Kissing babies
27 February 2017
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” [John Stuart Mill, 1 February 1867]
I think I may say, without false modesty, that at school I was an outstanding pupil. At the age of eight, I scored 199/200 in end of term examinations. I still remember the question which I got wrong: it was a simple piece of mental arithmetic (of all things), 7 x 5, for which I gave the answer 45. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Anyway, that was an early lesson in the need to check, a lesson which in later life I have not always applied, with more or less embarrassing results.
At secondary school I once scored 101/100 for a term’s work in Greek, the +1 being a bonus point which I earned for something or another. Brian Dobson, my Greek teacher, chickened out in the end and wrote 100/100 on my end-of-term report, probably because Danny Booth, the headmaster, a rather prim (though well-meaning) man, would not have permitted such frivolity.
All this gave added point to the question which children are often asked: what are you going to do when you grow up? At primary school I had an answer ready. I wanted to be a professional cricketer and an amateur scientist. Note my early enthusiasm for cricket. I remember being desperately disappointed not to be chosen for the school team, a disappointment which was barely assuaged by being asked to be the scorer. As for science, Mr Wallard, the science teacher had filled me with enthusiasm for his subject. It was not his fault that in my teens I turned away: at the Liverpool Institute, my secondary school, science was badly taught and other subjects attracted me more.
However, sometimes the question was not asked in quite that way. Sometimes it was preceded, or followed, by the suggestion that I would be Prime Minister one day. I didn’t have much idea what the Prime Minister did, and I certainly didn’t want to be him (which at least showed precocious judgement). I did know that it would be an immodest aspiration.
During my time at the Liverpool Institute, I had no real idea what career I wanted to follow. True, I had a growing interest in public affairs. In the sixth form I won the public speaking competition with a speech in favour of a free-at-the-point-of-use health service, and the essay competition with a piece in favour of the UK joining the Common Market (we were not, at that time, members). If I remember rightly, at least part of my argument was the promotion of peace in Europe; and that is still a major reason why I think we should be doing our best to shore up the EU, not to leave it. But I had no real thought of a political career.
At Oxford I had my first real opportunity to engage in political discussion. I joined the Oxford Union and participated in debates. At various times I think I became a member of the Labour Club, the Conservative Association and the Liberals, which gave me the chance to hear senior political figures “live”: I think I remember Robert Carr, Bob Mellish and David Steel, and there were many others. And I met fellow-undergraduates who were actively hoping for political careers.
But I had no aspiration to join them. By and large, the most ambitious politicos were also the least likeable. And they were already engaged in plotting – that is, factional manoeuvring for personal advantage both between, and especially within, the parties – which was, I suppose, quite fun to observe, but no incentive to participate. There were some honourable exceptions, but what I remember most about Oxford politics is how Colin Maltby, a friend whom I liked and admired, became chairman of the national Federation of Conservative Students for a year. The plotters gave him such a hard time of it that he gave up active politics forever, which was a sad loss to our public life.
I also disliked the prospect of the more humdrum but necessary duties of aspiring politicians: what I thought of then as “kissing babies,” but more prosaically involves knocking on the doors of people you don’t know and asking for their support. You need a good deal of chutzpah to carry that kind of thing off, and I knew I didn’t have it.
In any event, during my third year (out of four) at Oxford, I realised what career path I wanted to follow. My friend David Normington had started work as a civil servant that year. He came back to Oxford regularly, and it took only a few conversations for me to realise that I wanted to follow in his footsteps. The civil service would give me the opportunity to participate in public affairs, if only in a limited way, without any need for kissing babies, or (as I then thought) plotting. I was probably wrong about the plotting, but that is a story for another time.
I spent 32 years as a civil servant. When I started there were still senior people and commentators who talked, rather pompously (as I thought, then and now) of “the public service ethos.” This was something to do with accepting a role in the background, giving advice without fear or favour to politicians of any party and suppressing whatever private views we might hold, in return for a safe career and a moderate salary.
Over time I gradually came to put these thoughts in a different way. In a nutshell, it is the civil servant’s job to promote good government. That is, government as a process, not any particular Government formed by whatever Prime Minister and party. Ministers and MPs have the absolute right to set a political direction and agenda, which they earn through the ballot-box (kissing babies, again). But we live in an inter-connected world in which all the easy options were taken long ago. Any political initiative is certain to cause a wide ripple of effects, which may be undesirable in themselves or cut across other initiatives. It is the civil servant’s job to help Ministers to untangle these complications.
When this is not done, as Theresa May is now finding, the result is a mess. Worse, when a political direction is set in wilful disregard of likely consequences, the public is misled and failure, or even catastrophe, ensues. In this, politicians have been their own worst enemies. The desire to put a favourable spin on everything has created scepticism and distrust. That makes hard but necessary truths and decisions the more difficult. And the effect is a ratchet: the more spin, the harder it is to be straight. No wonder fringe parties and outsiders do well at elections. The political class has not shown that it is fit to govern.
While I was a civil servant I could at least feel that in a small way I was able to help stem the flood of spin, unreason and wilful blindness. Now I feel powerless and, if not despairing, at least apprehensive for the future. We have a government boxed into an agenda which must in the end be self-destructive, an opposition which is completely failing in its duty to oppose, a centre party which is crippled by election losses and led by a lightweight, and an insurgency which was created by one egregious charlatan and is now being led by another. In the meanwhile, the small-g government for which I laboured is crumbling with, apparently, no-one to care. If there was a party, any party, which was prepared to tell the public that government is difficult, that not all aspirations can be met, and that society depends on a proper compromise between reward for endeavour and fairness for all, I would support them, whatever label they bore. But there isn’t.
Perhaps I should have learned how to kiss babies after all.
