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Oh – joy!

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The feeling is that of the lost soul who – when dying of thirst on the remorseless sunbaked sands of an unforgiving desert and on spotting on the heat-hazed horizon a life-saving oasis – discovers that – contrary to his initial fears – it is not after all a mirage, but is indeed the fountain of life…

You may think this somewhat too effusive given that the object of my preroration is a mere television programme, but I can assure you that it accurately reflects the emotions experienced by this viewer on discovering – in the wasteland of the UK’s 21st century televisual output – an intelligent, complex, splendidly crafted, subtly directed TV drama – acted with exactitude and beautifully shot.

I refer – of course – to the first episode of ‘Parade’s End’ which was shown last Friday on the BBC. Adapted from Ford Maddox Ford’s quartet of post-Great War novels by the estimable Tom Stoppard this splendid offering starred – amongst other luminaries – the excellent Benedict Cumberbatch. Stoppard is a personal hero and I have been lucky enough to have met him twice – at first night parties for ‘Indian Ink’ and ‘The Invention of Love’. This was not only a lot more prosaic than it sounds but was also proof of the dictum that one should never meet one’s heroes. At each meeting I was reduced to babbling incoherence, telling him only on one occasion – as I recall – that his play was “quite brilliant”. He gave me a pitying look…

I could wax lyrical for a further 1500 words on the subject of ‘Parade’s End’, but the critics have already done so far more eloquently than I ever could. Here is Euan Ferguson in the Observer. All I will do is to urge those of you living in the UK who missed it on Friday to seek out the remaining four episodes – and for those of you in Canada and elsewhere to lobby your local TV stations to purchase said work and to screen it forthwith.

Following Friday’s episode there was a ‘making of’ documentary which featured a number of astute commentaries on the piece, including that of Cumberbatch himself. Without being too rude I think it safe to say that not all actors are as erudite on the subject of works in which they have appeared. Cumberbatch came over sufficiently well that I will forgo my usual somewhat childish remarks about his Alma Mater.

Well – they are rivals!

 

A kind of praise

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“Fools may our scorn, not envy, raise.
For envy is a kind of praise.”

John Gay

The day after Kickass Canada Girl and I returned from Provence we had lunch – sitting under the blazing sun outside a surpassingly pleasant country pub in a typically bucolic Surrey village – with my oldest friend and his wife. By ‘oldest’ I actually mean ‘longest serving’, as it were, since he and I have known each other since I was nine and he seven and we were at school together back in the late 60s. I have known his wife for nearly as long – she being the same age as he – and it is one of the apparently inevitable sadnesses of modern life that these days we don’t get to see each other nearly enough.

Without going into detail it is fair to say that my friend and his wife have had a difficult couple of years. Some of the things that have happened to them have been echoed to a degree in both my life and that of the Girl, and as a result our empathy levels are high…

Both the Girl and I felt on this occasion – however – that there was a new-found air of tranquility about them which suited them well. The genesis of this was not difficult to ascertain; Oldest Friend’s wife (who has been Deputy Head of a preparatory school for as long as I can recall) had – shortly before the end of the summer term – taken the apparently un-premeditated decision to retire with immediately effect – or as close to such as can be achieved by those in the teaching profession!

Though it might – under the circumstances – seem inappropriate to feel even a tad envious, I must nervously admit to having briefly experienced that emotion. I am well aware that retirement can bring its own difficulties, and that the transition can be stressful. I have observed first hand examples of those for whom the entire undertaking was an unmitigated disaster. I am also only too aware of current pressures to extend one’s working (though not necessarily productive!) life longer and longer. However…

On the day following the aforementioned lunch the Girl flew to Warsaw on business, where she languishes even as I write. Once again we are restricted to Skyping each other, though at least for now without the eight hour time diference. She will be back in the UK tomorrow and then – after the Bank Holiday weekend – will return once more to Victoria. This time – and it hardly bears thinking about – we will not see each other face to face until November, when we meet in Hong Kong to attend the wedding of some lovely friends of ours. Under the circumstances a little envy may surely be forgiven.

Oldest Friend ventured the opinion – with reference to his wife’s decision – that even when such a course of action has not been seriously considered, one often knows – instinctively and instantly – when the time is right. I absolutely concur with this view. Even though I have to work out this coming academic year I know already that the time has come for me to step away.

I’m done!

Long Beach Wild

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The eagle-eyed amongst you – and probably in this case even the short-sighted – will spot at once that the image above is the original from which the masthead to this blog was derived. It was taken in August 2010 on a really rather inexpensive digital compact shortly before said camera ceased working entirely a few days into our honeymoon – forcing me to seek another such in the (relative) wilds of southern Alaska. One of the things that I like about the photo is that I did nothing at all to pre or post-process it – this is exactly as the camera saw it.

