Disgressed

We had a pleasant evening yesterday listening to a concert given by Sarah’s training band (she plays the trumpet) and a couple of older youth groups. They got her name wrong in the programme, I’m afraid, but by way of compensation she appeared prominently in the picture (see left).

The concert was in a church, however, and I’m afraid my bottom is not really up to a long session on wooden pews any more. I’ve gone through phases on this. When I was young, thin, and even fairly fit (yes, there was such a time, though it seems hard to believe it), I also found it difficult to sit through longer events. In those days my trousers used invariably to wear out at the knee, and it was mainly the overflow of surplus energy which was the problem, though lack of fat cover on the bones might also have had something to do with it. As time went on the problem of too much energy solved itself and the natural padding of my nether regions was sensibly augmented. In my thirties I could sit happily more or less anywhere: if I had some kind of support and something to look at, I was pretty much OK for the rest of the day.

But now that my trousers invariably wear out at the seat, it’s getting more difficult again. Why is that? Increased weight? Deteriorating muscle tone? Spending all day in a high-tech, super-sprung, cosi-fit office chair? It really came home to me when we went to the Globe Theatre a few years ago. We hired the extra large versions of the foam rubber cushions which they offer to take some of the strain off the solid wooden benches, but it made little difference: after about half an hour a painful numbness appeared and things went downhill from there.

Bearing this in mind, I had little compunction last night about seizing a hassock from the hook in front and stuffing it underneath myself. I have a vague feeling that this must constitute, if not an actual misdemeanour, at least a pretty bad lapse of taste: but I’m sorry, that’s just too bad. It was only a leather one, anyway, not somebody’s special embroidery. If that helps. It had the unfortunate side effect of making me appear to be about six foot eight: I expect the people behind would have complained about the restricted view, except that, well, I appeared to be about six foot eight.

The concert was composed almost entirely of 20th century music – not avant garde stuff, you understand: a version of the theme from the Pink Panther was one highlight, and a sort of West Side Story medley was another. I suppose for musicians at this level you need something bright and appealing, something that makes a confident noise capable of covering up any minor errors and showing off the brass to its best advantage. All the more surprising, then, that the last piece should have been an orchestrated version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: not exactly a forgiving piece of music. But of course, this was Johann Sebastian with the upbeat rhythm section and funky Latin beat he was so sadly lacking during his lifetime. I think they had the old man up to about 45 rpm by the time they finished.

Takes your mind off your bottom, though.

“Pencils? We’ve got pencils, haven’t we?” I asked, “I mean, in the drawers. In the girls’ pencil cases. On the desk. In the desk. On the table.”
“Yes,” said Katharine, “But I thought that for Sarah’s test tomorrow it would be nice if she had new ones. And a rubber. You know she changes things.”
“Could the pencils have rubbers on the end?”
“I’m not sure. Better play it safe. Get two. You can get some, can’t you?”
“Yes, sure.” I said, “OK.”

It was Friday evening and I was about to leave the office: the following morning Sarah was due to take a school entrance test. I looked thoughfully towards the stationery cupboard, full of pencils, rubbers, pens, and everything to gladden the heart of a stationer. But no. Just a small diversion to Victoria station and I should be able to buy some nice new ones honestly.

The stationery section of WH Smith on Victoria station has suffered a contraction recently in order to accomodate a branch of Yo! Sushi; but it’s still fairly sizeable, and I had a reasonable choice of pencil. I picked up one with special grippy bits, no doubt designed to solve those irritating problems with hard-to-grasp pencils. Of course once you’d sharpened it a couple of times the grippy bits would be gone, but it should last a morning. There were no rubbers. Not with the pencils, not with the pens, not anywhere else in stationery: not even fancy girly ones with cartoons on or ones shaped like dinosaurs. I could get twelve different kinds of cardboard box with inferior merchandising, but no rubber. I got a packet of six pencils with rubbers on the end, just in case, and set off across the station to PaperChase.

You know what’s coming – I could get seven different flavours of lip-balm (probably meant to help repair the ravages incurred while licking envelopes, I suppose) but no erasers of any kind. By now I had missed one train. I headed out of the station and eventually found a small newsagents where I could get Pritt sticks, biros , and pads of writing paper. A rubber? The man behind the counter shook his head.

I decided the rubbers on the pencils would have to do. The next train was cancelled, by the way.

“Did you get the rubbers?”
“Well, no, but these pencils have rubbers on the end – is that going to be OK?”
“The thing is, I’ve been reading the rules again and they’re not allowed to take rubbers in at all.”
“This one’s OK,” I said, holding up the special grippy pencil “And we have got other pencils, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” said Katharine “It’s OK. I’ll just have to cut the ends off two or three of these you got.”
“With a saw?”
“No – I’ll just cut the rubber bits off.”
“Will that be good enough?”
“It’ll have to be – come on, we don’t want to start getting picky about it.”