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Homicide : Life on the Street
23 February 2017
Among the DVDs which John has lent to me is a box set of the first two seasons of this American television show, and I have spent the last few evenings watching them. The show is based on a book of the same title by David Simon, in which he describes the year which he spent “embedded” with a team of homicide detectives in Baltimore. I believe that, for the first couple of seasons, most of the stories were based on real events depicted in this book; thereafter the scriptwriters took over, but did their best to maintain the show’s quality of gritty realism which won many plaudits, and several critical awards, when first broadcast in the 1990s.
Notwithstanding the television critics’ admiration, H:LotS seems to have led a precarious existence. It was produced by NBC, which is one of the three major television networks in the States (CBS and ABC being the others). Network television is a cutthroat environment, where viewer numbers are king, and H:LotS never truly commanded mass audiences. NBC executives demanded changes in the series as their price for recommissioning, and I suspect that when I get round to watching later seasons they will display a gradual reversion towards the mainstream.
H:LotS stands somewhere between Hill Street Blues and The Wire in the development of American cop shows. I confess I never had much patience for HSB: its examination of the cops’ private lives was groundbreaking in its time, but it gave the show a “soapy” quality which I disliked. Homicide has some of the same quality, but it seems to me not to be concerned with the detectives’ lives and personalities for their own sake, but for how they are affected by the work which they do.
As for The Wire, that came later still, and was first broadcast on the cable network HBO. This by all accounts allowed its creators (including David Simon, again) more latitude in every aspect of production, from bad language and violence to casting, photography and storylines. John has box sets of The Wire too, and I hope he will lend them to me too in due course. But as I understand it H:LotS blazed a trail without which The Wire could never have been made.
Its first season is certainly – what is the mot juste? – invigorating. And yet there is almost no “action” in the usual sense at all: no shoot-outs, no car chases. The murders take place offscreen, like Greek tragedy, though the nobility of classic tragedy is equally absent. The tone is relentlessly downbeat. The very first investigation undertaken by the squad remains unsolved at the end of the season. Many investigations run in parallel and carry over from one episode to the next, so there is no artificial parcelling-up. One episode consists entirely of a long – and inconclusive – interrogation. Another contains no investigation at all and depicts the detectives hanging around in their squadroom over a holiday period. Much of the dialogue is inconsequential or mundane. The lighting is often subdued and the photography full of jump-cuts and hand-held movement.
On the other hand, the characters of the detectives are deftly sketched in. Every one of them except the rookie has been in different ways tarnished by their experience, and over the first two seasons you can already see the rookie going the same way. Their faces all look lived-in. Casting appears to have avoided glamorous types, to such an extent that NBC eventually demanded changes and two of the original cast were replaced in later seasons by more photogenic alternatives. But, more importantly, they can all act. There are no stars: the only names I knew were Yaphet Kotto, who plays the commander, and Ned Beatty. I first saw Kotto, who is principally a film actor, in the movie Blue Collar at least 30 years ago. Beatty has a career filmography as long as your arm, though I needed to look him up on Wikipedia to work out why I remembered him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Beatty). They are both primarily character actors and do not outshine the rest of the cast.
H:LotS’ officers are a mixed-race squad whose commander and star detective are both black, and the scripts do not shy away from racial issues. The depiction of Baltimore life and death is by implication highly critical of many other aspects of American urban life, including poverty, violence (especially gun violence) and hopelessness. Most of the crimes arise from desperation or stupidity: motive is rarely an issue, and the “whodunit” element is almost completely absent. Interrogation, on the other hand, is central. Most cases are resolved by a confession which the detectives have elicited by inexorable logic, patience, intimidation or trickery.
Even in the second season, some of H:LotS’ more radical aspects are already starting to be toned down: in particular the camerawork, which truth to tell was too tricksy in the first season for its own good. There is also one episode which focuses on a single crime, the murder of a tourist, demanding the squad’s entire attention. Robin Williams guest stars in this episode, and delivers a stunningly good performance as a grieving husband, all the more effective because elsewhere in the series we see little of the victim survivors: the focus is all on the cops. Williams’ participation shows that, whatever the viewing figures, word was already getting round the acting community that H:LotS was more than just hack work, and I am expecting to see more guest stars in later seasons. The structure of the episode, however, doesn’t fit well with the series’ other strengths, and I am hoping it was not repeated too often.
It is easy to understand why the show never commanded large audiences. Its virtues are light-years away from the typical crowd-pulling crime dramas, from Perry Mason to Colombo to CSI. It demands the viewer’s attention, the classic three-act story arc is (almost) absent, it is often pessimistic and rarely uplifting. The characters are well observed, but this can be said of much American TV drama these days. Why does H:LotS stand out? Why have I found it so satisfying?
In the first place it stands out precisely because it is different. For some years, when I was travelling regularly up to Liverpool at weekends, I used to watch CSI regularly on Saturday and Sunday evenings. More recently I have been watching Elementary, the American series featuring a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. Both of those series tell stories of ingenious detection, and I enjoy them for what they offer. Their central characters are well developed, but the world around them is not. Their storytelling is straightforward and their tone is broadly optimistic. They are also constantly in danger of becoming predictable. H:LotS is not predictable, and its sourness is refreshing.
It also feels realistic in a way that other shows do not. Colombo was never plausible, and CSI at times verges on fantasy. Police procedure in H:LotS feels real, and the crimes it depicts have a terrible mundanity to them. Partly for this reason, H:LotS also feels as if it has something important to say. The crimes it depicts are often sad, occasionally tragic, but the real tragedy is that we have created a world in which they are commonplace; their weight is borne by the policemen and women we have appointed to deal with them.