One of the great joys of our recent break in Provence was that – for the first time in ages and notwithstanding the demands for attention of our dear Saanichton friends’ (our travelling companions) two young sons – I was able to catch up on some reading. I finished David Ross’s excellent and comprehensive biography of Richard Hillary – of whom I will write more later – as well as hugely enjoying Stanley Booth’s kaleidoscopic description of the Rolling Stones fated 1969 tour of America – ‘The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones’. You are probably familiar with how that particular tale ended, but needless to say this classic narrative – sufficiently difficult to write that it was not published until 15 years after the events concerned – is the definitive guide to the essence of the times. For those of us who grew up in the late 60s – and for those who wish that they had – it is required reading.

Neither of these weighty tomes, however, moved me as much as did a slender volume that I picked up (in Costco of all places!) whilst in Victoria at the beginning of July – ‘Long Beach Wild’ by Adrienne Mason. Subtitled ‘A Celebration of People and Place on Canada’s Rugged Western Shore’ this is a heartfelt evocation of Long Beach – that spectacular sweep of sand on the west coast of Vancouver Island between Tofino and Ucluelet – written by someone who has lived in the region for 20 years and is clearly in thrall to the place.

The connection between these two apparently unrelated items – as you might already have guessed – is that my photograph was itself taken on Long Beach, with which I have also fallen in love though, of course, much more recently than did Mrs Mason. The image is of what is now the Wickaninnish Interpretive Centre but which was – as I learned from Mrs Mason’s excellent history – the original Wickaninnish Inn that was closed and taken over on the foundation of the Pacific Rim National Park and the incorporation of Long Beach thereinto. A new – and somewhat up-market – Wickaninnish Inn was created rather more recently a short distance to the north on Chesterman Beach, which destination will – I firmly intend – be the location of my sixtieth birthday celebration in January 2014.

Those of you who are inhabitants of Vancouver Island will probably already be familiar with this part of the Pacific Coast. Some may not find themselves moved by its austere attractions, particularly during ‘Fogust’, though I myself find even those mysteriously murky mornings strangely enticing. In any case, whether an old Long Beach hand or a complete ingenue I recommend regardless investigation of Mrs Mason’s book and of her excellent blog on the subject – The Long Beach Blog – one that will certainly be added to my blogroll.

Provence – pictorial potpourri

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The staggeringly beautiful villages of the Vaucluse have been documented by far, far greater photographers than I could ever hope to become, and I do not intend to add my humble efforts to the many gorgeous images than can already be found on the InterWebNet. I will simply, therefore, post a few snaps taken over the last week or so that I quite like, in the hope that the gentle reader may also obtain some pleasure therefrom.

 

A muse of fire…

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O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention

William Shakespeare

I have long been fascinated by the nature – and the mystery – of creativity.

In one way or another – and for the greater part as an amateur – I have been a writer for as long as I can recall. I have read throughout extensively on the arts of writing and composing but – although I have learned much about technique – I still don’t understand how the muse itself functions. Perhaps no-body does.

In my youth and young adulthood – throughout the 70s and early 80s – I played in bands for which I was often the principle songwriter. Later – through my background as a musician – I became involved with youth theatre, and shortly thereafter started to write musicals. I wrote – or co-wrote – six such shows (including a re-working of Hamlet set in Thatcher’s Britain!) the majority of which were performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. When I ran out of collaborators willing or mad enough to take on such ventures I turned to writing straight plays instead.

One of the great hopes for my retirement to BC is that I will have the time to devote to writing properly. A full length play will currently take me 2 or 3 years to complete (though of course a play is never actually finished) as I have to fit the writing around work, commuting and sleeping – all of which consume far more of my life than does creativity… at least in the temporal sense. I have only once had the opportunity to write ‘full-time’, as it were, when a (sadly) quiet and lonesome Christmas fortnight enabled me to pretty much complete the first draft of an adaptation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ‘Parzival’. Sounds pretentious… was a lot of fun!

Recently I have spent a considerable chunk of my spare (ha!) time re-working some of my songs that were written over the past four decades. The driver for this was that my home studio – which at one point was indeed a room full of equipment but which has now shrunk to a single keyboard and a computer – has reached a point in terms of the technology involved that reasonable quality recordings can be made single-handedly and without great expense. Indeed, when now I meet old friends with whom I once played we often find ourselves discussing – somewhat longingly – what we might have achieved had we access to the technology that the young now take for granted.

All this is of course an aside. Back to the muse…

I have not written a new song for nearly 10 years. Until now – that is.

