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Degrees of imperceptibility

December 14, 2012 in Life as we know it | Permalink

It is 41 weeks since the Kickass Canada Girl moved to Victoria to take up the job there that we had hoped would see her through to retirement and me becoming a permanent resident of Canada. This weekend – in the brave new world in which we now find ourselves – she flies back into Heathrow to resume her life here in England, with our relocation to British Columbia postponed until some as yet unspecified date in the future.

Welcome back, Kickass Canada Girl!

This post is my one hundred and second since the Girl left for Victoria in early March and my one hundred and twenty first since I took up blogging towards the end of January this year. I suppose the obvious question in this regard is  – do I carry on blogging now that the balance of my life has swung away from immigration and towards imperceptibility?

It would be entirely understandable if regular readers were to curl their lips in disdain and demand to know – since the stated theme and purpose of this blog no longer exactly holds (at least in the short term) – why they should continue to waste their time on my picaresque meanderings. They would indeed have a point and I would not blame them for dropping out at this point.

However – as you may already have deduced from the tone of the above – my initial reaction is to carry on blogging regardless in the hope that some of what I write may still be of interest. The Girl and I have many connections in Canada and we will inevitably be visiting as time goes by, though our next trip will probably not now be until next summer. Hopefully my contributions on trans-Atlantic life will continue to resonate, creating perhaps something of a virtual connection between our communities of friends on both sides of the ocean.

Truth be told I have enjoyed blogging this year. The self-imposed discipline of having to produce posts on a regular basis was particularly beneficial whilst I was living on my own and will, I believe, continue to be so once the Girl and I are fully reunited. Writing virtually daily is terribly good practice and the need to polish the resultant prolix prose into concise, pithy and apposite nuggets is slowly imbuing in me a most useful skill in an area that has perhaps previously been somewhat neglected.

So – with your kind permission – I will carry on…

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More to say…

December 4, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I find that I have more to say on the subject of the latest Bond opus – Skyfall.

A period of contemplation found me considering the underlying meaning of the film. This in itself represents a considerable departure for a Bond film. How many of the previous offerings – however enjoyable they might have been – could be said to have a deeper (even if not much deeper) meaning?

Skyfall – on the other hand – does so.

It is entirely apposite that, with the franchise celebrating its 50th anniversary, questions should be asked as to the continuing pertinence of the series. Skyfall chooses to do this at several levels, questioning not only the relevance of Bond to the action film genre itself, but also of Fleming’s cold war ‘blunt instrument’ in the era of cyber espionage, both as a fictional character and also – by extension – in the world of real live spooks… whatever the reality of that might actually be.

This exchange between Bond and Ben Whishaw’s Q – sitting in the National Gallery in front of Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire” – is germane:

Q: It always makes me feel a bit melancholy. Grand old war ship. being ignominiously haunted away to scrap… The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?

James Bond: A bloody big ship. Excuse me.

Q: 007. I’m your new Quartermaster.

James Bond: You must be joking.

Q: Why, because I’m not wearing a lab coat?

James Bond: Because you still have spots.

Q: My complexion is hardly relevant.

James Bond: Your competence is.

Q: Age is no guarantee of efficiency.

James Bond: And youth is no guarantee of innovation.

Q: Well, I’ll hazard I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field.

James Bond: Oh, so why do you need me?

Q: Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled.

James Bond: Or not pulled. It’s hard to know which in your pajamas. Q.

Q: 007.

The Turner is, of course, carefully chosen and there is little doubt that Sam Mendes – directing his first action movie – is to thank for bringing his erudition and intelligence to bear on what might otherwise have remained a somewhat dated format.

Mendes also no doubt had a hand in the choice of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, the final stanza of which provides a fitting climax to M’s peroration to the select committee – immediately before all hell breaks loose. I found myself pondering the exact reasoning behind this particular choice and this naturally led me back to the poem itself.

Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ takes the form of a dramatic monologue in three parts. In the first Ulysses – having taken 10 years to return home after the Trojan wars and having eventually recovered his long abandoned wife and throne – finds himself enduring a quotidian existence, much vexed by the trivial responsibilities of power. He pines for the glory days of yore, longing once more to be able to travel and to explore.

