Disgressed

I see Simon Hoggart, in his entertaining Guardian column yesterday, took up the cudgels in support of John Humphrys and Shakespeare. According to Humphrys, it seems, schools now teach versions of Macbeth translated into contemporary teenage language. Instead of “Is this a dagger I see before me?”, they get “Oooh! Would you look at that.”

Humphrys and Hoggart make that point that where Shakespeare is concerned, the actual words are of the essence. This is probably truer of Shakespeare than most writers, since he seems to have picked up his plots second-hand without much in the way of an original contribution: it’s the poetry that makes him great, and if you remove the words, you remove the poetry. It’s like, says Hoggart, making an non-alcoholic version of Chateau Petrus: why would you even bother?

There’s clearly a large element of truth in this, though I wouldn’t want to say that translations of Shakespeare are necessarily worthless; and you can’t help wondering whether the intentions of the school book in question are being accurately portrayed. Were the authors really offering the phrase above as Shakespeare, or a substitute for Shakespeare; or were they just trying, however clumsily, to draw pupils in towards the real text – perhaps even making a point along the same lines as H & H? (And did they really miss the question mark off the question?) I’m not sure it would be altogether uncharacteristic of John Humphrys to put confected indignation before careful elucidation.

But what really raised my eyebrow was Simon Hoggart’s analogy. Let’s just examine that one a bit more carefully. So the whole point of Shakespeare is the poetry; just as the whole point of Chateau Petrus is – the alcohol? So that’s why Chateau Petrus is a great wine – its strength? An easy slip – no doubt he meant to say something about paraphrased Shakespeare being as pointless as pineapple flavoured Petrus, say. Still, it might be something to bear in mind if you’re contemplating buying one of the wines chosen weekly by Hoggart for the Spectator.

Remember my mentioning an extraordinary emergency train-cleaning episode? It looks as if the explanation may have been the activities of one Bonny Eberndu. According to the Croydon Guardian:

“Bonney Eberndu, 36, of no fixed abode, was arrested by officers in Camberwell Green bus garage yesterday (Wednesday).

It is estimated that the alleged vandalism caused thousands of pounds worth of damage as well as leading to some carriages having to be taken out of service.”

The remaining mystery is Mr Eberndu’s motivation. Some deep-seated neurosis, or just frustrated customer feedback?

I think the Human Wall may be coming back.

It used to be particularly bad at Streatham ten or fifteen years ago, for some reason. Mind you, I thought Streatham was possibly the worst station in England at that time. It’s sunk deep in a kind of trench, with a substantial part of both platforms underneath the road and buidlings in a gloomy tunnel strewn with ineffective anti-pigeon netting. The shape and position of this tunnel guarantee that on winter evenings a freezing wind blows through the place. Moreover, it must have been the only sizeable station in the country with no clock on either platform (it doesn’t matter any more because the indicators show the time). On top of all that, there was the strange phenomenon of the Human Wall. Commuters often get into fixed habits and stand in the same spot on the platform every day. I remember a senior colleague telling me he knew it was time to find a different job when he found himself thinking murderous thoughts about an innocent woman who happened to be standing in his spot one morning. The thing is, at Streatham the practice grew up of people forming lines on the edge of the platform exactly where the doors of the train would be when it stopped (regular commuters have an instinct for this, as powerful as the salmon’s instinctive ability to find its home waters). I suppose there was an element of competition over who was going to get on first – you don’t want somebody arriving ten minutes later than you and then standing between you and the door of the train, do you?

But if you were on the train, as I sometimes was, and you wanted to get off, you found that when every door opened it had a neat line of four people blocking it off. The same four people for each door each day, in the same order. Sometimes the temptation to put your head down and charge through them like a rugby player was almost overwhelming, but as I discovered, even a gentle hand on someone’s shoulder would evoke gasps of horror and astonishment at your rudeness. I suppose the expected thing to do would have been to say “Excuse me please!” or possibly “Move down there!”.

Somehow or other that problem seemed to go away eventually. But recently I’ve noticed a definite trend at other stations. To begin with, people would just stand around on the platform. Then one person would start making a point of going and standing at the edge of the platform as soon as the previous train had gone (sometimes before). Others began to look at this askance: wasn’t this a form of queue-jumping? Soon a second person would regularly go and stand right next to the first, as though, but definitely not, in friendship.

Please, folks! If this goes on, you know where we’re going to end up.