This is quite strong stuff for a network television show, and I am not surprised that NBC executives sometimes felt queasy about it. But at least the show was made. I greatly doubt whether any British production company, including the BBC, would today have the guts to commission a similarly realistic police drama with a similarly uncompromising political message. It’s not that the source material doesn’t exist. Graham Hurley has written a series of police procedural novels set in Portsmouth which have a similar tone, depicting an embattled force barely holding back a surge of disaffection and despair. I recommend them: the first in the series is Turnstone, and it’s probably best to read them in order. But it is no surprise to me that they have never been made into television shows. No-one would dare.
The Interloper (aka David):
I love reading these ‘blogs, and I must say that whilst I am not inspired to find a way to view “H:LotS“, I am inspired to use my BookSuppository account to buy a copy of Turnstone!
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What’s cooking?
18 February 2017
These days I suppose most boys are taught at least the basics of cookery. But when I was a boy, back in the 1960s, traditional gender roles were well established, including in our household: Dad earned the money, Mum did the cooking. (This did, of course, change later. I still have Dad’s cookbook, from the cooking lessons he took when he retired, and use several of his recipes.) Anyway, Mum thought I should learn to cook, and started me off pretty early: how to grill chops and sausages, and tell when they are done; how to make meatballs, curry, hot-pot and cottage pie; how to cook vegetables.
I did occasionally cook for myself, if for instance I had stayed home at the weekend to play cricket while the rest of the family were up in the Lake District. But it was when I came down to London to work that those early lessons proved their worth. I spent my first two years in London living in a bedsit in Highgate where I had my own tiny electric stove, with a hotplate on top and a grill/oven underneath. The stove was small enough to fit on a tabletop, but it was just fine for one person. At weekends I was able to cook chops in the grill and vegetables on the hotplate, or curry and rice on the hotplate (I did the curry first and put it in the oven to keep warm while the rice was boiled), or cottage pie in the oven with potatoes and carrots I had boiled on the hotplate. Basic stuff, but it kept me fed.
Most of the week I ate in the staff restaurant, usually omelettes. There was an omelette chef whom you could watch. He had the process down to a fine art, and kept two omelettes constantly on the go, so that as one was finishing the next was starting. I have never really mastered omelettes – how do you ensure that the middle cooks as well as the edges? And how do you flip them over without tearing? But this guy was a master. He never did anything else, but there was always a queue.
The advantage of omelettes was that they didn’t remind me of school meals, as canteen food (let’s drop this nonsense about “restaurant”) often does. They were also cheap, which was a consideration in those early days. After work I often went to concerts at the South Bank and ate in the café – soup and a sandwich. Otherwise I ate sandwiches at home.
This pattern continued, more or less, when I moved out of the bedsit and into the resident clerks’ flat at the Department where I worked. At this point I had barely expanded my repertoire beyond those early lessons, so if I wanted variety I had to eat out, on my own or with friends, at lunch or dinner. Money wasn’t quite so tight, but eating in a good restaurant was still a major social event. One difference was that I now had a full-size electric stove to use. I remember on one occasion inviting a cricketing friend and his girlfriend to dinner. At the last minute he told me that they were both vegetarians. Panic! I improvised and made an approximate ratatouille with just about every vegetable I could lay my hands on except the potatoes, which I boiled on their own. Amazingly it was a success.
Things changed in 1980 when I moved into my own flat, on the top floor of a late-Victorian house in South London. I was only 20 minutes’ train journey away from central London, but it was my first experience of commuting by rail. I bought a simple gas stove – the first time I had used gas – and expanded my repertoire a bit. At the time you could buy breaded chicken or turkey pieces, and I used to fry those in a little butter and eat them with redcurrant or cranberry jelly. Depending on what work I was doing, I might get home any time between six and eight o’clock in the evening: if early I usually cooked, if late I more often ate some kind of cooked meal at lunchtime and sandwiches in the evening. I never repeated the ratatouille, though.
All this time, sitting unused in my bookcase, were several colourful cookery books I had bought in my last year at Oxford. Many of the recipes, even the simplest, were tricky to make in single-person quantities. I could have cooked and reheated, but this was in the days before microwave ovens, which make reheating so easy, were commonplace, and in any case I had very firmly in mind Mum’s warnings about the hazards of reheating food. Those hazards were probably exaggerated in my mind. But all these thoughts now seem to me to have been an excuse. The truth, probably, is that I was happy enough with my limited range of recipes, and that eating out gave me as much variety as I desired.
I didn’t really start to use the books until I came to live in Oxted, in 1989. Mum and Dad were more likely to come to stay for longer visits, and expected their eldest son to cook for them at least once. My mainstays at this time were The Times Cookery Book and The Times Calendar Cookery Book, both by Katie Stewart, which I liked because they didn’t call for outlandish ingredients or complicated methods. Unfortunately both books disappeared a few years ago; but at the time they were invaluable. I also obtained a couple of cookery books specifically designed for a single person, and experimented with some of the recipes.
However, the big change in my cookery came when Mum fell ill in 2004. I travelled up to Liverpool at weekends, and while I was there I cooked for three: Dad, John and me. I did a lot of experimenting with recipes from Mum’s books: not just main courses but desserts, cakes and pastries too. The best ones I typed out and assembled in a loose-leaf folder which is now my very own cookery book.
These days I have a regular repertoire of nine or ten different meals which I cook regularly: lamb chops, pork steaks (grilled, or baked with onions), sausages, lamb hot-pot, “Pearl Bailey” (actually pearl barley) stew, beef stroganoff in Delia’s recipe with cider, stir-fry chicken with quinoa, chicken provençale, chicken with apricots. I occasionally also cook cottage pie, chili con carne or spaghetti bolognese, so long as I am quite sure of the provenance of the steak mince; but the scandal of a few years ago, when horsemeat was found in Tesco and other supermarkets’ mince, has made me very suspicious. I make omelettes too, with mushrooms or peppers, but I still can’t get them to cook evenly. When I am with John I also make steak and kidney pie with my own suet pastry, pork with orange and ginger (those are both Dad’s recipes), and pork with apricots and redcurrant, but these are a bit too fussy to make for a single person.
