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May 22, 2014 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidLast Saturday afternoon found me – somewhat reluctantly – sharing the unlovely plaza that is the arrival hall of the prematurely senescent Terminal 4 at Heathrow with a heaving Babelian mass of humanity. Alternating increasingly irritable pacing with lounging louchely against a pillar I awaited the arrival from Paris of a brace of Canadian girls. In spite of the fact that the marginally more kickass of the pair is in proud possession of British Citizenship, they were still forced to negotiate – at considerable length – the bureaucratic inefficiencies of the UK Border Agency – along with the effusion of seven continents.

When the pair finally made it landside they were hungry. They demanded curry!

Now – my mother (bless her soul!) was a woman possessed of an extremely limited culinary repertoire. She maintained an even more restrictive diet herself, eating like a sparrow and having no truck with herbs, spices and other such fancy distillations. As a result I reached the age of majority equipped with what can only be described as a totally untutored palate.

This state of affairs was not to change until my early twenties – the point at which I got married and left home. My former wife sighed, tutted inwardly and took in hand my belated education in the cuisines of the world. Latterly – of course – the Kickass Canada Girl has generously taken up the baton with regard to this noble task (along with that of all of my other foibles and eccentricities) and has matured me into a dedicated epicurean. There really is now very little that I do not eat, appreciate and enjoy.

Or rather – there was…

In the middle of the night subsequent to our culinary expedition to the sub-continent I became what – for fear of distressing those of a sensitive disposition – can only be described as – unwell! Of itself this would mean little, except that something similar has now occurred on the last few occasions on which I have dined thus. It is difficult to avoid the implication that I am no longer able to stomach curry. Worse – this follows previous reluctant recognition that the consumption of duck eggs now also seems to leave me internally incapacitated.

What we are talking about here is – of course – an acknowledgement of the fact that I am getting old! My formerly robust constitution is beginning to creak a little – my once indomitable digestion is showing signs of becoming somewhat more finickity.

This is only to be expected, of course, but I certainly don’t intend to go quietly. Though I will at least try to be sensible, when it comes to the foods that I love… all bets may currently be off.

Needless to say – this does leave me somewhat apprehensive for the future…

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A perfect palimpsest

March 12, 2014 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
“See me, feel me, touch me, heal me”

Pete Townshend

I suppose it is symptomatic of encroaching old-age that I am unable now to recall exactly why I found myself sitting at my computer last week, searching the InterWebNet for recorded versions of The Who’s “See Me, Feel Me“. I know that this was not what I started out looking for (though of course I can’t remember what that was either!) – neither can I now call to mind the supervenient sequence that ultimately led me to Acton’s finest.

It is a sorry business – this aging!

Though I had, naturally, been well aware of The Who throughout the late 60s I did not truly become a fan until 1971 – when I heard for the first time the mighty sound that is “Won’t Get Fooled Again“. The effect that this had on me was not dissimilar to that which I experienced on hearing – for the first time – “A Day in the Life“, “Eleanor Rigby” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds“. I had no idea that music could be like this. In the case of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” I was astonished that a ‘pop’ song could not only have something reasonable to say, but that it could do so with such power, such brio, such… passion! “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is one of those rare tracks that sounds exactly as fresh, meaningful and powerful today as it did when heard first.

“See Me, Feel Me” is – of course – a couple of years older, originating as it does in The Who’s ground-breaking rock opera – “Tommy” (the first of a mercifully modest canon!). Through the decades since the album was released in 1969 I have endured a number of different stage productions, as well as gazing slack-jawed at Ken Russell’s flamboyantly eccentric movie version. I have to say that I find the piece as a whole to be somewhat… patchy! There are – of course – familiar highlights such as “Pinball Wizard” and the finale – “Listening to You” – which apparently later found its true niche in The Who’s live set as an act of communion between band and audience.

The opera’s one moment of genius, however, is its penultimate fragment – the aforementioned “See Me, Feel Me” – a fleetingly transcendent distillation of pure longing, which hangs upon the sudden breathless air a still small voice in the eye of the hurricane. This palimpsest crystallises somewhat unexpectedly out of the preceding number – “We’re Not Gonna Take It” – and once it’s brief existence is done bunny-hops through a crunching gear-change into “Listening to You“.

The lyric comprises but one repeated line:

“See me, feel me, touch me, heal me”

There is no more because at this point there is nothing more to be said.

Harmonically, “See Me, Feel Me” is also stripped back as far as is feasible – comprising what is essentially a repeated three chord pattern…

|Ebmaj7 |Fsus4  F|Fsus4   F|G

…which forms (apparently!) an Aeolian progression. The suspensions that initially render the phrase tonally ambiguous resolve at the end of each line in a manner that contrives to be at once final and infinite. This is one of those rare musical phrases that is so complete in and of itself that no development is possible. I imagine that Pete Townshend must have tried pretty hard to come up with a way of so doing before giving up and accepting this gift from the gods for what it was – a perfect representation of imperfection! Trapped within itself like a bug in amber this tiny fragment manages thus to express eternal longing. We might wish that it went on for ever. It cannot do so.

You may not be familiar with this orchestral version – featuring Townshend himself on vocals rather than the familiar tones of Roger Daltrey.

