Revelations (18.6.88)

Mr Anthony Rooley is an enterprising man.  Not content with more or less single-handedly rescuing vast tracts of English and Italian Renaissance music from obscurity, and recording it with his Consorte of Musicke, he then hankers after even more unreasonable propositions.  Like an all-night performance of Italian music built around Orazio Vecchio's Le Vegile di Siena - The Revels of Siena - at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.  A folly, clearly; and yet the place was packed at the start and nearly full at the end when the audience marched out for its croissants.

Independently of the musical worth of such a concert - and this was high - it is interesting to consider the occasion as a rare kind of laboratory in which a thousand willing human guinea pigs had placed themselves.  For many of the taboos implicit in public classical music-making were flouted, rent by the boilerhouse pressure of the experience.

Consider the facts.  The concert ran continuously, without formal intervals. Even for the most passionate early music fan, remaining seated for eight hours was clearly out of the question.  So the audience was allowed to roam in and out as they pleased - though a modicum of consideration for those still listening was required and usually obtained.

Several things flowed from this.  There was a constant flow of people not just at the end of sections, but at the end of pieces.  After all, once the principle of set exit and entrance times has been breached, any point is as good as another.  There was a gentle hubbub most of the time caused by this entrance and exit, and as a knock-on from it, since we are trained to equate movement of people in a theatre of concert hall with the liberty to talk.  Noise was also generated by the sounds of cups and glasses being brought into the auditorium, put down, and tripped over.  Again, this unprecedented activity flowed from people's need for constant stimulants - tea and coffee were on tap free throughout the night - and their desire not to miss the concert.  The result was quite obvious obbligato parts for cups and saucer in many of the quieter pieces.

The same freedom of movement produced another curious side-effect.  It was possible to leave the confined hall and go out onto the South Bank.  Doing so throughout the night produced a sequence of snap-shots of London, the most memorable of them being that of dawn rising over the City.  These shifting and lightening skies were in stark contrast to the changeless and artificial world inside.  It was like literally stepping out of reality.

The length of the concert, and the fact that it proceeded seamlessly, only emphasised this effect.  As the audience grew tired, its sense of time and place grew fuzzy.  The choice of music, mostly liquid madrigals, distant dances, and the tiny evanescent sound of lutes, conspired to make the audience believe that it was sinking very slowly into another realm, half human, half heavenly.  This, you were tempted to think, is what it would be like to go gently into that night.

So at the end of this feast of civilised revels you were glad to be in London, and glad of Mr Rooley.  Taking part proved a small revelation.

(19.6.88)

Index

Miles better

At Glasgow, the businessmen and women sit as if waiting for a bus; which is precisely what it was to most of them: the 6.15 to London, arriving some 50 minutes and 400 miles later.

But this is sad.  Aeroplane rides remain as one of the twentieth century's quintessential acts: it is one of the few things which most people can do now which could not have been generally possible a hundred years ago.  True, greater changes have taken place, most notably as a result of electricity and, more recently, computers.  But for pure personal experience, there is little to match it.

Which is why, when I travel by plane, I always strive to savour the sheer mind-boggling unnaturalness of the whole process.  For a start, there are the airports.  These huge bustling convergences of people, some resident, dedicated to guiding in and out these improbable tubes of metal, others transient, flowing to and fro in sudden concentrations and dilations.  The buildings are great sprawling structures which mirror the organisational set-up which determines them and validates them.  Their halls sprout long tentacles which reach out and embrace the waiting planes.

Ritual is everywhere.  First you queue to check-in; then you queue to pass through security, itself a kind of hieratic purging of impure elements before you are worthy to approach the godhead. You pass to the inner sanctum of departure lounge before finally moving on to a further queuing and checking, another wait, and then a repeat of the process before embarkation.  All of this wreathed in the growing fumes of airports' own special incense: air kerosene.

Nor has the process ended once you have boarded the plane.  The great shining beast moves slowly and awkwardly over the ground, almost a parody of the grace it will soon exhibit; it is like some gawky bird whose huge and spectacular plumage is a burden on earth but its glory in the air.  And like the first few beats of those great pinions, so the first lunging acceleration as the plane springs down the runway at take off makes the heart leap with it.

You are pressed back into you seat, waiting for that moment of benediction, that miracle when hundreds of tons of metal slowly but effortlessly lift off the ground where they so plainly ought to belong, and soar off into the blue above.  It is this transcendent moment which should shock travellers every time they fly, just as the fact of hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour in a large metal tube should be a matter of constant wonder to them.

That it is not to most of the travellers on the 6.15 to London is a tragedy.  They have lost a real sense of what this century has achieved, and what mankind has achieved.  They have lost too that wonderful and humbling insight air travel offers us: the sight of our tiny world below.  Seen from this new and in some ways truer perspective, we can gain important knowledge about ourselves and our inherent and abiding vulnerability - for all our spectacular and wonderful technology. 