A major change happened about ten years ago when Cook, a high-class ready meals shop, opened in Oxted. Hitherto, ready meals had only been available in supermarkets, and were pretty basic in quality. I remember scouring the shelves in Sainsbury’s for meals to leave for Dad when John and I were not with him: on the whole they were not inspiring. Cook is quite different. The quality is much higher, the range of meals more adventurous and interesting. If I were lazy it would be easy to rely on them entirely, but I have managed to resist the temptation. However Cook is an invaluable resource for when I am short of time, or arrive home from a weekend in Cark, or just for variety. I particularly like Cook’s lasagne – something I would never even consider attempting to make for myself.
If I were just a bit more adventurous I now have a small bookcase full of cookery books – some inherited from Mum, some purchased for myself – waiting to be explored. I have even acquired a couple of books of vegetarian recipes in case Georgina or David ever comes to dinner, and David has shown me how to make a good dinner out of roast vegetables on their own, which – if I can repeat it – may get added to my “regulars” list. But even if the extra motivation is lacking, I think Mum would be pleased that those early lessons have borne fruit.
The Interloper:
I hesitate to confess this Mark, but there is no recipe for my roast vegetables, or if there is it would read like this:
- Take as many vegetables to feed the number of people and number of meals you need. Use whatever variety you particularly like. Wash, scrape or peel as you wish.
- Microwave for 5-10 min depending on mass of veges (rough guide, two people one meal five min., 4p/1m or 2p/2m, 10 min., but rarely more than this anyway. Aim to get potatoes “par-boiled” (still a little gritty when you stab them with a sharp knife).
- Put veges in a dish. Easiest (for washing up) if you use a non-stick dish or a non-stick liner (Teflon sheet), otherwise cover the base in Canola or Sunflower oil. Add herbs/spices/Dukka as desired (I esp. recommend rosemary, basil, black pepper, sesame seeds). Pour oil (I use Canola but Sue – who has expensive taste – likes to use Extra Virgin Olive Oil) over it all. Not too much.
- Cook in oven at 150-200 degrees C for as long as it takes [at 150 it cooks slowly and may not be ready for an hour, with no issues about timing; whereas at 200 – esp. if fan-forced – after 15 min. make sure the veges aren’t going black on top.
- Add sliced red capsicum (OK, any colour will do) about 15 min. before the end, or add grated cheese if you wish (any cheese – “Yellow Cheese” as our boys used to say – is fine) 10 min, before the end.
Serve with attitude.
That’s it.
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Animation
17 February 2017
A couple of weeks before Christmas I bought a new television. I’d had the old one since 1990 or thereabouts, and for many years it had been very little used except to watch videos and DVDs. About 18 months ago, at the time when analogue transmissions were switched off, it actually became unusable as a TV receiver, since I never bothered to obtain the adapter which would have enabled it to receive digital broadcasts.
It was Georgina who told me to get a new one. She said I needed to make sure that, when John came down from Manchester to spend Christmas and the New Year, he wouldn’t be bored. John’s musical tastes are very different from mine – indeed, they barely touch at any point; and he doesn’t like board or card games. I laid in a large stock of his favourite beers, but that wasn’t going to be enough.
So now I am the proud owner of a Samsung 40-inch high-definition “smart” television, fully internet-capable, and a new piece of corner furniture on which it stands. I also purchased a state-of-the-art Blu-ray disc player, and ditched the old DVD and video machines. Truth to tell I still don’t watch much broadcast television, as there’s no cricket, and too many “reality” shows for me, ugh; but John and Georgina have each lent me several DVDs to watch.
As it happens, we used the TV less over the holiday period than I had expected. John spent a lot of time up in London visiting art and photography exhibitions, which he has blogged about elsewhere, and the beer kept him happy in the evenings. But we did watch a couple of films, both of them animations: the runaway hit Frozen, which is how we spent Christmas afternoon, and How To Train Your Dragon 2. John also watched Penguins of Madagascar, another animated movie, but I lost patience with it after a few minutes. It was relentlessly loud and silly.
Among the discs which John has lent me are several more animations, and so far I have watched four of them: The Incredibles, Up!, Despicable Me and Coraline. What these, along with Frozen and HTTYD2, have shown me is how diverse and sophisticated the process – no, the art – of animation has become.
Of these six, Frozen is the most “traditional,” if we regard the Disney standards like Cinderella and Snow White as establishing a tradition. Frozen has not one but two beautiful orphaned princesses, a talking snowman and a humorous moose. (OK, perhaps a moose isn’t traditional.) It’s easy to see how the story has enchanted an entire generation of little girls, and why it’s the sister with magical powers she can’t control who is the most adored. She sings her anthem to being different, Let It Go, as she raises a palace of ice on the mountainside, and if you are unmoved by the music you may still be stunned by the visuals.
But Frozen also delights in subverting expectations. The trolls are not strong, dumb, evil beasts as most modern fantasy demands, but cute clever midgets: in another era they would have been brownies or gnomes. The handsome prince turns out to have feet of clay. For most of the movie, the nearest thing to a villain is a covetous but incompetent Duke who is mocked by the characters and the audience; it is those uncontrolled magical powers which create danger and drive the plot. The act of true love required to save the imperilled princess turns out to be not a kiss but an act of sacrifice by her sister. I confess I didn’t see that one coming at all.