The second part comprises a relatively brief discourse on the virtues of Ulysses’ son, Telemachus, who will rule in his stead once he is gone. The tone suggests that he sees in Telemachus an altogether less passionate, perhaps more ‘modern’ – even sedulous – approach to the business of statesmanship. His admiration verges on the grudging.

He works his work, I mine.

The third and, perhaps, most oft quoted passage comprises an invocation to his mariners (though those who accompanied him on his ‘odyssey’ are – by most readings – already dead) to engage in one final quest, one last adventure – whilst they still have the strength. The passage culminates with these stirringly elegiac lines:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Interpretations of the poem are legion. Tennyson composed it shortly after the death of a close friend, the poet Arthur Henry Hallam, and said of it: “It gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life.” There is – as a result – much debate as to what extent Tennyson’s reading of Ulysses is autobiographical. This in turn informs a debate as to the ironical (or otherwise) nature of the poem. This view makes play of the apparent inconsistencies in the character of Ulysses across the poem as a whole.

Most interpretations do, however, seem to consider the closing stanzas inspirational – an invocation of the heroic – and as a result they are much used as mottoes by schools and other similar institutions. The last three lines are engraved on a cross at Observation Hill in Antarctica to commemorate Captain Scott and his party.

My reading is somewhat different. The subject to me seems to be loss. Ulysses is in reality – as Thomas has it – ‘raging against the dying of the light’. He recognises that his long moment in the sun is behind him, and though he comes out of his corner bravely – puffing out his chest and taking on all comers – he actually knows that the game is up.

It is, of course, in the nature of a true work of genius that each of us may find in it our own truths – our own meanings. Though Skyfall is itself certainly no work of genius I am indebted to it for leading me back to these other classics – and for making me think a little…

…and that is certainly more than can be said of any number of other like films.

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Go west

October 22, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

The November edition of GQ magazine (British edition – which I purchased because it contains a number of Bond related features) details the winners of the GQ 2012 ‘Men of the Year’ awards. The Bond link is a tie-in with the (very) imminent release of the new Bond opus – ‘Skyfall’- which marks the 50th anniversary of the franchise. You can all rest safe in the knowledge that I will be returning to the subject of Bond (if not of Daniel Craig!) in the not too distant future. For now, though, I want to focus on one particular man of the year…

It is 23 years since ‘A Few Good Men’ premiered on Broadway and kick-started Aaron Sorkin’s writing career. Sorkin – who sold the film rights to the script before it had even opened – was  subsequently engaged to write the screenplay for the 1992 movie version, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination later the same year.

Sorkin’s career highlights have been rehearsed often enough that there is no need for me to repeat them here. It is a testament to his talent and longevity that adding the 2012 GQ ‘Men of the Year’ award for best writer to his trophy cabinet comes as no surprise, and indeed as something of a relief to those who hanker after the sort of high quality writing that – Stoppard and a few others excepted – seems sadly in short supply in this day and age.

For those unfamiliar with Sorkin’s oeuvre, however, I feel compelled to give just one example – from the first series of the multi-award winning ‘The West Wing’ – by way of an illustration and encouragement to all budding playwrights and screen writers.

As is the norm for ‘The West Wing’, in this episode – ‘The State Dinner’ – a number of plot threads evolve simultaneously. The main strands are as follows:

  • In the evening to come the White House is hosting a state dinner for the President of Indonesia – a regime with which the incumbent Democrat administration has a difficult relationship as a result of differences over human rights issues. This is further complicated by a personal mission on the part the administration’s Communications Director who is hoping to persuade one of the Indonesian President’s aides to help to arrange the release of a friend held as a dissident in that country.
  • There is a hostage stand-off in Idaho between the FBI and a group of white separatists over gun charges. There are women and children amongst those held captive.
  • A meeting has been arranged at the White House between the truckers’ union and the haulage bosses, in an attempt to settle an imminent and potentially damaging labour dispute.
  • A hurricane is bearing down on Georgia and is due to arrive before the day’s end with potentially devastating results.