(7.3.88)

See also Moody Sonnets - Clapham Uncommon

Index

Taxi

To say that a banana is like a phallus inevitably implies that a phallus is like a banana.  The fact that gondolas have often been called the taxis of Venice therefore tells us something interesting about London cabs.

Both are as black as hearses, and unique to their respective cities.  Both remain aloof from their fellow vehicles: the gondola from the vulgar motor boats and hulking vaporetti which are used for more mundane tasks of transport, and the taxi from the cars and buses which surround it.   Both professions are studiedly closed; the gondolieri are family institutions, while London cabbies often pass on their venerable machines within a narrow circle.  Both above all, are mysterious and luxurious.

Taking a cab is always an adventure; it is never a crass matter of going from A to B.  For a start, the London traversed is never your London.  Apart from the routes and manoeuvres denied lesser mortals in their lesser chariots, cabbies seem to inhabit a city which is structured like a huge Swiss cheese, with curious and useful holes throughout its fabric.  These they use like science fiction wormholes to transport us in strange unknowable ways.  Perhaps there is a conspiracy between them and the map-makers; this would explain the long, almost masonic ritual of initiation called - aptly enough - The Knowledge.  Instead of some tedious and improbable learning by rote of a few routes through London, cabbies are in fact committing to memory the wormholes in London's inner space.

The London cab is invested with mystique not only by virtue of its curious journeys and unusual construction - what other vehicle accommodates five passengers in such a confined space in such luxury? - but also by association.  Taxis are always used by special people and for special purposes.  The constant rubbing together of cabs with the extraordinary has promoted their further use in this way.  Today, the act of hailing and taking a cab is almost like the ritualised start of an Arthurian quest.  To arrive in a cab at an important event is to bring a huge black rabbit's paw, and a way of sanctifying the business of travel.

Cabs thus become holy chariots, carrying a new priesthood who bless and are blessed.  In the past we could recognise them by their tightly furled umbrellas and immaculate bowlers.  Today, it is more likely to be a discreet Filofax or cellular phone.  But the great virtue of taxis is that however patrician their tradition and true clientele may be, they are fundamentally democratic in their availability.  As such we may all taste the illicit pleasures of this mode of transport; for a few pounds we can imagine ourselves one of Them, the powerful ones whose vehicles we have borrowed for a few hours just as a noblemen of yore might have lent his carriage to a plebeian for an afternoon drive.

Taxis are at once personal yet unattainable limousines which are the acme of motorised travel, and at the same time negations of that movement.  From within its curious, womb-like interior, you can almost believe that it is the world that is travelling not you.  As a symbol and vehicle of power, the taxi, like its close cousin the gondola, offers the ultimate trip.  And in this respect it is rather like a banana.

(27.5.86)

Index

Ecstasy

When the great synoptic annals of Britain come to be written, 1989 will go down as the Summer of House.  And when the history of Acid House is pieced together, England, and London especially, will emerge as the key location.

House may have originated in Chicago, but its most characteristic and exciting manifestation has been driven - literally - by the infrastructure of London's orbital motorway, the M25.  Police resistance to the burgeoning House scene meant that venues were never announced in advance.  Instead, a curious Acid House party-game of hide and seek evolved, with a nightly ritual of clues leading to more clues before the final destination was revealed; to work, this demanded a road system that could take anyone within 50 miles of London anywhere else within the same radius in a few hours.  Such flexibility meant a huge catchment area, which in turn meant potentially huge parties - twenty, thirty thousand and up.  And it was this critical mass of numbers that gave rise to House in its mature and perhaps quintessential phase.

Ultimately it was the extraordinary success of this system that brought it down.  The police and the government were frightened at the thought of gatherings this large; there were uncontrollable, outside the law.  Not that law-breaking was a real issue; to begin with, at least, House parties were models of rule-abiding order. No alcohol was on sale, and nobody looking for trouble would bother following the long and Byzantine road to an Acid House party to get it when the local pub was closer and much more convenient.  But for the powers that be, a principle was at stake: that everything and everyone should be within the domain of the law.

The pretext for this old fart churlishness was drugs.  Doubtless incensed by the provocative name 'Acid House' itself, the police claimed that drug- taking was rife, and that minors were being corrupted - the standard anti-Socratic argument beloved of repressive governments.  In fact the main drug being taken - and that only towards the end - was Ecstasy.  Its principle effects were heightened energy and a general feeling of well- being and warmth towards your fellow humans.  Mild, then, in comparison to those most anti-social of drugs, tobacco and alcohol, which grown-ups in their hypocritical wisdom have deemed legal and acceptable. 