Subversion of genre appears also in The Incredibles, which pulls off the clever trick of combining satire and parody with an entertaining story. The film’s most outrageous and amusing character is a fashion designer who creates outfits for superheroes. Did you ever wonder where they got their indestructible capes and tunics? Now you know. But the whole film oozes imagination and charm: its writers clearly had enormous fun, not least in thinking of all the ways in which Elastigirl’s special powers could be used. The design is full of little details reminding me of Thunderbirds and James Bond: a remote island, a base hidden in a volcano, a plane which converts to a submarine, a monorail, a sultry temptress, an invincible robot. Much is deliberately over-the-top without ever becoming camp. I particularly enjoyed the music, which runs almost non-stop, and in which I am sure I noticed references to the themes from Mission: Impossible, James Bond and Batman.
Music is an important element in every one of these films, but it is most distinctive in Coraline, featuring a range of unusual instruments, adult and children’s choirs and a pervasive harp. Coraline is a fairytale with Gothic overtones, based on a children’s book by Neil Gaiman. The animation here is stop-motion rather than computer-generated, and its quirkiness suits the story well. I can see why John likes this one so much, but it left me lukewarm at best. Coraline herself is a sparky heroine, but other characters, notably the retired actresses (voiced by French and Saunders) and the Russian acrobat, just seemed odd, independent figments of Gaiman’s imagination whose only connection to Coraline’s world is that he put them there. A creepy Gothic atmosphere is well established, but the story is rather thin stuff. Coraline is required to complete the traditional three tasks in order to defeat the evil witch, but they turn out to be rather easy.
HTTYD2, which we saw on television, is another film based on a children’s book, or rather in this case a series of books, by Cressida Cowell. It is clear from online reviews that this is one of those unusual cases where the sequel outshines the original. What I liked most in this film were the dragons themselves. The variety of design and the stunning animation completely overcame my prejudice against stories of friendly dragons, which generally seem to me rather to miss the point. The story is a coming-of-age and has some elements which I suspect would upset younger children, but it didn’t offer much for an adult audience.
Despicable Me is similarly child-oriented, and its bare bones, with three young orphans gradually winning over their adopted parent, is another familiar trope. The twist here is that he is a supervillain, backed by an army of Minions, who is being outshone by a younger rival. He certainly has character, more so than the three orphans who find ingenious ways to charm and blackmail him to their side but remain just a touch insipid. His rival is a classic spoiled rich kid. Meanwhile the Minions are little better than yellow blobs with eyes, but their antics provide a good deal of slapstick amusement. Unless you have a heart of stone you will laugh at this film, but unless you are the Amazing Memory Man not much of it will stick. I remember that the orphans sold cookies, the rival had a pet shark, and Despicable Me stabbed a balloon in the opening scene, and that’s about it.
Finally, Up! As John said to me, this is almost two films in one. For the first ten minutes we see a montage of Carl’s life: he meets Ellie as a girl, they have adventures, they get married, they can’t have children, their savings get spent on various emergencies, Ellie gets sick and dies. It’s a sad little tale but most beautifully evoked. Children might get impatient, but their parents will have tears in their eyes. Then we reach the main film in which Carl, melancholy and out of step with the world, attaches balloons to his house and floats off – only to find that Russell, a Boy Scout-type figure, is an unwitting stowaway. Much of the humour of the film (and it is often funny, before the story takes centre stage near the end) comes from their mismatch. Carl is a classic Grumpy Old Man but it is hard not to smile as he is gradually won back to life and adventure.
Unfortunately Russell, for all his bright smile and enthusiasm, is a bit of a cipher. Apart from Carl, the most vivid character is a (mythical) rainbow coloured flightless bird which they encounter and christen “Kevin.” I’d happily see more of him! Overall, though, this is a wonderfully imaginative film, with elements of humour, story and emotion and some very striking images.
In a nutshell:
The Incredibles – would happily watch again
Up! – would watch again if offered
Frozen – would watch again, especially the songs
Despicable Me – would watch again if feeling miserable
HTTYD2 – would watch again if bored
Coraline – would avoid.
Your mileage may differ.
OOOOOH! An interloper.
Yes, Mark. I like your analyses of the animated films.
However, before you make comparisons, have you seen either “Corpse Bride” (my favourite) or “The Night Before Christmas”, both by Tim Burton? You should also remember “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”, out of the Aardman Animations studio.
I have watched “Frozen” for instance, and had to fast-forward through all the boring/soppy bits ….
More animation
This piece was really just about the six films I’ve seen in the last six weeks. I did have a whole introductory paragraph about the Aardman films, and another about the HannaBarbera cartoons of our childhood, but cut them out in the final revision as they made the blog top-heavy. I haven’t seen either of the Tim Burton films, but will look out for them. – Mark
I have copies of both of the Tim Burton movies, so I will lend them to you if you like, though they are more in the creepy gothic line of Coraline, so I am not sure that you will like them. I found Frozen a little too soppy and manipulative, especially the snowman, but each to their own taste, I guess.- John
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Swing bowling
11 February 2017
I had lunch with Georgina yesterday at our usual haunt, the Buona Sera restaurant near Clapham Junction. It’s a convenient place for us to meet: a direct train for me from Oxted, a walk across Clapham Common, or a bus when needed, for Georgina. Yesterday it was cold, damp and miserable, so we naturally compared notes about our journeys. I described the mist or fog (hard to tell) in the countryside around Woldingham. At Dawlish, said Georgina, they call it mizzle, which is of course a portmanteau of mist and drizzle. Georgina knows Dawlish well as she owns a small flat there, originally bought by her for her sister, but now mostly unoccupied except for occasional visits by herself or other family members.
At Hove, said I, weather like this is more common: the sea fret, which is a phrase I know because of cricket. Several notable Sussex swing bowlers have prospered at Hove when the fret has come in from the sea. I remember Ian Thomson, who once took all 10 wickets in an innings and toured South Africa with the MCC in 1964/65, but the most famous of them all was undoubtedly Maurice Tate, one of England’s finest bowlers in the 1920s and 1930s.