As ever in Sorkin’s scripts the narrative development of these major issues of the day is seamlessly blended with a multitude of personal involvements, by which means the richness of each character is revealed and developed. The whole creates a multi-layered tapestry woven through with many detailed threads… much like life itself!

The underlying theme of the episode is that of the powerlessness of those in high office in the face of events. Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett eventually mounts a feisty intervention in the truckers’ dispute precisely because – as the Stockard Channing’s First Lady explains to one of the other dinner guests – he is powerless to influence the Idaho hostage negotiations and he cannot stop the hurricane!

It is in the nature of such drama series that – to achieve maximum emotional or philosophical effect – each episode will most likely culminate with one of the featured storylines proving to be the ‘doozy’. Part of Sorkin’s genius lies in his adding to the impact by keeping us guessing as to which it will be. In ‘The State Dinner’ each of the themes builds inexorably to a series of climaxes, each out-doing the one before.

Finally – having been sold a dummy on hearing that the hurricane has changed course and will no longer make landfall – it is revealed instead that the naval carrier group that has previously been diverted to avoid the storm – is now directly in its path and cannot escape. Surrounded by a silent tableau of horrified aides the President tries to make radio contact with the commanders of the group – the scene rendered all the more powerful because we only see the White House end of the connection.

The radios on the carriers have been knocked out by the storm. The only contact that can be made is with a small auxiliary supply vessel, which has already been badly damaged by the huge waves. The captain has been summoned to the radio room but does not appear – leaving the President on the line to the terrified youth who is the radio operator. Knowing the inevitable fate of those concerned the President promises to stay on the line as long as it is open…

Pure class!

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Planting a tree

September 26, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“That’s the way I do things when I want to celebrate, I always plant a tree.”

Wangari Maathai

 

This last weekend saw the final cricket match of my season. It was a very relaxed, festive affair – taken in good heart by both sides and with much jolly banter and gentle joshing. I found myself batting for a while alongside a much younger chap whom I had not met before. This is not unusual as the nature of a wandering side such as ours is that players come and go over the years, playing a few fixtures here and there as and when they can, or when the mood takes them. You might gather that – given my advancing years and general inability to keep up with the keen youngsters who turn out for more ‘serious’ sides – this suits me rather well.

As it turned out this particular batsman had well and truly got his eye in and laid waste to bowling of all complexions, only finally succumbing shortly before our allotted overs were up for a score in the mid 60s. (Note for the uninitiated: I am not even going to try to explain cricket here. Maybe in a future post… or ten!) The chap concerned was delighted. He had been playing for 9 years, and this was the first time he had scored a ‘fifty’!

Whilst congratulating him unreservedly I couldn’t help feeling a small pang of envy. I came back to cricket in my mid 40s – having played in a desultory fashion at school – and I have thus only been playing semi-seriously for about a dozen years. Scoring a ‘fifty’ has been a major ambition of mine throughout this period and – though I have flirted a number of times with the 30s and once almost made 40 – I have never been able to go on to get the ‘big one’. Maybe there is yet time – maybe not. Though I am learning to “treat these two impostors” with equanimity I have to admit that this has been the cause of some small sadness.

 

No matter – this post is intended to be purely celebratory. I may not have scored a ‘fifty’ at my favourite game – but I have scored a ‘ton’ when it comes to blogging. Yes – in a little over 38 weeks since I took up blogging as a complete novice I am now posting my 100th entry. Hooray!!

Well – I’ll drink to that – and also to the gentle reader for sticking with it…

Cheers!

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Parade’s End

September 23, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Look – I’m sorry to bang on about this – and I really don’t want to bore the gentle reader more than is absolutely unavoidable – but I really must just put in one final word for Tom Stoppard and the BBC’s adaptation of Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’, which finished on BBC2 on Friday evening.