As usual, the police, the government and worried parents missed the point.  House parties were not about drugs; they were not even the meat markets that conventional discos have sunk to, that display of tawdry finery and crude pairing-off.  They were about precisely what Ecstasy promoted, but was not necessary for; that profound sense of ease, of being among good and dear friends - thirty thousand of them, of all ages, colours, sexual orientations, classes.  And the music was the glue of this great pulsing pacific unity; in its relentless beat, its enormously amplified volumes and its near-wordless bass-heavy textures, this was music for the right- brain, the intuitive side, music for the body to get into, music so loud and so low that it got into the body until bodies and beat were one and outside all other categories.  In its total being and belonging it offered to the young and alienated more a sense of a deep, global home than Deep House; and ecstasy indeed.

(19.11.89)

Index

Back to Bach (1)

Tastes change.  One day we prefer apricot jam to strawberry, or decide to move away from London.  But it is the tiny aesthetic shifts which prove more profoundly worrying.  It is as if the cherished cultural edifice we construct within us is so weighty and finely poised that even minute movements can bring it crashing down.  So it is that we greet with mingled pride and horror the realisation that we now turn to Dante's Paradiso more than to his Inferno, or that we have learnt to love the austere intricacy of Bach's chorale preludes in preference to the grander organ works.  For as we adopt these finer, more mature tastes, we must acknowledge the root of the change: that we too are different - we are older.

Youth is to blame.  It will prefer the obvious, the loud, the brash and the exciting.  It has little time for subtlety.  In the case of the Bach chorales, the competition from Bach himself is perhaps a little unfair.  The mightiest of the preludes and fugues are the baroque equivalent of heavy metal.  The full organ emerges as the eighteenth century's answer to over-amped guitars with feedback.  The compositional tricks of relentless extended sequences and gut-churning pedal points speak straight to the blood.  Against them, the minimalist filigree of the chorale meditations are about as effective as a haiku in answer to screamed football slogans.

There are also social factors which contribute to this early misguided antipathy.  For many schoolchildren, Bach chorales and their multifarious cousins conjure up too vividly the trips to the local church, the eternal pointless ritual, the hard wooden seats, the queasy smell of polish and incense.  Played on a quavering late-Victorian organ by a nervous and unmusical sixth-former, the delicate tracery woven by Bach around the strong Lutheran lines emerge with all the grace and lucidity of a dropped skein of wool.  What now seems timeless, then seemed endless.

Not all of this is a trick of jaded memory.  Bach did not go out of his way in these works to strive to be accessible.  We know very little about when the chorale preludes were composed, for whom and for what use.  Like other works by Bach such as The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue they seem to have been deeply personal creations with only tenuous links to the external world; like those works, they are for that reason among the greatest he ever created.  They had to be: he was writing for an audience of the two severest judges imaginable - himself, and God.

This explains the almost painful density of musical thought.  The brevity of the pieces was not a limitation, but an attraction.  As so often, Bach had to create his own challenges to which he could rise.  Not content with creating masterpieces on an almost Webernian scale, he piled on further difficulties by constructing some as fugues and double fugues.  Still too easy, he then made each work not just a musical meditation on the original chorale, but often an illumination and exegesis of the text as well.

Those with the same iron faith as Bach can doubtless make the requisite leap to meet his musical theology halfway.  For the rest of us, as we grope towards an understanding through his other works, reaching an accommodation is simply a painful matter of time.
 
(7.2.87)

See also Moody Sonnets – Bach, And Chopin’s Hands

Index

Good timing

We arrived in London ten minutes before we left Paris.  A case perhaps of things being better ordered in France - though the one-hour time difference had something to do with it. Whatever, our final transcending of time was emblematic of the whole trip.

It started well.  We drove straight from work to Gatwick, flew to Charles de Gaulle airport, took the train then metro, and emerged from an Art Nouveau-y exit to find ourselves a pierre's throw from the Seine.  In a little under four hours we had passed from suburban England, home of the quotidian, to central Paris, abode of all that is civilised.  Though the physical distance we had travelled was slight, in that short time we had exchanged worlds.

Perhaps time proved such a recurrent theme because the overall duration of our trip was a mere three days.  Forced to concentrate everything within that span, time itself became the prime medium and material: it could be pushed and pulled, dilated and dallied with.  And where better to dally than at the Café Les Deux Magots, erstwhile haunt of the existentialists.  As we sat drinking one of the inimitable cafe cremes of the city, opposite the gnarled and crumbling face of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, their philosophy of intensity of experience seemed inevitable.  Of course life must be drained to the last drop, with each drop; especially when those drops were such coffee, drained in such a Café.

Time also regained a new power by being unconstrained.  Freed from our daily routine, set loose in a new land without preconceptions, the day moulded itself around our will, which in turn responded to the ebb and flow of the passing hour.  We drank bottles of wine in our hotel room at three in the afternoon; sat on the boulevard and snacked at ten o'clock at night; stopped and drank yet more cups of coffee morning, noon and evening.  We travelled by foot, by metro and by taxi; without plan or premeditation, but as the mood took us.  By varying the means of transport, distance was telescoped, and with it absolute time distorted.