The generator blog has links to a myriad of generators, programs which produce amusing output in text or graphics. In the old days, these things typically combined a relatively small number of words randomly to produce a fairly unimpressive series of permutations on a puerile theme. I seem to remember using a kind of primitive Markov chain system to run up a fortune-teller in GW-Basic myself at one stage. These days some of the generators are a good deal more sophisticated. Many of them allow you to produce graphics spelling out your own headings etc, like the pretzels here or the biscuits. (I’ve only just noticed that from all the available alternatives I automatically picked out the two food-related ones. Hmm…)

Not all of these are brand new, of course: in fact the biscuit one is an old friend of mine: I used it years ago to produce the heading for an invitation to a coffee meeting which won general acclaim. Well, I say acclaim, but as you perhaps know, one rarely gets acclaimed for this sort of thing without a simultaneous implication that one is a slightly sad and nerdy person. Instead of saying “What a talented and creative individual you are!” people tend to say “Gosh! You must have spent hours on that!”.

Of course, in this case I could have riposted that it took me less than a minute using the biscuit site. The strange thing is, in a way I actually prefer people to think I spent hours fiddling with pictures of biscuits.

It seems to me that schools and schoolteachers often have a strange metaphysical view of parents. When they don’t need you , you just sort of wink out of existence for the time being as far as they’re concerned, like some sort of genie. Every so often at Sarah’s school, they have an assembly which parents are invited to attend. The trouble is, they don’t have these assemblies as soon as the children arrive: typically they leave it about an hour. For me, at any rate, this is a problem. Having walked over to the school with Sarah, I now have to go away – but only for an hour. It takes me twenty minutes to walk back home, so it’s not really worthwhile, and there are no cafés or anywhere else you can sit for an hour, except the park.

On Friday, it was assembly day, and Sarah had a substantial speaking part in the moral dilemma to be presented for our edification (Should you help the popular bully, or stand up to them and make friends with the oppressed swot? Readers may like to see whether they can work out the answer as an ethical exercise).

“It’s at a quarter to ten.” she said.
“So, an hour after the quarter to nine when we arrive at school?”

The only possible plan was to take a book, and sit in the park. Except it was raining. I took a plastic bag to sit on and a cloth to wipe the seat, in the hope that it wouldn’t be too wet, and off we trudged with umbrellas in hand. The rain wasn’t too heavy, but when I arrived at the park bench nearest the gate it was clearly not viable. There were small pools of water on the seat, and even the back was sodden: there was no way it could be rendered usable unless I wanted to turn up at the school with a wet bottom. I walked along the path in the hope that one of the other benches might have been sheltered by the trees: some were less wet than others, but none was OK. It occurred to me that over by the church there was a small graveyard, which had a kind of lych-gate with a roof, and – I couldn’t be sure, but I thought – seats inside. It was over at the east side of the park, but what else had I got to do?

Remarkably, once I had trudged across the park, my memory of the roof and the seat proved to be correct. Unfortunately the roof was shedding tiles and the whole thing had been fenced off so that I couldn’t get into it even if I wanted to risk it.

Now the only slim hope was the park café. It was at the northern end of the park, and there was no appreciable chance it would be open this early on a Friday morning, but what the heck. As I approached, it was clear the shutters were down, but there are at least toilets in the same block, and by now I was ready to use them. Three park keepers appeared on a kind of glorified lawnmower, speeding towards the café almost as if to head me off. I hurried into the loo, and it was only as I was about to leave that I realised I had made a small error and was in fact exiting from the ladies, at perhaps the only moment that morning when there would be anyone to watch me.

After that, I felt more comfortable out in the street again. As the time drew near, the rain began to abate, and I was able to furl my umbrella as I strolled back up to the school.

“No,” said the lady in the school office, “The assembly is at ten to eleven. We made it a bit later because people complained that there wasn’t enough time to make it worth going home after they’d delivered the children. You’ll have to have a bit of a walk round for an hour. Looks as if the rain’s coming on again, though.”

I’ll spare you the details of the second hour in the rain. The best part was spent at a bus stop, not getting on buses.

It was a nice assembly though. The correct solution is to spurn the popular bully and befriend the harmless swot.

OK, then: here’s my contribution to One Day in History.

I made the breakfast, as usual: Katharine and Elizabeth left for work and school, and Sarah and I enjoyed the strange hiatus of about an hour which then elapses before we have to set off. (This is when I do most of the updating on my own blogs Disgressed, and Conscious Entities. We set off about half past eight. Sarah was loaded down today with two bags and a trumpet: sometimes I carry the trumpet, but past experience suggests that is a risky practice: there were many occasions in the past when I arrived at work still carrying a school bag. I left her at the corner, watched her head towards the school gate, and entered Beddington Park, which I cross on the way to the station.

