating when first I read it some time ago, because odd bits of Call for the Dead have come back to me in the last couple of days. However the denouement had completely eluded me. Could be my age. I hope not.

I like Le Carre: he writes beautifully and even when his novels are wandering around not doing very much (this mild criticism applies more, I think, to the later novels) they keep you wrapped-up in the prose. This, his first book, is taut and concise. Not (obviously) as good as his master-work A Perfect Spy, but definitely worthy of your attention.

A Vulgarising Influence

I have been rooting around in Walter Bagehot's journalism again and was struck by a passage from a piece written for The Economist dated 17 May 1873. Bagehot is rehearsing (yet again one might justifiably comment) his famous diagnosis of the dignified/efficient dichotomy as explanatory of the durability of the English constitution. (And incidentallly I use the descriptor 'English' deliberately because that is what Bagehot invariably did).

We hold therefore that Mr. Bright was quite right and wise in not expressing any distaste to the abstract object of the republican working men's ambition. It is a very natural political ambition for working men to feel. They see their class much more completely shut out from the objects of political ambition than they would be in the United States, where any one of them might rise, as Abraham Lincoln did, from rail-splitter to President, and, very naturally indeed, they do not count the cost of a change. They do not see from what sort of evils the aristocracy and monarchy still protect us. They do not realise the vulgarising influence of the worship of mere wealth.  

No prize which world leader I was moved to think about. I think it's dangerously close to being an obsession with me. Oh well, it gives me something to do with my down time.

Writers Read

The urge to read has remained with me as we go deeper into the coronavirus lockdown. In the last week I went straight from Simon Raven's Friends in Low Places to its successor in the Alms for Oblivion sequence, The Sabre Squadron. To my mind this is the best of the ten novels. It can profitably be read without reference to the other books, but once you have read it I suspect you will want to search out the remainder.

After the scabrous Raven, a change of tack altogether. I fancied a chunk of comfort reading so it was back to a childhood favourite author, Arthur Ransome. I lazily thought I had read all the Swallows and Amazons tracts but I had overlooked Missee Lee. A book which would today have child protectors rushing to condemn it and which might very well also be deemed racist, it rockets along at breakneck pace and is a plain and simple delight.

Politics still intrudes. In America the Democrats have at least stopped fighting each other and will hopefully direct all their energy to defeating the narcissistic sociopath that is Donal Trump. Mind you whether the selection of someone as obviously second-rate as Joe Biden to lead the fight is a good one must be very open to question. Good luck to them in any event. In 1980s America I met Republicans who were very thoroughly decent people but one has to say that the amoral manner in which today's GOP has fallen in behind Trump should leave members thoroughly ashamed.

At home I'm afraid I have to say that I have always found something vaguely unpleasant in the phenomenon of Keir Starmer. Yet another bloody lawyer, he was a good enough prosecutor to attract a knighthood under a Tory regime. Despite his carefully cultivated appearance of moderation he had no problem falling in behind the laughable policies of Corbyn. He started his leadership of the Labour Party by disavowing factional opposition for the sake of opposition and the very next day published a mealy-mouthed attack on the conduct of the coronavirus crisis. When Boris Johnson fell seriously ill Starmer blathered self-serving bollocks about constitutional procedures. Sanctimonious prig.

But hey ho, the sun is shining, the Pig ran five miles this morning and there is one glass of Chateauneuf-du-Pape left from last night's bottle (it was a bank holiday so therefore does not count as a weekday) - the recliner in the garden is calling and the Pig is going to read another chapter of John Wilders' The Lost Garden, a consideration of Shakespeare's history plays (including those of Rome) in a lapsarian context. You must be so jealous.

Writers Write - The Third Law Of Marchant

 It is almost four years since I wrote this poem about the wretched illness of my dear father. I could not bring myself to publish it at the time, lest it seem disrespectful. As in so many things I was of course wrong. I revisited it today and found that it says something of that terrible, prolonged grief we endured. The final line is bitter. If I was writing today I would probably omit that final line but the poem will speak better if it speaks from the time when I wrote it. God bless you Dad.

The Gradated Death of a Local Hero

1. In the Pink

And – which is more – you’ll be a man my son.

His quest for finished fullness never won

He bequeathed it to me

Not from any harshness but affection

That any loss at pitch and toss might be redone.

No island entire of itself and yet he stood

Craggy proud in spirit’s fatherhood

Gifts borne hero proper lightly

And regiven burnished to his tribe

Pretty burdens urged and not misunderstood.

2. Faded Shaded

He hosts his thieving illness

Though always searching

Yet cannot find his keys

Terrified of stillness.

For stock questions

He learns stock answers

Yet cannot find his keys

Resents helpful suggestions.

At all meals’ end he tidies

Meticulous in stacking

Yet cannot find his keys

Nor tell Sundays from Fridays.

The form is an abandoned shell

How often must we say farewell?

3. Palimpsest White

loud character overwritten

in grey

and lighter

and overscribed again until

in white

finally undetected unpersoned

in spite at our winnowed out grief

nothing can be read

of a local hero.

God mocks us.

Contagion

She's a cheery soul the Groupie. Last night she wanted us to re-watch Contagion (available on Netflix) - a film that documents the wild progress of a new virus around the world. The first thing to say, in the current coronavirus context, is just how much the film gets right. The initial scepticism of some fictional officials would have some real politicians (you know who you are) squirming. Fortunately we have not yet seen the posited looting and societal breakdown, but don't hold your breath.

This is a solid piece of film-making with a good ensemble cast. I particularly liked Jude Law as a shitbag blogger/journo. Have you got the stomach to watch it at present? 72/100.