Perhaps too, the scale of Paris contributed to this shift.  In London, that great sprawling metropolis, everything is diffuse, in separate pockets.  You have South of the River, the West End, the City, each of which subdivides many times before reaching the human level.  But in Paris, the majority of sights and sites are bounded by the girdling boulevards built by that great tidier Haussman.  You can walk from the Latin Quarter - say Chelsea - to the Fauborg St Germain - Mayfair - to the Louvre - the British Museum - to the Pompidou Centre - the Barbican - without strain.  Which cannot be said of the equivalent areas of London.  In Paris, time is endowed with a density which is unavailable in England.

In the end this thickness of time comes down to what and how much you do.  If those three days seem unexpectedly rich in positive milestone experiences, it is a measure of the bounty which Dame Paris offers.  And an indication of the extent to which she continues her millennia-old role of noble hostess-cum-knowing whore, intent on giving those who are receptive to her manifold charms a civilised good time.

(21.5.86)

Index

Modern magic

When I first came to London one of my principal activities was attending concerts of modern music, perhaps once or twice a week.  My golden memories of that time are compounded partly of a general sense of wonder at all that the great city offered, and more particularly by the very special magic of those concerts which seemed to me like a continual fanfare to the opening up of this brave new world. Even now, on the rare occasions when I can visit the concert hall for this purpose, I am transported to an enchanted kingdom which seems as fresh as the first day I entered it.

The pleasures to be derived from this music, are, to be sure, of a singular nature.  Contemporary compositions are a rare and exotic drug craved by the few.  And this of course becomes part of its attraction.  Since such concerts are almost invariably attended by the same hard core of enthusiasts - who probably number less than a few hundred in the whole of the capital - you soon get to recognise your fellow adepts.  Just as Mozart wrote ceremonial music for the masons, so all modern music can be seen as the latter-day equivalent for an even more select and mysterious associations.  The widespread and ineradicable nature of these low-profile and hopelessly low-profit events throughout the capital each night only adds to the abiding sense of conspiracy.

The very paucity of audience also has the effect of rendering the occasion rather more august and serious; there is none of this cheery populism which so often invades ordinary concerts.  Even in the smallest venues such as the Purcell Room - and particularly in atmospheric buildings like St John's Smith Square - the sense of space makes everything paradoxically more intimate and personal.  It is as if the musicians are playing just for you.

Indeed, the performance you hear may well be the work's only outing, given the way contemporary music is funded in this country.  It is like the ritualised smashing of crockery to prevent defilement after a king and queen have eaten off them; the concert turns out to be a unique, once in a lifetime experience, and one which is unlikely ever to be devalued by anything so crude as a repeat performance, at least not in London.

Not all of the joys are of such a tangential kind.  Nowhere else can you hear music which draws so eclectically on every musical tradition imaginable, and adds many of its own.  There is the brain-damaging rigour of the residual post-Webernians and the languorous lushness of the neo-romantics; you can listen to the intricate trance-like beauties of systems music or the sparse and fervent glories of religious composers like Pärt and Taverner; alongside the crazed algorithms of Xenakis there are the insidiously hummable and subversive pastiches by Gavin Bryars; and against Ferneyhough's intentionally unplayable essays in compositional bravura there is the counterbalancing simplicity and humility of the last Experimentalists like Howard Skempton.  All of this is music which lets us sense most directly the great exploration which lies at the heart of new art; this is music to stretch the ears, electrify the mind, warm the heart and for me to stir cherished memories of a younger age.

(3.12.87)

Index

Giants' work

In two Anglo-Saxon poems there is the phrase enta geweorc - work of giants - referring to ancient buildings of immense but decaying splendour.  The newly-arrived Germanic tribes stood in awe of these silent and mysterious achievements in stone; they could not comprehend them, but they were sure that they could be the product of no human agency.

Something of that shiver of non-recognition lingers still at the splendid exhibition of modern British architecture at the Royal Academy.  As befits a show dealing with endeavours on the largest scale, only three architects are featured; Rogers, Foster and Stirling.  Each has two rooms with drawings, photos and models.  Over each of them hovers the sense of futility, of giants surrounded by pygmies.

The accompanying book spells this out clearly.  Each of the architects is a prophet with little honour in his own land.  Each has spent years of his life on projects which never came to fruition. Each has had the loftiest visions.  And yet there is surprisingly little bitterness, as if they recognised that they were out of joint with the world, and that such outcomes were inevitable.

But then the whole business of architecture is strange.  It is the grandest of arts, dealing at the very least with the habitations of man, with the largest structures we have about us.  At its heights, it is inspirational, and attains something akin to physical spirituality in its pyramids and temples and cathedrals.  And yet it is also the most compromised of arts.  It is hedged in by the pettiest of human constraints, like planning regulations.  And buildings are always so visible, such palpable monuments that everyone wants to have their say.  Even members of the public, who would not dream of commenting on a new symphony or poem, take it upon themselves to judge all aspects and every detail of a new building project.