As usual at this time of the morning (unless it’s raining), it was full of people walking dogs. There’s a man who often practises the bagpipes in a little group of trees, but he wasn’t there today. You can sometimes hear and even see woodpeckers, but today the only birds in evidence were crows and a couple of the green parakeets which are now apparently spreading across the South of England. When you see them in isolation, their acid green plumage looks absurdly exotic and out-of-place, but it actually works fairly well among the trees. The horse chestnuts, alas have suffered from an attack of leaf miner moth this year, and look prematurely dead.

At Hackbridge station, the preceding train had been delayed so that it arrived only two minutes before the one I normally get. I opted not to catch it, on the theory that everyone would pile into it and leave the usual one, only a couple of minutes later, nearly empty. There’s always something of a gamble involved in letting one train go, of course, but the normal train duly turned up, inexplicably (or at any rate, unexplainedly) reduced to four carriages but still full of room.

The tourist season should be slackening off, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier to make your way across Westminster Bridge. Half the people want their picture taken with ‘Big Ben’ in the background, half want the London Eye behind them. Between the two, it is impossible to get across without barging into several snaps. Luckily, nearly everyone has digital cameras these days, so no film gets wasted.

It was a fairly quiet day in the office. A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of asking what was happening about Christmas lunch, and have therefore got the responsibility of arranging it. Selecting the venue is always a tortuous business: this year there was early enthusiam for the Archduke: but then one person wanted something less traditional. La Tasca emerged as the new favourite, but we had to have a vote by email, in which Auberge, a thrid contender, came from behind to win a clear victory. They have a traditional menu.

At lunchtime I treated myself to one of those chicken escalopes in a granary bap. These things are to chicken burgers what the Berlin Philharmonic is to a Stylophone. Halfway through, I found a large hard foreign object in my mouth, which on investigation proved to be the crown off a tooth – one of my front teeth, in fact.

My dentist, in Wallington, gave me a slot at 3.45 They’re National Health – there doesn’t seemto be any problem with finding a National Health dentist round here. They do seem to have a high turnover of staff though – it’s been a different dentist on each of my last three visits. This time I had a lady (from Poland?) who berated me for my carelessness and insisted I come back for descaling next week. At least my smile is restored.

As part of the “History Matters” campaign, we (us Brits) are being asked to upload an account of our day (‘one day in history’) tomorrow to a special site – they’re calling it a blog, but I don’t think it actually qualifies for that description. I’m tempted to participate, but knowing what Fate is like, I wonder what happens when you nominate one day arbitrarily to be your representative day. It could go several ways, I suppose. It could be that the day turns out to be the most boring and uneventful ever: conversely you might be struck by lightning the moment you set foot outside the door.

More insidiously, you might be tempted into distorting the day for the sake of appearances. Not that this is going to become an important historical document, of course, but somebody might read it, and you’d want them to know that you were a patient, cultured, kindly, and above all, interesting soul. Yes, of course I was going to nip across the river to Tate Modern in my lunchtime anyway. I often travel to work by boat along the Thames, especially on a Tuesday. And I always stop and give money to that excellent busker who plays outside Waterloo.

Or what if something amazing happens to you by pure chance? Suppose, I don’t know, suppose I spot a live otter in the Thames (A dead one was seen the other day, apparently. You might not think that the appearance of a dead otter was much cause for celebration, but in the case of the Thames the gradual return of wildlife is strictly a matter of one step at a time)? I won’t dare put it into my account of the day, because nobody would believe me, would they? How likely is it that that would happen on the nominated day?

There’s nothing I can do, of course; just wait and hope the day turns out representative. But not too representative. That wouldn’t be credible either. Just one little quirky thing – is that too much to ask?

I had an agreeable evening on Tuesday at the Cock Tavern with fellow members of Monkeyfilter, meeting middleclasstool and missus tool, Mofites from Little Rock who were on the first leg of their whirlwind European tour.

Sometimes when you meet people in the flesh for the first time, they turn out rather different from what you expected. I once had a lot of dealings by phone and email with a colleague in Southend. From his self-effacing tone, elaborate courtesy and close attention to detail, I gradually worked up a vivid picture of a balding, elderly man in half-glasses, dressed in a sleeveless jumper that buttoned down the front. When I finally met him he turned out to be a 25 year old Goth.

From my limited experience to date, I think people you meet online turn out to be slightly more reserved and proper in the flesh than you might have expected. It’s probably because the ‘online disinhibition effect’ is absent, and probably just as well – if the people from some popular websites behaved in reality the way they do online, a meet-up with them would be like a nerdish version of a 1980s Club 18-30 party on free cocktails night, with people goatseing and ROFLMAOing all over the place. Or something.