Sarah did her best to calm us down before she went off for her test. She said she liked the grippy one, anyway. Later on, I went to pick her up, standing with a crowd of other parents as half-a-dozen children at a time were exhibited for recognition, very much in the manner of a slave market. I managed to avoid bidding against anyone, and Sarah came over.

“Were the pencils alright?” I asked.
“Yeah, I suppose so.” she answered, “Actually, they gave out pencils when we arrived.”

On the whole, though, I think it was probably as well that our efforts were focused on the pencils, rather than anything more important.

You may have seen, on YouTube and elsewhere, the short video of a shrimp at Atlantic University, running enthusiastically along on a treadmill. The research project is to do with establishing that unwell shrimp are less fit and less able to survive: this has implications for our stewardship of the environment. Yes indeed. Come on, David Scholnick: that may wash with the grant-awarding committee, but we know you just wanted to put a shrimp on a treadmill (and what’s wrong with that?).

The curious thing, it seems to me, is the shrimp’s ready compliance. Hard to see what could motivate it, but apparently it runs along determinedly for hours. It reminds me of the scientist who built a complex set of twisting tubes to demonstrate how an octopus could squeeze through tiny spaces: he was planning a set of food rewards and incentives, but as soon as the tubes were set up, the octopus started zooming through them, just for the hell of it. I think this tells us something about motivation and perhaps the theory of affordances, which says, approximately, that if you give a man a hammer, he starts seeing everything as a nail. If you give a man a peaked cap, similarly, you don’t need to tell him he should start enforcing the park bye-laws, and you don’t need to incentivise him any further.
That was noticeable in my office many years ago when a rigorous performance-related pay system was introduced. Up till then, the position of management had appeared to be: we know you’re a dutiful person who does a good job, and we know you’re worth more than this: but we’re afraid we can’t afford any more. That was OK: give us the twisty tubes and we’ll crawl through them anyway. Once performance pay was in place, the implicit message changed to: we understand that money’s the only thing you care about, so perhaps if we dangle £50 in front of your nose you’ll get off your bum for once. It was almost as unhelpful, motivationally, as if a man had started to offer his wife small cash sums for good performance.

What was going through the shrimp’s mind? Perhaps to begin with it just automatically moved forward, and then thought it would look stupid if it stopped?

This must be what they want me to do. Let’s swing those legs a bit so it looks as if the whole thing was my idea. Actually you know, though I say it myself, I’m pretty good at this. Those people up there must be noticing. They must be a little bit impressed. Who knows, maybe this will turn out well.  They obviously want the running done: maybe  if they see me run so well, I’ll get something in return.  I could keep this up for hours.  I was always a runner: just had it in me, I suppose: just lucky that the opportunity to exploit that talent has finally come along…

..whoops, the third leg on the left stumbled a bit there. They didn’t notice. They can’t have noticed. Anyway, so what: in a running career like mine, what’s one little stumble? I don’t have to do this, you know. I could take up swimming. It’s not as if there were any kind of punishment. Not that I would know exactly. Those rumours about them eating shrimps – it wouldn’t be shrimps like me, anyway. Not lab shrimps. Not runners. Not top performers like me. Oh! Wait! You can’t replace me! What’s going to happen to the treadmill? You’ll never find a shrimp that can do it the way I did, you fools!

Excuse me. I have some tubes to attend to.

The girls were watching television on Sunday morning, sprawled on the sofa in their pyjamas. One of the growing stream of pre-Christmas toy ads attracted Elizabeth’s contempt.

“Ha.” she said, “I bet most of the little girls who get Barbie Cinderella have’t even seen it…” she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye “…or read it, of course.” she added.

It’s true though: for my daughters, most classic stories are not books, but films. There’s a general disliterarification (or something) at work. Cinderella probably isn’t so bad (you could argue that it should be told to you, or seen as a pantomime, rather than read), but it pains me rather that in their eyes Alice in Wonderland is primarily a Disney film, and also, but less importantly, a book. I’m sure both of them think of nursery rhymes as that stuff on the old video, and Lord of the Rings is the name of a film trilogy. Elizabeth, indeed, has taken a principled decision that she will never read any of the Harry Potter books, but sees the films and will own the whole sequence on DVD. Scrooge is Patrick Stewart (at least he isn’t Mr Magoo), and to my mother’s annoyance, the Jungle Book is obviously another Disney special: the characters are forever the randomly altered (virtually inverted in some cases) personalities devised by Walt, rather than the Kipling originals.