Against this background, the architect can only look on, and dream.  The exhibition is clear enough proof that these men have dreamt, and have often been rudely awoken.  So many of their grandest plans have been re- jigged, objected to, re-drawn again, accepted then finally dropped for the most banal or arbitrary of reasons.

When one slips through the petty net of this world, it stands forth like a wonder.  Here in London we have the Lloyds' building, a majestic castle in steel and concrete; Stuttgart has its new art gallery wing, its creamy stones blending elements from countless architectures; and Hong Kong has the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the skyscraper redeemed.
 
Each of them is at once totally and breathtakingly modern, and yet because of their assurance, their sense of place and of physical rightness, they seem to be timeless, of immemorial antiquity. It is as if in the midst of our small and petty hovels, with the ramshackle buildings falling this way and that, there are huge towering remnants of an older, deeper civilisation. These are truly enta geweorc, and the RA exhibition shows us just what giants produced them.

(19.12.86)

Index

Old Budapest

Old Budapest is no more.  The smell of bubbling goulash, the cool and subtle Tokays, the plangent strains of the gypsy violinists, the dark Hungarians with their sparkling eyes and wry smiles - all are gone.  It is as if a small part of Europe has disappeared off the face of the earth.

True, there is the Gay Hussar just down the road, but it is not the same.  To lose a favourite restaurant is like losing an old friend.  Both are unique and irreplaceable.  You turn up one day, and they have simply vanished, without warning or forwarding address.  You are left only with the memories.

Good restaurants tend to be charged with them.  A favourite haunt will be saved for special occasions, which by their nature will be relatively few.  As a result, the locale becomes an integral part of those evenings; to think of your fellow diners is to think of the restaurant.  Losing the restaurant seals up those memories as if in some time capsule.  Eventually the restaurant becomes an era; do you remember when we used to dine at the Café X? we ask our cronies in years to come.  It is the same with biographies of the famous.  They are as much the stories of the restaurants and cafés they frequented; think of Les Deux Magots, Harry's Bar and the rest.

Buildings may rise and fall, but we soon assimilate them into our mental image of the townscape.  Shops too open and close; but except for those in which we have some particular emotional investment - a barber's perhaps, or a tailor's - we migrate easily and unthinkingly to other establishments when the need arises.  But we notice when restaurants disappear.  It means we must change our habits, explore new possibilities, investigate new worlds.  For a restaurant does not exist in isolation; it draws in the whole vicinity, and becomes a defining landmark for it.

Thus the restaurants I have lost have been painful uprootings.  In one case a closing down has cost me an area of London, since I now have no points of reference.  Il Palio was a simple but atmospheric Italian restaurant in Earl's Court Road, complete with check tablecloths and faded pictures of Siena on the walls.  One day I went past and it was a boarded-up shop-front.  In that instant I lost an entire district of West London.

The Diamond was a cheap and basic Chinese restaurant in Lisle Street.  It had a feel of the Triads about it, with small and angry-looking Chinese running everywhere.  Eventually the Triads seem to have got to it; I went to eat there once, and there was nothing but a wrecked shell.  Thereafter, my Chinatown was the poorer.

And finally there was the Old Budapest.  Never will I forget the luscious coolness of the pressed pike, the sheer amplitude of the smoked goose with its red cabbage and steaming onions, the dry delight of the wines.  Nor will I forget the stumpy little violinist playing Brahms Hungarian Dances - what else? And I will not forget the civilised, old world staff, exiles perhaps, and with all the dignity which that confers.  The Old Budapest restaurant may no longer serve its exquisite food, but for me it lives on.
 
(18.10.87)

Index

Where are the New Chiliasts?

Wulfstan, Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Worcester and York, was not an optimist.  In a sermon he wrote: "Many portents shall occur throughout the wide world, both heavenly apparitions and terrestrial disturbances, before that great judgement comes for us all.  And verily, just as the flood came once on account of sin, so now comes the fire upon mankind for sin's sake, and it approaches rapidly."  Preaching his famous 'Address to the English' he said: "Dearly beloved, know what is true; this world is in haste, and nears its end; and for this reason as time goes on, the worse things get; and on account of the people's sin it will grow even worse until the advent of the Antichrist.  And verily, at that time it shall be fear and terror throughout the wide world."
 
Wulfstan may have been extreme, but he was not alone.  Like him, many around the turn of the first Christian millennium were convinced that the end was nigh and the Antichrist close to hand.  1000AD was not the only date to fear; 1033, the thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion, was a popular second choice, when the millennium itself passed without incident.  And when in its turn 1033 came and went, 1065 was the next candidate; for in that year the Annunciation coincided with Good Friday for the first time that century.