None of that the other evening, anyway: the tools are as charming in the real world as on the Web. The only surprise for me was to discover that mct is in fact normal sized. For some reason I had formed the idea he was on the slighter side of average height. I have no idea why: I an only think it must be because his prose suggests someone quick and light on his feet.

I look forward to hearing about the rest of their trip, anyway. Things have been a bit quiet over at the toolshed recently, but the two of them are my tools of the week, anyway.

I don’t know whether I’m getting irritable in my old age, but the other day I was reading some innocuous official document and came across a reference to the European Union’s ‘Anthem’. Suddenly I was grinding my teeth with annoyance. The Anthem in question is a filleted bit from the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth: the bit that would normally be accompanied by the words of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, though for these purposes the words are omitted, allegedly because of the impossibility of singing in all European languages at once (surely you’d have to be a trifle narrow-minded to object to it being sung in German?).

Now you might think that if a forward-looking body like the European Union wanted an anthem, it would spend some money on commissioning a struggling young composer, who needed the money, to produce a new one. They might even sponsor a competition. But I suppose that’s a secondary point. There’s no doubt that Beethoven’s Ninth represents a high point of musical achievement. It surely also provides a testament to some exceptional strength in Beethoven’s own personality. By this stage of his life, after all, Beethoven had many reasons to be depressed. The political hopes and idealism aroused in him by the French Revolution had been rudely crushed by Napoleon; he was going through a prolonged legal struggle over the guardianship of his nephew, he continued to suffer financial problems, and worst of all he was deaf: his career as a star pianist had been rudely terminated, and he could no longer hear his own music. Most composers would be tempted to produce sombre, despairing music: for Beethoven, constantly being asked his opinion of Mozart, it must have been tempting to turn his hand to a Requiem which would blow all its predecessors away with a howling black void of despair. Instead the Ninth Symphony is a great affirmation of faith and undimmed hope for humanity. The Beethoven who wrote the Ninth is clearly the same man, with the same vision, as the one who wrote the Eroica: not quite so quick on his feet any more, a little more heavy handed with his transcendence of established forms, possibly: but the energy, the optimism, and indeed the joy, are the same: and from the older man, acquainted with grief as he was, they are surely doubly heroic.

A great choice for an anthem then? Perhaps so, if there were ever a world government: but to appropriate it as the property of Europe alone is an act of cultural larceny. No work of art could be more explicitly and essentially addressed to the whole of humanity; indeed, I suspect this is the real reason Schiller’s words were left out by the EU: it would expose the theft too embarrassingly to have the singers belting out words about “alle Menschen” and “der ganzen Welt” with never a mention of Europe. Quite apart from making poor Ludwig turn in his grave, the whole thing epitomises the least attractive facet of the European Union – its tendency to want to reserve for Europe alone benefits which should rightfully be accessible to the whole world.

It makes me mad…

So it seems South West trains are removing many of the seats from their existing trains. This is their strategy for reducing overcrowding, even though there will in fact be more people packed into the train. Promises of longer trains seem to have evaporated (in fairness I have not recently experienced a case of the expedient which was much used a while ago to avoid having to admit that a train was cancelled – splitting the earlier train in half and running two tiny trains packed to the physical limit).

I’m afraid this development is not really a surprise. New rolling stock which made its appearance a few months ago on some lines features more open space, fewer seats (some of them folding) and by way of compensation, some minimally upholstered “perches” which afford the bottom marginally greater comfort at the cost of additional strain on the legs and back. I dare say in the long run even these ‘perches’ will be reserved for the disabled or pregnant.

It’s all just part of the way rail privatisation was arranged. I have nothing against the idea in principle, but it is remarkable how cleverly a way was found to ensure that none of the benefits of private enterprise (choice, competition, lower prices) was achieved, while all the disadvantages of private operation (safety neglected, myopic focus on immediate profit, large salaries for inert senior management) were realised; and to round things off, the monopolistic contempt for passengers which had grown up in British Rail was preserved and enhanced.

But that’s not the thing that annoys me. What I want to know is, where is the Health and Safety Executive when you finally need them? A large amount of effort has been going into ensuring that even rather large children have booster seats in cars: but in trains, it’s apparently fine if they just stand up amongst a crowd of adults. Have risk assessments been done? Has anyone worked out what’s going to happen when a seatless train has an accident?

Of course, I know how it will go. The official view will be that a seatless train is fine so long as people are packed in so tight they prop each other up. Sorry, this train’s not going anywhere till the last few spaces are filled up. Move down!