This led to a conversation – well, mostly a monologue – about how weather affects cricket, and in particular swing bowling. Georgina knows next to nothing about cricket, or indeed most ball games, and I was watching to see if her eyes glazed over. But she seemed interested. I tried to keep it simple for her benefit, and she said I should write it all down in the blog. So here we are.
First, you need to understand how a cricket ball is made. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cricket_ball) : “a core of cork… is layered with tightly wound string, and covered by a leather case with a slightly raised sewn seam. In a top-quality ball… the covering is constructed of four pieces of leather shaped similar to the peel of a quartered orange, but one hemisphere is rotated by 90 degrees with respect to the other. The “equator” of the ball is stitched with string to form the ball’s prominent seam, with six rows of stitches. The remaining two joins between the leather pieces are stitched internally.” Perhaps Wiki should have added that a new ball is polished so that its surface is shiny and smooth.
There are three principal ways that a bowler can make the ball swing: through the position of the seam, through the spin he imparts to the ball, or by exploiting roughness in the surface of the ball. In addition, the atmosphere and the condition of the ground can make a difference. Here’s how.
An orthodox swing bowler like England’s James Anderson, probably the leading exponent in the game today, uses the seam of a new ball to make it swing. He releases the ball in such a way that the seam is at a slight angle to the direction in which he is bowling. He also imparts an amount of backspin to the ball, rotating along the axis of the seam. The relative roughness of the seam, compared to the otherwise smooth surface of the ball, catches the air just sufficiently to disturb the flight of the ball and push it off a straight trajectory. The backspin assists this effect. If the air is heavy and humid, as in the sea fret at Hove, the effect is accentuated.
However, as play continues, the ball loses its initial smoothness, the seam becomes less prominent, and swing becomes harder to achieve. This is why you often see fielders polishing the ball on their trousers before returning it to the bowler. Polishing is permitted but other artificial aids are not, though top class players often push this rule to its limit: I remember that Fred Trueman was notorious for running his hand through his Brylcreemed hair (Brylcreem was a hair oil, now deeply unfashionable) before polishing the ball. This is also why orthodox swing bowlers are most effective with a new ball and when the atmosphere is heavy, as it was when John and I saw Anderson and Stuart Broad skittle India for a low score at Old Trafford in 2014.
Even a very ordinary seam bowler can get the ball to swing if conditions are right. My best bowling for my London club came in 1980 when, under a cloudy sky, I took three wickets in an innings with in-swing. Sadly I don’t have a scorecard, but I remember exactly when it happened because I passed up the opportunity to hear Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall in order to keep bowling.
The second method is used by orthodox spinners (that is, right-arm off-spinners and their left-handed counterparts). It is usually described as drift or float, rather than swing, and the aim is to make the ball move in the opposite direction to the spin. Spin disturbs its smooth trajectory and pushes the ball away from the direction of spin. This is also how baseball pitchers throw a “curve ball,” as they have no seam to manipulate. The only time I ever took three wickets in an innings bowling for my school, I made the ball loop in to the batsman quite spectacularly in this way. I had no idea why it was happening, but I was most disappointed when the captain changed the bowling and took me off: I might well have taken five and had my name read out during notices at assembly the next day.
I believe the amount of drift is influenced by whether the bowler delivers the ball mainly with sidespin, his fingers behind the ball, or with overspin, fingers over the top of the ball. This changes the axis of spin. The over-the-top method gets less drift but a bit more bounce and is used by most Australian off-spinners like Nathan Lyon or Ashley Mallett. On pitches in Australia, the extra bounce is a very useful alternative weapon, but on the slower pitches in England or India it is less effective. The classic English off-spinners like Fred Titmus use more sidespin, get less bounce but are more adept at drift. On one occasion I was watching a game at Liverpool with Dad in which the Sussex left-arm spinner R V Bell made the ball both drift in to and then spin away from the batsmen, who not surprisingly were a bit befuddled. I still remember Dad explaining what was going on; I thought it was a bit miraculous. Just the same, Bell retired from first-class cricket soon afterwards.
The third method is so-called reverse swing, which happens when the two sides of the ball become slightly asymmetrical. The fielding side can help this to happen by vigorously polishing one side while allowing the other side to roughen, which happens naturally in the course of play. The condition of the outfield, and I believe even the type of grass, can make a big difference: if the outfield is brown and abrasive, reverse swing will be available sooner than if it is lush and green.
The first modern bowler to exploit reverse swing was Sarfraz Nawaz, who played for Pakistan and Northamptonshire in the late 1970s, but it was two more Pakistanis, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, who perfected the art and are today regarded as the finest ever reverse swing bowlers. It probably helped that Wasim and Waqar were both genuinely quick, as reverse swing is easier to achieve at high pace. Modern swing bowlers aim to master both orthodox and reverse swing, but as one method requires the ball to be shiny while the other requires it to be rough on one side, they are rarely bowled during the same period of an innings.
I never bowled reverse swing in my life. Nor for that matter have I ever faced it while batting. It is an advanced skill which club cricketers of my standard rarely acquire. Just as well, really.
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Prostate cancer
10 February 2017
Beware: some explicit medical detail
Many of the people reading this will already know that I have recently completed a course of radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer, and will probably also have read the email bulletins I have been sending to friends and family over the last ten months. However, it’s also probable that no-one but myself knows the full story, which has been a part of my life for the last four years – and, as we shall see, is likely to continue to be at least part of the background to my life for the foreseeable future.