Such chiliasm seemed natural enough at the time.  For a society touched with an almost childlike wonder at patterns and congruences in numbers, the millennium was clearly a special date.  The harrying of the barbarous Vikings around the coasts of Europe and their audacious forays deep inland only added to the sense that time had grown old and was staggering towards the embrace of the Antichrist.  We, too, teeter on the brink of the millennium.  If we lack the numerological turn of mind of our forebears, surely we have enough portents, surrounded as we are by daily chaos and carnage, and the dissolution of society's most cherished values? Where then are the New Chiliasts, the lashers of an overripe age about to reap its bitter fruits?

Perhaps it is an idea whose time has not yet come.  At the moment we seem to be enjoying a last fool's paradise.  Ceasefires are being announced in long-standing wars, fashionable glasnost is thawing the hardened hearts of both East and West, democracy and capitalism, albeit in truncated forms, sweep all before them, and even the world economy seems to have been kickstarted into some semblance of life. For most of the potential nay-saying Savonarolas, life is good.

And as Breughel's 'Triumph of Time' so graphically showed with its pitiless portrayal of death and dalliance, nothing takes your mind off Doomsday so much as a good party.  Today those 'heavenly apparitions' are likely to be jittering lasers and stuttering strobe lights, while the 'terrestrial disturbances' are simply the subwoofers of the wicked sound system.  How appropriate then, that the imp-like Prince - in any case thought by many to be Beelzebub incarnate - has already provided us with the music for the Last Day's Ultimate Party - called, appropriately enough, '1999'. This is the way the world will go; not with a bang but a boogie.  If only Bishop Wulfstan had known how to bop.

(10.8.88)

Index

The Wipees

They came from nowhere, these urban guerillas.  They knew the terrain, choosing their theatres carefully: major intersections, where the confluence of four or more roads meant lengthy and predictable delays at the lights.  Then they struck, moving with practised ease between the stationary, stranded cars, wielding their weapons with an imperious facility: buckets, sponges, cloths, scrapers and chammy leathers.  Trapped inside, the vehicles' owners could only look on helplessly as they fell victim to one of post-Thatcher entrepreneurialism's strangest manifestations: the Windscreen Wipers.

And so driving in London became a journey between islands of soapy, savvy assault.  You could choose to avoid the hotspots - Vauxhall, Chelsea Bridge, Clapham Old Town - but in doing so you felt that in some obscure sense you were being pusillanimous, that you were cheating.

Because it was notable that whatever the hour of the day or night, and whatever the weather, these Wipers maintained an evenness of temper, a cheeriness, a gaiety even, that seemed almost independent of how much they were given as recompense or indeed whether they were given anything for their pains at all.  It was almost as if they were carrying out some philanthropic service, providing to the motorised an analogue of the marathon runner's en route water supplies, offering mankind solace during its symbolic journey from departure to arrival, cleaning the vehicle's screen as a parable of a greater purification to come.  Not to provide them with an opportunity for this smiling magnanimity seemed churlish.

Could it be that this pleasure they derived from the act of washing and wiping had something to do with their origins?  Many were foreign, including Wipers from such far-flung and exotic places as Australia and Jugoslavia.  Were they perhaps just happy to be in this great, seething metropolis, surrounded by the swirl of traffic which was a visible manifestation of the great diurnal pulse of the city?  Did they feel in some obscure way that by offering this service - however pointless and however humble - that they were in effect being co-opted and hence accepted by the society and world that they had travelled so far to see?

Or were they so happy simply because they were able to earn about £20 an hour for work which required no more than a few seconds of mild effort every few minutes?  But if this financial aspect was indeed cardinal, it was made possible only as a result of the unique dynamics that existed between the Wiper and the Wipee.

For clearly the Wipee had not asked to be wiped; nor could the Wiper enforce any sanctions against non-paying Wipees.  All that bound the two together was a tenuous ethical link between someone who gave without asking for anything, and someone who received that gift.  In other words, the Wipers were banking on the general decency of the Wipee.  Perhaps this is why the Wipers from abroad were here; perhaps only in a country like Britain with a residual sense of fair play could the whole magic dance of Wiper and Wipee be played out.  Perhaps this is why they were smiling, and why we too have reason to smile that Wipees still exist, even today.

(24.12.91)

Index

Curried away

The town of Mitcham does not really exist: it is simply the agreed, arbitrary designation for a particular section of the continuum of London’s outer suburbia.  Apart from one fairly anonymous Grade I listed Georgian building, now hedged in by a swathe of the by-pass and a parade of newsagents, hairdressers and car showrooms, it has nothing to entice the visitor or gratify the inhabitant.

I knew it only as a place on the way to other parts of that Surrey sprawl.  For years I drove through it, never stopping, never really looking.  But one landmark always caught my eye.  Perhaps this was due to its position: on a corner along a stretch of road that was invariably congested.  Sitting in the traffic I had plenty of time to contemplate that building.