Achingly beautifully written, acted, directed and shot this (hopefully!) award-winning drama represents all that has ever been best in what really has become a very sorry creative sphere – that of modern television production. Those who know me even marginally will be only too aware of how little I find to admire these days in the televisual and filmic arts. Kickass Canada Girl claims – with some justification – that I have spoiled the cinema going experience for her. It is no fun at all to sit through a film at my side as I sigh, grunt and squirm irritably when faced with clunky dialogue, unbelievable characters and unnecessary yardage of exposition. The trouble is that she herself has now become much more critical and less able to sit through such mediocre offerings. Sorry about that!

The greatest failure to my mind on the part of TV and film producers – and one which is almost certainly a result of there being too many ‘executives’ now involved in the process who mistakenly think they know how to make drama – is that of not trusting the intelligence of the viewing audience. Let’s put that another way – of patronising the viewing audience. There is nothing more eloquent in drama than that fragmentary understated occurrence or reaction that generates in the viewer a small shock of recognition and understanding. This – surely – is how art can have such a great and direct impact on those eager to learn from it. These days in film and on TV it seems that there is a belief that only if signposted in huge letters on enormous billboards will the viewing audience actually get the point. My worry is that this in itself is breeding a new generation who indeed will not be able to ‘read’ creative works without such assistance.

By way of illustration of what can be achieved let me give just the tiniest example from ‘Parade’s End’ – and that not from any of the main plot threads but of just a single small incidental detail – beautifully handled.

In the trenches of the first world war Ford Maddox Ford’s passe protagonist, Tietjens (played exquisitely by Benedict Cumberbatch), finds himself unexpectedly and unwantedly in charge of his battalion. One of the more unexpected duties he is called on to perform is to give permission for a private – whom we have heard unknowingly for some minutes in the background practicing his bugling – to play the following night before the top brass at an event behind the lines.

A while later – during a German artillery barrage – Tietjens is given the news that a shell has burst in the entrance to a slit trench, and that there has been a single fatality. Tietjens hurries to inspect the scene and sees – half buried in the mud thrown up by the blast – the bugle case that we have seen previously. There is no dialogue – no lingering shot – merely the briefest reaction in Cumberbatch’s eyes.

Then – after some further narrative development – both we and Tietjens hear again the distant refrain of the bugler at practice. Again – no dialogue – no labouring the point – simply the realisation as revealed on Cumberbatch’s face.

This sort of thing requires (under)writing and acting of the highest order, but stirs in the viewers breast an empathy and understanding that no amount of dialogue or elaborate visual symbolism could have effected.

Enough! You have missed ‘Parade’s End’ in its first run (congrats to those who did not!) but it will doubtless be repeated.

…and there is always the boxed set – which would doubtless make a wonderful Christmas present!

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Continental Drift

September 2, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

The twighlight shadows the horizon
The lustre fading from the day
I’m stranded on a shrinking island
And you are half a world away

The hourglass has changed direction
The silver sand sliding away
Time running slow on this connection
And you’re still half a world away

Plus ça change
Plus c’est la même chose

How did we come to this position?
If you had known would you have stayed?
Should I have raised more opposition
To living half a world away?

Plus ça change
Plus c’est la même chose

Your shining face cuts through the darkness
And I am half a world away

Plus ça change

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Oh – joy!

August 26, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

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!

 

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Long Beach Wild

August 20, 2012 in Life in BC | 2 comments

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.

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A muse of fire…

August 12, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

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…

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The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

May 5, 2012 in Flotsam and Jetsam | 8 comments

A few evenings ago I watched a fascinating TV documentary about Kenneth Grahame and the creation of ‘The Wind in the Willows’. The story is an interesting one, but I was somewhat disappointed that the program made little reference to what seems to me one of the key elements of the book, and to the strange fate that has befallen it.

I have, in a previous post, recommended Jackie Wullschlager’s excellent book ‘Inventing Wonderland’, which is a study of a small group of contemporaneous authors – J. M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, A. A. Milne and Edward Lear. The common thread uniting these writers – if you accept Ms Wullschlager’s premise (which I do!) – is that they each contrived to create a classic work of ‘supposed’ children’s fiction whilst themselves exhibiting traits indicative of an inability to fully realise the transition from childhood to adulthood. I say ‘supposed’, of course, because in spite of this exigency these works speak as much (if not more) to adults as they do to children – which may well go a long way to explaining their enduring appeal.