In mid-2013, soon after my 60th birthday party, I made an appointment to consult my GP because I was needing to make more visits to the lavatory in the mornings. I expected him to tell me that this was a normal consequence of growing older, but he took it much more seriously. His initial examination found nothing untoward, but he immediately referred me for an ultrasound scan, a blood test and an appointment at the East Surrey Hospital’s urology clinic.
The ultrasound revealed nothing. The blood test, however, showed that my PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) level was 6.3, which is above normal for a man of my age. The urology consultant told me there was about a 1 in 3 chance that this was due to cancer, and booked me in for an MRI scan, after which we would review my options.
At my next appointment the urologist told me that, on a scale of 1-5, the result of my MRI scan was a 3. He suggested a biopsy, but I did not want to have this done at the time, not least because I was about to go with John to New Zealand and Australia for a month. I was also not very keen to undergo invasive surgery. He agreed that this was reasonable, and that it would be enough for me to continue to have my PSA level monitored, with follow-up appointments every six months. We agreed however that further action might be needed if my PSA reached double figures.
And that is how we left it for almost three years, during which my PSA level fluctuated. Looking back at it now, there was a slowly rising trend, but it was obscured by the variations up and down: it did not reach 10 until early 2016. At that point I agreed to undergo a biopsy, and that was done in April, under general anaesthetic. John came down from Manchester to stay with me for a couple of days, and to drive me to and from the hospital in Crawley.
Unfortunately, the biopsy showed that cancer was present, with a Gleason score of 8 (possible range 6-10, calculated as the average score plus the highest score for any cancers found). Only 6 of the 27 samples taken (“cores”) showed cancer, but one had a score of 5. This meant that further treatment was now essential. I was initially given two options, surgery or radiotherapy. Surgery is quicker overall, though it does require a couple of days in hospital and a period of recovery. Radiotherapy is not invasive but takes longer. The literature I was given to read suggested that the risk of unpleasant side-effects, the worst of which is incontinence, was small in either case, but slightly lower with radiotherapy.
The biopsy did suggest that the cancer had not broken out of the prostate, which is the major risk if prostate cancer is untreated. That was a relief. I was immediately put on a course of hormones (goserelin) whose effect is to shrink the prostate and inhibit cancer growth. The doctors told me that older, more vulnerable patients are only given hormones, with no other treatment as the risks for them are too great. This was somewhat reassuring, not least for the fact that I was not considered old and vulnerable. I also had another MRI scan, which showed that the cancer had not spread to my bones, and that too was a relief. My diagnosis, technically, was T2N0 – T2 representing how easily the cancer could be detected, and N0 denoting that it had not reached the lymph nodes, from where it would easily spread elsewhere in my body.
At this point I consulted David and Sue, who is a nephrologist and so knows about these things. She suggested that I ask about a third treatment option, brachytherapy, which involves inserting tiny radioactive seeds direct into the prostate, and is thus better targeted, with lower risk of side-effects. So I did ask, and my oncologist arranged for me to be assessed by the brachytherapy team at the Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford. They agreed that I was suitable for treatment, but told me that I needed first to have a small operation, a TURP (trans-urethral resection of the prostate). This was arranged for September, and John came down from Manchester to support me.
Unfortunately the TURP did not go well and the surgeon was unable to complete the procedure. My urethra failed to dilate sufficiently to admit his instruments. The effects from this were quite nasty, specially the first evening; my post-anaesthetic memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember John helping me to the ward lavatory and us both being very alarmed when I passed (and leaked) a lot of blood. Not surprisingly the hospital kept me overnight for observation. For the first few days after I returned home, I had a good deal of pain when passing urine; but this gradually cleared, as I had been promised.
So we were back to radiotherapy. (I was at this point again given the option of surgery, but my original preference did not change. If anything, my experience with the TURP may have strengthened my prejudice against surgery.) This could not start straight away as I needed time to recover, but was eventually scheduled to begin on 23 November and continue to 17 January, every day except weekends and bank holidays.
The radiotherapy proved, as an experience, to be pretty straightforward. Each morning I had to drive to the St Luke’s Radiotherapy Unit at the East Surrey, 9 miles from Oxted, to arrive 45 minutes before treatment. On arrival, I had to empty my bladder and to drink a pint of water within five minutes. The prostate is surrounded by the bladder and apparently it helps with the treatment for the bladder to be distended by a certain, measured amount each time.
After 45 minutes I was ushered into a changing room, to remove some clothes and put on a dressing gown. Fortunately I have one of my own which was suitable; the hospital-issued gowns are horrible. Then I was called into the radiotherapy theatre. There is a routine where the nurse asks you for name, address and date of birth; they don’t want to give you the wrong treatment by accident, though by the 37th time it seemed a bit silly. Then you have to lie down on a kind of slab (made of carbon fibre, I was told), your position is carefully adjusted by the radiography nurses, and the machine then emits a high-intensity X-ray aimed directly at your prostate. This was one of the latest models of the machine and it revolved a full 360 degrees around the patient, so only the prostate receives the full dose; the other areas through which the X-ray passes only receive a small fraction, which again helps to reduce side-effects.
Anyway, it’s all done now. The treatment is monitored by the oncologists and the radiographers, and they have told me they are happy with how it went. The worst side-effect I have had is fatigue, which is apparently expected. I will need to continue hormone treatment for another 2 years or so, and to have check-ups, including blood tests and an outpatient consultation, at regular intervals, though if all goes well these follow-ups will gradually become less frequent.
I can’t say I feel any different now. The only time I really felt unwell was after the failed TURP. But I suspect that I shall be apprehensive before each follow-up appointment. There is nothing visible to show whether the cancer has in fact been fully eradicated. For all the reassurances given by the doctors, surgeons and nurses I have seen, I’m not sure that the lurking fear of recurrence will ever go away.