It was called “Benares”, and was a simple curry house.  Beyond that I know nothing.  Except that as I sat there each morning, the word “Benares” would be stamped once more upon my mind.  As it did so, it would translate across into “Varanasi” – the Indian name for the city of which “Benares” is the typically mangled English approximation, calling up to my mind’s eye huge, exotic vistas.
So when some time later I was in India, planning my itinerary, and my eye happened to alight on that name on the map, my heart leapt, and those same visions began insidiously to work their spell.  And I went to Varanasi.

I went to Varanasi, and found myself in a city of exhausting proportions, a city which seemed to repeat itself endlessly, with market following scented market, rows of poor shops selling the same permutations of goods as a hundred or perhaps a thousand others.  I found myself in muddy backstreets, dark even at noon so narrow were they, confronted and trapped there by the slow, stupid bulk of a roaming cow.

And above all I found myself in a boat on the Ganges at dawn, mist still hovering over its turbid waters.  Behind me were huge sandy plains which, when the river rose, turned into a sheet of motionless shimmering, tens of miles wide.  In front of me was the city.  It was high above the waves now, but ominous markings fifty or more feet up the sides of the bank indicated the almost ungraspable rising of the Ganges in flood.

At the bottom of those banks were the temples and the ghats, the platforms and steps down to the river where pilgrims came to bathe – and were bathing now, even in that chill air – the men dressed in dhotis, the women still demurely robed in by-now wet and clinging saris.  At one or two positions along the river there were the burning ghats.  Here bodies were brought to be cremated, and from my riverside seat I now found myself gazing at the lurid orange flames licking around charred but half-recognisable shapes, with an all-too human leg emerging from one side.

I will always remember Varanasi and these image, which have now superseded the inchoate fantasies conjured up by the “Benares”.  And I will always remember Varanasi for another reason: it was there that I was struck down with the worst food poisoning I have ever had.

(18.1.92)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels - 1988 India: Delhi, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Varanasi

Index

A week in Gourmandy

One of the pleasures of travel is the sampling of local cuisine.  Even the simplest of fare is imbued with subtle local characteristics which raise it far above its nominal station.  So the mind retains forever the salty sensation of fresh oysters in Bayeux, the baked barracuda in the Gambia, the freshly-slaughtered lobster in Loggos, the tuna fish bap in the canteen of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  In their savours and smells they become neat parcels of memory: just add water and bring to the boil and your various vacations rise up before you.

But it is by no means necessary to travel to distant climes to sample these culinary delights.  An interesting indication of the level of yuppification of London is the number of restaurants which have sprung up in recent years.  In this, of course, London is merely aping New York, a city where rich hedonistic professionals seem to live to eat rather than eat to live. When I first moved to Abbeville Road, there were two restaurants.  Today there are five, with a sixth opening in two days.

Normally you restrain yourself.  However much eating may degenerate into excess, it is important to ration the experience itself.  In the last week I have broken this cardinal rule, though not always through my own greed.

Take last Monday and Tuesday, for example.  At lunchtime on both days, I had business lunches; in the evening, social engagements.  On Monday I was regaled with stockbroker’s fare.  To be precise, I was entertained by a pair of analysts in their modest but acceptable directors’ dining room.  After aperitifs, we went straight into the Beef Olive, followed simply by cheese and mints.  In contrast, Monday evening was a get-together chez Ahmed’s, with a fine hotchpotch of some ten or twelve dishes, not forgetting nans, raitas, parathas and dals.

Tuesday lunchtime was more directors’ dining rooms, this time on home ground.  We began with smoked salmon, proceeded to chicken in a rich sauce, and finished with lethal profiteroles.  Tuesday evening was American, with a fine clam chowder, then a pork kebab, rounded off with – but already the gourmand’s curse has struck: I cannot for the life of me remember what I did round it off with.

Friday lunchtime is easier to recall, because quite idiosyncratic – The Bombay Brasserie, reputed to be the best Indian in the land.  And the buffet-style food, placed by ourselves on quite the largest plates I have ever eaten off, was equally memorable, if not nameable.

And from there we begin the long haul of the Bank Holiday weekend.  That Friday it was the Metro, the first but not the last of the Clapham wine bars.  Sunday was Just Williams for the evening – just another wine bar.  Monday saw us at the fine new Pizza Express Clapham Junction for lunch, and in an atmospheric hamburger emporium opposite the ABC in Fulham Road in the evening.  But now the gourmand’s curse has done its worst: in the maelstrom of overeating out, not only can I not remember the details of the food, but even the name of the venue has gone.  Voyages in the land of Gourmandy, if too frequent, lead to the River Lethe.

(6.5.86)

Index

Outer London

First I must declare an interest.  I am a fanatical Londoner, convinced that there is no more exciting, civilised, beautiful spot on earth; there is nowhere I would rather live.  But I hope that I would feel the same if I were a Cornishman, Scouser, Scot or Lancastrian.  The fact that the rest of Britain seems increasingly to be as besotted with London as Londoners is a disturbing trend.