When we stayed – on my recent visit to Victoria – for a week in Oak Bay, it happened that the house in which we were living contained an upright piano. As Kickass Canada Girl had to work on some of the days that we were there I took advantage of being at a loose end to sit at the keyboard and to doodle around (extemporise!) a little. To my surprise a couple of interesting sequences popped out, and when I discovered the following day that I could still recall them quite clearly it became apparent that an new song might be emerging. A 20 minute wait for the Girl in Serious Coffee in Oak Bay Village gave me the subject for the song, and a little further head scratching produced a workable lyric for the first verse and – as a bonus – an idea for the chorus. All of this before she arrived…

Back home in the UK I thought I should see if I could get something down. I have become accustomed to spending a month or more working on a track trying to get a decent recording, but this one sprung to life in no more than a couple of weeks of snatched moments, and that included writing the bridge and instrumental passage that seemed to be required. I have become used to the incidence of happy accidents during the recording process, but in this case they not only all worked out well, but added a couple of layers of meaning to the song that certainly didn’t come from the conscious mind.

At this point the Girl arrived from BC and we traveled to Provence. I thought I might find a little time to work on some more lyrics but was greatly surprised that – in a spell of no more than 30 minutes yesterday – the rest of the song appeared “as if by magic”! Now all I need to do is to record some vocal tracks (regrettably only with my unfortunately scratchy voice) when I get back to the UK and – hey presto!…

It is not the most original song ever written, but I think it works quite well for what it is. Have I learned anything new about the creative process? Not really – except that one should never, ever think that the muse might have deserted one – no matter how long since one last created. My father – having given up composing when a young man – came back to it in his retirement.

There is definitely a lesson there…

Cultural differences

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I was really quite taken aback – after nearly eight years together – to discover that there are still major cultural differences between Kickass Canada Girl and myself.

Picture the scene… The Girl and I exit the Hypermarche laden with Provencal goodies which I lovingly load into the minuscule boot of our diminutive hire car. She tosses me the key and says,

“You drive”.

With the sun attempting to scorch us to toast before the air conditioning has a chance to kick in I jump into the driver’s seat and fumble with the key for the ignition lock. Got it! I twist the key vigorously. The car leaps forward and slams into the kerb in front of us.

“What the heck!”, she exclaims. “Could you jolly well not do that?”

She didn’t actually say that, but for the sake of the sensibilities of the gentle reader let us assume that she did.

“Could you not leave the jolly car in gear!”, I retort.

Actually, I didn’t say that either…

Apparently I am a particularly slow learner, because it took me four or five bunny-hopping commencements to excursions before I figured out that the Girl was not – in some heat induced stupor – forgetting to put the car into neutral before disembarking… This is, clearly, what she always does. I had not noticed before because – under a peculiarity of UK regulations which meant that the Girl could only exchange her Canadian drivers’ licence for an automatic licence – she had not driven what the Canadians call a ‘stick-shift’ during her time in England.

It turns out, of course, that in Canada one is taught always to leave the car in gear when parked. My protestations that this renders the parking brake somewhat redundant – particularly because Canadians are apparently taught not to use it when waiting to move off on a gentle incline either – cut no ice. It seems that the gearbox is to be relied on but that the parking brake is not. So much for automotive technological advancement!

Let us hope – in the interests of saving face in front of the amused locals – that we reach a compromise rapidly, and that our progress throughout the south of France is free of further lapinary lurches.

Still – as they say here – ‘Vive la difference”!

Vive la France!

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In about an hour from now (time of writing rather than posting!) Kickass Canada Girl will be touching down at Heathrow. Hooray! I will, of course, be there to meet her.

We are going on Holiday.

Double hooray!!

On Friday evening we fly down to Marseilles – in the south of France – and on the Saturday will drive up to Avignon where we will meet our dear friends from Saanich and their two small boys. They are travelling to France independently – and directly – but once we have conjoined there we will be spending a (hopefully) completely relaxed fortnight recovering and recuperating from all the recent trials and tribulations. I can’t wait…

I intend to send images and despatches from Provence if at all possible. The apartments we have booked are equipped with wifi and as long as there are no unexpected hitches I should be able to post some relaxed and contemplative musings on life, the universe and – well – everything!

Hmmm!

 

The Girl and I also have reason to celebrate as yesterday marked our second wedding anniversary. Strangely whereas, on the one hand, the wedding feels as though it took place only yesterday, at the same time it is as though we have been married forever. I think this must be a good sign – though as I am an optimist I think that everything is a good sign…

Happy days!

Olympic dreams

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Why on earth would an Oscar winning movie director – who can pretty much pick and choose his projects these days – wish to take on the impossible challenge of directing the London Olympics opening ceremony?

Any way you size it up this really was the poisoned chalice – the hopeless cause – the no-win situation.

Consider…

  • It would be impossible to top the massively funded, meticulously choreographed (some might say ‘regimented’) show that the Chinese put on in Beijing four years ago.
  • Given a potential world-wide audience running into the billions it would be completely impossible to please all – or even the majority – of them, let alone to entertain everyone whilst contriving to offend no-one.
  • From the director’s point of view devising such a show would surely be – in any case – an impossible task. How could one create a show that was at once local and global – embodying some essence of this sceptred isle whilst not being so parochial than no-one else would get it? How could one reconcile the demands of the TV close up with the requirement for a spectacle that would fill a stadium? How could the show be at once personal and universal?