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Hedda Gabler
1 February 2017
One way and another, I have now seen most of Ibsen’s plays at least once, including some of the less well-known such as Emperor and Galilean (see John’s blog of 24 July 2011) and Brand. But I had somehow missed one of the most celebrated of them all, Hedda Gabler – until today. With my long-time friend David Thomas I went this afternoon to the National Theatre’s production, in which Ruth Wilson took the title role.
It was good, very good. For anyone reading this who may not have the opportunity to go to the National Theatre, I strongly recommend taking advantage of the NT Live presentation in cinemas which, it has been announced, will take place on or after 9 March. However, do not expect a barrel of laughs. There are a few humorous moments early on, but the overall effect is bleak, especially the climax which comes with desperate suddenness.
Many of Ibsen’s plays tackle, more or less directly, what he sees as the social evils of his own time and place in 19th century Norway, and this is certainly true of Hedda, where the underlying theme is the powerlessness of women and the emptiness of their role in society. According to the programme notes, it may also have been prompted by some of the circumstances of Ibsen’s own life, though this is never explicit or apparent in the play.
But the tragedy here is personal. Hedda has made bad decisions. Her relationships, not least with her husband, are strained. She feels trapped. She is also impulsive and neurotic. She can’t settle down to anything. She does wrong for reasons that she doesn’t fully understand. She is in fact not only not very likeable but hard to sympathise with.
For the play to work requires an actress who can capture this personality and make her, if not sympathetic, at least interesting. Fascinating would be better. And Ruth Wilson, of whom I had previously scarcely heard, does so outstandingly well. You don’t know what she’s going to do next, but she makes you want to find out. She is totally believable, in how she talks, how she moves, her gestures large and small, her swings from elation to moodiness to malice to despair. The rest of the cast are also pretty good, especially Kyle Soller as her husband and Rafe Spall as the sinister Judge Brack, but it is Ruth Wilson who is on stage almost throughout and carries the show.
The play is directed by Ivo van Hove, who is based in the Netherlands but has had an extensive international career. This is his first work for the NT and his involvement was regarded as a great coup. The production design and lighting are by Jan Versweyveld, a long-time collaborator of Van Hove. Ibsen is often produced naturalistically, so far as the plays allow (it’s quite hard to do a naturalistic Peer Gynt), but that is not the case here, though there is nothing outrageous in the presentation. The set is a bare white-panelled box with a few pieces of furniture – an upright piano and piano stool, a sofa, a single chair. On the left-hand side is a set of vertical blinds which can be drawn or adjusted to admit or exclude light. In fact the lighting is arguably the most striking aspect of the production, changing in colour and intensity to match changes of mood and scene.
There are some elements which don’t quite come off. Hedda’s piano is an important feature, and the show begins with piano music, which is fair enough. But some of the scene changes are accompanied by off-stage piano and voice (not Ruth Wilson, and not presented as such) performing what I imagine may be Scandinavian jazz*, though of a rather pared-down kind. The singer seems intrusive. Worse, the ending of the play, which should be a great bleak silence, is filled with more of the same: it is inappropriate and trite. A bad mis-step.
I was also puzzled by the presence on-stage throughout of a black-clad woman, who is listed in the cast as “a maid.” She speaks in that role in the opening scene, but scarcely at all thereafter. It is obvious that she is meant to be a symbol, but of what exactly isn’t clear. One reviewer suggested that she represents Hedda’s conscience, but if so she is a singularly quiet conscience for such an unquiet soul.
The blank white set, the black-clad maid and one or two other elements in the show give it an expressionistic tinge. This seems fair enough, and to support Ibsen’s original concept. Hedda could, I suppose, be produced in an entirely naturalistic way – indeed I suspect that is the tradition – but the staging helps to underline Hedda’s predicament. I was put in mind more than once of Munch’s The Scream, which I think is pretty much the effect Ibsen was seeking.
I was the more interested to see this production in the light of an article in the Guardian a few days ago (https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/jan/29/david-hare-classic-british-drama-infected-radical-european-staging) which reports the playwright David Hare as complaining: “…Now we’re heading in Britain towards an over-aestheticised European theatre. We’ve got all those people … coming in and doing director’s theatre where you camp up classic plays and you cut them and you prune them around…” Van Hove is one of the directors singled out for criticism.
In recent months John and I have seen several productions where a director does indeed seem to have overlaid the original play with ideas of his or her own. Some might have even been described as camping up. But I haven’t seen this as a sinister adherence to some European theatrical agenda. It’s more like pandering to the audience, to make the play more accessible (as in the RSC’s recent productions of The White Devil and Doctor Faustus, which were damaged by raucous modern music) or funny (as in the NT’s She Stoops To Conquer, where the original wit was replaced by vulgarity). I don’t like being condescended to, and I think the less of theatres and companies whose directors do so. But this is a long way off the “director’s theatre” of which Hare makes such complaint.
There are certainly a handful of directors who enjoy imposing their own vision, often quite deliberately controversial, on blameless material. They are mostly working in opera houses: Peter Sellars, David Alden, Calixto Bieito are a few names which spring to mind. Even so, an original vision can help to enliven a well-worn (not to say hackneyed) opera. Jonathan Miller’s Rigoletto with a Mafia setting and his Marx-Brothers inspired Mikado have both been outstanding successes for English National Opera, fitting the original material like a glove. But perhaps the difference is that Miller was attempting to refresh the originals, whereas the likes of Sellars and Alden seem to want to subvert them.
I have no idea whether Van Hove’s other work deserves criticism on these grounds, but in any event Hedda Gabler at the NT is blameless. On the contrary, the expressionist design and production work wholly with the grain of the play. If Ibsen were alive today, he would be very pleased.
* Scandinavian jazz is a recognised sub-genre. Look it up!