In part it is understandable. Government is becoming more and more centralised; attempts to spread cultural facilities more evenly throughout the country have been wishful thinking at best, and window-dressing at worst.  As all the remaining bright young things move to the capital, drawn by the seductive charms of a high-tech, highly-paid, high society, London is turning into a total Yuppiopolis, which feeds the process yet more.  London is where the action is.  Which is good for us, bad for the rest of the country, and ultimately bad for everybody.

Compare the situation in the U.S.  There, everyone is proud to be American, but even more proud of their local city. Hence we see a tremendous number of centres of economic, social and cultural activity.  This richness provides much of the motive power which fuels American society.  Some cities like New York, Washington and Los Angeles may have particular pulling power, and represent especial concentrations of activity and facilities.  But this is in addition to the countless Clevelands, Denvers, Seattles and Austins, all of which are busy pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to national, and in some cases, international eminence.

The effect is multiplicative.  Just as London’s cuckoo-like growth is sapping the will and energy of regional centres, so the pullulation of such concentrations in the U.S. promotes a healthy spirit of competition, engendering more of the same.  The cumulative richness also goes some way to explain the dominance of American television, language and culture in the Western world.

Consider television.  The most popular and populist TV series are almost invariably rooted in a particular location – Dallas, Miami Vice, Hawaii-Five-O and so on.  Although given the shallowness of such series the backdrop is vestigial, and rarely plays an important role, it does nonetheless promote a sense of civic differentiation.  Compare the situation in the U.K.  Both Crossroads and Coronation Street are dinosaurs; most other series, either of soaps or action, are set in London, or at best deracinated.  If attempts are made to use specific non-London locations, the results are either half-hearted or failures.

The same goes for language.  In the U.S. there is a constant competition to enrich the general language with local words and phrases.  In the U.K., it is mainly London media who determine what new words will become current.  It is an uneven contest, fifty or a hundred against one.  As a result, American English, especially in its more colourful and flamboyant forms, is pouring into world English, together with its culture. Despite this, I maintain that London is best; but I wish others disagreed.

(28.12.86)

Index

Talking to myself

After my Part III exams at Cambridge, I decided to teach myself German.  I did this in my room at the top of the Queen’s tower, opposite the chapel and clock tower.  From its windows you had one of the best views in Cambridge, looking out over the plush sward of Trinity’s Great Court, with the Great Hall on the left and the porters’ lodge in the top right-hand corner.  During the month that I had to learn the language, I would often sit in the alcove, watching the world go by, and talking to myself.

In fact I spent most of that period talking to myself in one way or another.  Much of the time it was in German, since I need the sound of a word to learn it.  Interspersed with my constant repetition of words and phrases, mostly out loud, I would commune with myself on nothing at all.  Since my friends had already gone down, I rarely spoke to anyone else.  I can honestly say that during that month I had some of the best conversations ever, and found my mind pullulating with ideas and thoughts.

Similarly, I have found other times of my life when I have been alone fruitful in this way.  Whether this was when I had just moved down to London, and was unemployed and so had nothing better to do, or when I was on holiday wandering the Greek islands, at such times I have found anything and everything was liable to send my thoughts racing after some mental butterfly, only to relinquish it at the sight of another, yet more brightly coloured or elusive.

I remember those times with fond affection, partly because like most memories, they are bathed in a warm glow of nostalgia which smooths out the rough edges of inconvenience, and partly because like youth, they represent a lost time to me.  Today, in the hustle and bustle of my very full yuppie life, I am rarely on my own and never idle.  It is therefore a long time since I have had a really good heart to heart with myself.

Though my present lifestyle has ample compensations, I do miss this talking.  I miss the immediate understanding I can offer, the absence of any need to fill in details or sketch their background. Instead, I can proceed with concocting thoughts at their most fresh and daring.  With myself, the feedback is so instant that the inspiration is rarely lost.  Bouncing an idea back and forth between my split yet unitary self is like an image in two parallel mirrors, shadowing itself to infinity.

I feel less fecund as a result. My thoughts and inspirations are few and far between, I must husband them.  Inevitably my work eats up many.  However, at least those that are left, poor as they may be, become all the richer for being rare and more occasional.  Perhaps that is why I produce these essays when I can, why they represent no drudgery, but an almost self-indulgent luxury.  Often they are sparked off by one of these little illuminations.  After chewing on it for a few minutes, savouring its particular insight, enjoying the afterglow of minor creativity, I will often try to fix it by committing it to a written form.  In the course of filling the page, new thoughts may, sometimes, emerge.  If these thoughts start to match up to the initial inspiration, I begin to feel again the old joys of the interior monologue.  And so do I.

(22.6.86)

Index