(Sometimes these things are really incomprehensible. I can easily see why Disney, for example, would pick on Tigger as the character from Winnie the Pooh most in tune with its own weltanschauung: but why, in The Tigger Movie, did they then go on to make him an eccentric inventor suffering from chronic depression? If we’re going to have these stories bastardised, at least let’s have them bastardised competently, for heaven’s sake…)

It pains me, I say: but I’m not altogether sure whether it should. For one thing, the girls do read books: they’re just not as obsessive about it as I was. Did it really do me any good to read one of Enid Blyton’s lesser works fifteen times over? I can’t even remember the title or much of the plot now. As one of my old colleagues, a voracious reader, remarked: “They talk about reading as if it was something marvellous, but it’s just a habit, like any other.” Moreover, doesn’t some of my disquiet stem from the fact that the girls don’t read my favourites, but Jacqueline Wilson and Roald Dahl instead (both good writers, thoug I have my reservations). I must further admit that when I read some of my old favourites to the girls, I sort of got a new perspective on some of them. Are the Just William stories a bit ponderous, actually? Is The Phantom Tolbooth more whimsical and less clever than I remembered? My mother also found, once she had bought a copy of the Jungle Book and was ensconced with her grandchildren, that it was a very large and complex book, and not altogether suitable for a quick bedtime story after all.

As for Harry Potter, I never realised until Elizabeth took up her stance, how much pressure there is to read the damn things. People are constantly asking whether she wouldn’t like them to get her the books, and doesn’t she realise what she’s missing, and looking shocked and disapproving by her failure to join in. I can’t help beginning to sympathise with her: you know, this is just some load of corny fabulation, by Enid Blyton based on an idea by Terry Pratchett. It’s not a central monument of Western culture (is it?).

Nursery rhymes possibly do have some cultural signifcance, but you know what? They’re rubbish, most of them: really poor, stilted examples of verse. So is that a horse we ride to Banbury Crorse, or a hoss to the Cross? And Jack “home did trot”, did he? Is that translated over-literally from the Hungarian or something?

All the same – Alice in Wonderland? A cartoon?

I used to be quite proud of my ability to duck and weave speedily across the large concourses at Waterloo, or still more difficult, at Victoria. At busy times you face a buzzing swarm of travellers and any attempt to walk in a straight line is thwarted by people coming at you or across you from all directions at different speeds and with varying degrees of attention. Typically you have to keep pulling up short: but if you increase your speed slightly it proves possible to zig-zag through quite fluently. You do have to keep an eye in all directions, though, anticipate other people’s changes in speed or direction, and be able and willing to jink and swerve like a Thompson’s gazelle trying to throw a leopard off track.

Some minor problems with my legs have decreased my agility over the last couple of years, but at the moment I have another problem: Joaquin Rodrigo. Four days ago I had his ever-popular Concierto de Aranjuez playing while I was doing something, and the third movement (the bit that seems strangely Christmassy for some reason: it sounds as if it ought to have lyrics about figgy pudding and boughs of holly to me) somehow got stuck in a continuous loop in my brain.

There could be worse bits of music to have stuck in your mind, but after a few hours it gets beyond a joke, and it starts to feel as if the small neuronal circuit in your brain which deals with that particular bit of music is beginning to turn sore and inflamed. Moreover, it completely throws off my rhythm. I’m not sure exactly what rhythmn it is you need to dart through the crowds at a station, but hints of flamenco and the lazy strutting of proud old Spanish hidalgos absolutely wreck it, I can tell you (the lazy strutting of proud old Santa Claus is no better, either). This is why I ricocheted off a lady dressed in black just outside Boots. She was a substantial lady, and my impact resulted in only the most trivial deflection of her course, but she was quite rightly displeased about it.

Normally when I have a tune on my brain it goes away fairly quickly, but for some reason this particular infection is really lasting. The night before last it was actually preventing me from sleeping: as a desperate measure I stuck my earphones in and listened to Classic FM. I often find that half an hour of the World Service, that fine channel, helps to recompose one’s mind for sleep in the small hours of the morning, but this was the first time I had resorted to music. It worked! They played Walton’s Crown Imperial, and somehow it drove out the Rodrigo, allowing me to sleep again.

In the morning, I found I now had the Crown Imperial running through my head. This didn’t seem so bad: but when I got to the station I found that the rhythm of a Governor-General’s stately march is just as disruptive to your path across the platforms as the Rodrigo. I didn’t actually make contact with anyone this time, I’m glad to say, but there were some worrying near-misses, and in the end I just had to go back to abject shuffling and ambling, like some pensioner or – heavens! – tourist.

If that wasn’t enough, the dastardly Dons regrouped somewhere in my subconscious, and by the afternoon Rodrigo’s mistletoe-waving matadors were back running through my head. They’re still there, faintly.