As you may have deduced – I spend Friday evening watching Danny Boyle’s bizarre, amateurish (in the best sense), messy, insanely brilliant opening ceremony. I fell off the sofa laughing. I howled like a baby – at some points so hard that I could scarce catch my breath. In the kaleidoscopic whirl of layered references (oh what delight – an Olympic opening ceremony incorporating subtlety and ambiguity, whilst at the same time displaying complete self-confidence!) I repeatedly heard and saw images and ideas in the magical musical and visual smorgasbord that made me cry out, “Yes – that’s us… and that… and that…”

From the exquisitely intimate (the tribute to the dead of 7/7) to the breathtakingly spectacular (the dark satanic mills rising Bosch-like from the stadium floor, the newly forged Olympic rings coming together in the sky above the crowd) Boyle nailed each potentially difficult shift in tone with complete assurance. The collective gasp when it appeared as though Her Majesty herself was going to take part in Daniel Craig’s granite-faced Bond spoof (she couldn’t be – she was!!), and smirk of pleasure at the wonderful tongue in cheek arrival of the Olympic flame carried on a powerboat skippered by David Beckham, in exactly the image of himself that we all believe he holds – merely confirmed a sureness of touch that the rest of us can only dream of.

That touch extended right through to the Olympic cauldron itself. Assembled unseen throughout the parade of athletes as each team carried in one of the ‘petals’ that formed the organic heart of the sculpture, and lit – not by any of the luminaries that had been the subject of pre-Olympic speculation, but by seven young athletes nominated by seven existing Olympic heroes – the individual flaming branches each representing one of the competing nations slowly rose toward the night sky, coming together to form a single, united blossom of fire. As Tim Berners-Lee had previously texted to the stadium – and to the world – “This is for everyone!”

Did everyone ‘get it’? Well – the correspondent of Le Figaro observed – with a generosity not always apparent in the relationship between our ancient races:

“The display reminded a billion viewers of the best contributions that Britain has given to the world for over a century: its sense of humour, its music, and of course sport”.

My view? Danny Boyle is nothing short of a genius. Give that man a knighthood!

The Silent Salesman

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“I’d rather trust a man who doesn’t shout what he’s found,
There’s no need to sell if you’re homeward bound.”

Peter Gabriel

Shortly before the end of last term – and my subsequent trip to BC – I was visited by the account manager for the School’s telecom provider. I am responsible for all of the School’s telephony and external data connections and the meeting was really just a routine catch-up, to see how things were going.

A day or so later – immediately before I left for Canada – I had an email from the account manager advising me that she could offer some significant savings if we signed a new three-year deal. As our existing three-year contract was about to expire this made good sense, but I was sufficiently tired and befuddled that I thought it best to take more time and to work through the implications when my head was clearer.

In the jet-lagged period following my return from Victoria our account manager again approached me, enquiring as to whether I had made any progress. Feeling somewhat guilty I admitted that I was still not entirely clear as to any possible ramifications of taking the offer, and asked for further clarification. The account manager offered to visit me again to explain further – an invitation that I gladly accepted.

When she duly arrived – on a glorious and rare 30°C morning – it took her a mere ten minutes or so to dispel any lingering doubts. This left me feeling guilty again, as I had forgotten that she had to drive all the way up to London from the south coast, which journey – given the heat and the traffic restrictions arising from the fast-approaching Olympics – had proved long and arduous. I spun the meeting out to an acceptable length on the entirely unreasonable premise that this might somehow make it seem to have been more worthwhile. She was – it has to be said – entirely equitable about the whole affair.

I walked her back to her car, passing on the way the three-quarters complete Science Building that is the first stage of the School’s major redevelopment programme. I explained that we would need to move all of our external connections – phone and data – to this new building once it had been handed over, and we discussed what would be involved in doing so.

I also mentioned that we had a small number of direct analogue phone circuits – provided by British Telecom rather than our own provider – which service fire alarm panels, security systems and the like. These would also need to be moved. She suggested that we simply install new lines – cancelling the old ones when the transition was complete.

Standing next to her car, a thought occurred to me. I asked her if her company could provide such circuits.

“Yes”, she replied.

I asked what would be the difference between them providing the lines and my ordering them from BT.

“Ours would be cheaper.”

I asked what I would need to do to set things in motion.

“I’ll send you the forms.”

Job done – a potentially tricky problem solved – everything integrated into one contract, and – without my prompting – she wouldn’t have said a word. Now – given that really don’t like being sold to, my question is – is she actually a brilliant sales-person, or just a very lucky one!

I know which my money is on…

 

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