See Me, Feel Me: See Me, Feel Me

There are some pieces of music – just as there are some poems, some prose passages – that are so immaculate that one wonders how the author – having achieved this proximity to perfection – could face writing again, for fear of never being able to top – or even match – what had already been accomplished.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be in that position!

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Now we are six(ty)

February 5, 2014 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidIt is not far short of a month since I passed the significant (for me, anyway!) milestone that was my sixtieth birthday. I am now officially ‘getting on a bit’!

The gentle reader may have noticed – however – that apart from describing in a frankly unnecessary degree of detail the celebrations that accompanied the event I have made very little reference to what it is actually like to have crossed the great divide into a seventh decade. Though I have now achieved an age that would once have been considered ‘pretty good going’ – in this day and age to have done so is merely commonplace.

Truth be told I have written nothing because being 60 has felt little different to being 59 – which in turn felt no different to 58 – and so forth…

That this may be self-evident is clearly no help at all to anyone who has arrived here as a result of Googling the InterWebNet nervously for signs of an after-life in the detritus of the boomer generation. I will therefore make what observations I can – however prosaic they may be.

The first thing to say is that once one has passed one’s sixtieth anniversary – in the UK at least – one is suddenly eligible for free stuff!

I take regular medication for inherited hypertension. It will be very nice no longer to have to pay for my prescriptions (three off – every two months)… at least until we move to Canada, where – the Kickass Canada Girl assures me – I will be charged even more than I had once to pay here.

I am also a long-time contact lens wearer and – as a result of one of my habitually curmudgeonly fallings-out with my erstwhile optician – I had recently to sign a new contract with a different chain. For this purpose I was required to take a fresh eye test and I was delighted to find that this also was free of charge.

Until fairly recently I would have been able to get a free bus pass as well – but I learn that the powers-that-be have decided that this was far too straightforward a service to be gifted to mere mortals and have thus of late complicated it to the nth degree. To qualify now one has to live in a certain part of the country, to have been born under a particular phase of the moon and to arrive at the answer ‘5’ when asked to subtract the number one first thought of…

Well – something like that! I will not – apparently – qualify for mine until I am sixty five years, two months and twelve days old – and I certainly don’t intend still to be around here by then. Those who know me will doubtless snort derisively at this juncture and point out that the issue is moot since I wouldn’t be caught dead on a bus in any case!

One change – however – is significant. I am now a pensioner! At my previous school my retirement age was 60 and my pension thence – though relatively humble – has now come into effect. I thus received my first pension paycheck at the end of last week. Now that was a momentous event.

The real changes – though – will not take place until I finally retire…

Roll on the day!

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In my life

September 6, 2013 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Photo by Suraj RajanThough I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

In My Life – Lennon/McCartney

I have been racking my brains over the past week or so trying to find an angle from which I might contribute something thoughtful or meaningful to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and – of course – of Martin Luther King’s epochal speech with which that event has become synonymous. Much has been written – over the intervening decades and in the run up to the commemoration itself – concerning both the event and the man, by writers considerably more gifted than I could ever hope to be. It may indeed simply be that all that could be – and possibly even should be – has already been said.

This reflection, however – as such contemplation frequently does – leads me on to other thoughts with which the gentle reader might discern some resonance.

I was only nine in 1963 and have no direct memories at all of the march or of the speech. The only event that year to have left a lasting impression on me – as on so many others – occurred later in the year – that fateful November in Dallas. The true nature and significance of even that momentous happening was lost on me at the time, of course. My mother was an avid Home Service listener and I do recall programmes being punctuated by shocked reports from Texas, though I was – at the time – unable to make much sense of them. When my father returned from work I ran down the garden path to meet him crying “They’ve shot the prime minister”… Of course, I didn’t actually know who that was either (Alec Douglas-Home, as it happens – MacMillan having resigned in October the same year!).

I grew up surrounded by women (bear with me here!). My parents were both only children but each of their mothers came from large families. I stress ‘mothers’ here because – other than my father – I have no memories at all of any of the men in either family. An initial imbalance in favour of the female had been exacerbated by the war and by ill health. Of grandmothers and great aunts I thus had an abundance, all of whom – endowed with the robust family female gene – lived to a ripe old age.

My grandmother on my mother’s side was born in the very early days of the nascent twentieth century, around the same time that Queen Victoria passed away. I recall in my youth being amazed that one lifetime could encompass so many dramatic changes and extraordinary events. She lived through two world wars… She witnessed the arrival of the motor car (as anything other than a plaything for the rich)… She was alive for the birth of flight and thus for the development of air travel… She was born in an age that pre-dated radio and TV. I could go on…

You can probably see where this is going.

At the time I could not imagine what it must be like to have lived long enough to have seen or experienced so many happenings. Maybe I just couldn’t imagine that such a pace of change could be maintained.

Now – of course – the realisation that when the March on Washington took place I was already approaching the start of my second decade on this verdant planet makes me realise just how many such events have actually taken place on my watch – as it were. The moon landings… The fall of the Berlin wall… The end of Apartheid in South Africa… The Good Friday agreement… The financial crash… The advent of the personal computer and of the mobile phone… The birth and extraordinary growth of the InterWebNet… DVDs… CGI… A Briton winning Wimbledon!… and on and on…

What this tells me is that I am already well on my way to achieving a similar status to that which my grandmother enjoyed – that of having lived a bloomin’ long time!

…and of having seen many things…

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