I have a little knowledge of the subject because – half a decade ago and more – I studied in some detail the life of J. M. Barrie. I was writing a play at the time about Barrie and the creation of ‘Peter Pan’ and in the course of my research I happened upon Ms Wullschlager’s book. The play was completed about six months before the frankly inaccurate and overly simplistic Johnny Depp film hit the multiplexes, and you can probably imagine how ‘thrilled’ I was at that particular turn of events!

When it comes to ‘The Wind in the Willows’, however, the background to the book’s creation interests me less than some of the content therein – in particular the seventh chapter – ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. When I first read the book as a youngster (probably about the same time as first heard an adaptation on the Home Service) it was this section that affected me most. Years later – when shopping for classic children’s books as a gift for the progeny of a friend – I found myself browsing through a lavishly illustrated hardback edition (sadly the illustrations were neither the wonderful originals by E. H. Shepard nor the later Arthur Rackham variants). I scanned the book idly, looking for the familiar prose of my favourite chapter…

…only to find that it was not there!

I looked again – and again! The chapter was missing…

Now – I am aware of only one or two instances in which elements of children’s books have been selectively edited out. I can just about imagine circumstances in which something that was once thought acceptable is no longer deemed to be so – but what on earth could possibly offend in ‘The Wind in the Willows’?

For those not familiar with the book, chapter 7 describes how – one hot, breathless summer night on which no-one can sleep – Ratty and Mole help Otter to search for his missing son, Portly. As dawn nears – after a fruitless night of searching – Ratty is suddenly captivated by the distant sound of ethereal music. Entranced they follow the mystical cadences to their source, where they encounter – on an island in the middle of the stream – a vision of the great god, Pan. The missing Portly is discovered fast asleep between the god’s hooves.

Rosemary Hill – writing in the Guardian in June 2009 – decribes this mysterious chapter thus:

“Those of them who went on searching for the divine often found it enveloped in clouds of pantheism and neo-paganism, spiritualism and theosophy, the faiths of the doubtful. It is this diffuse but potent supernaturalism that appears in The Wind in the Willows in one strange, unsettling chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. It is a section that abridgers of the book have always been quick to drop, though Grahame himself thought it essential” … “Whether it is the latent homo-eroticism of the vision or simply the sudden change of tone that makes the scene so uncomfortable, it is certainly a failure. But while artistically it is the weakest part of the book, it is at the same time the key to it.”

There is much to dispute in Ms Hill’s reading, not least the assertion about the ‘faiths of the doubtful’, which – by her tone – I gather she intends pejoratively. I would prefer to substitute ‘sceptical’ – the definitions of which include: “a person who habitually doubts the authenticity of accepted beliefs” and “a person who doubts the truth of religion, esp Christianity”. The InterWebNet offers a plethora of examples of those of established faiths – in particular Christianity – attempting to appropriate the text in support of their own beliefs. This is actually quite offensive. Grahame is far too good a writer: had he intended this interpretation he would have written it.

It is strange that the chapter that Ms Hill describes as a “failure” and “the weakest part of the book” should have had such an effect on me as a child that I habitually look for it first whenever I pick up the book. Grahame is right to consider it essential, and it is indeed – for me – the key to the book. Grahame comes as close as anyone ever has to capturing the essence of the numinous experience. Here Ratty first hears the magical music:

“Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

`It’s gone!’ sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. `So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!’ he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

`Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,’ he said presently. `O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.'”

…and after their encounter with the god…

“Sudden and magnificent, the sun’s broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

As they stared blankly. in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi- god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before.”

This is not merely Edwardian whimsy, nor some failed attempt at a search for the supernatural. ‘The Wind in The Willows’ is about Longing and Loss (which – along with Love – are the three great subjects of all art) written during a golden summer in which everything seemed possible, but at the zenith of which everything might also be lost – as indeed proved to be the case as the world spiralled into the maelstrom of the new century.

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