Eve

What must December 31st have been like two hundred and sixty years ago? Meaningless: it wasn’t the end of anything but December. The year didn’t end till March 24th (and I don’t know if this was marked by any excess). It must have been odd in 1752, when they had two New Year’s Eves, this being the year when they shortened the year by 11 days, and switched the dates of the calendar.

Ends of the year used to mean outbreaks of faux-Scots fever on television, with anyone called Jimmy (Stewart? Shand?) turning into the TV headline act, and with Kenneth McKellar in the mix somewhere. McKellar was a professional Scot, who toured the country and graced the nether regions of the charts with vaguely skirling songs – indeed, he was even the British entrant for the Eurovision Song Contest in the late 1950s, where his bold braw moonlicht voice succeeded in impressing hardly anyone at all. I did actually see him once, about fourth on the bill at the fag end of variety shows. It was 1982. (Top of the bill was Ray Alan and Ray Charles.) There was an odd sense that, just for a day, the Scots knew how to do what the English didn’t: step ye gaily. And drink everyone else under the carpet.

Now we have Jools Holland, and a crowd of pre-recorded celebrities. Is it just me, or does everyone think JH is a hopeless presenter? Everything he puts his hand to turns to schmaltz, except possibly boogie piano, and I am only able to say this because I can’t – much as I would like to – play boogie piano. It may be that there are boogie piano players out there who think he’s not much cop at that, either.

You can see where I’m coming from: fedupness. I find the ends of years profoundly unsettling: another year of under-achievement, even in those years when, as sometimes happens, I have actually achieved something. September is the month I like best, and it feels a long way off. But today, for me, is about tearing up calendars, and feeling time slip away.

My father used to enjoy New Year’s Eve. He used to mkake sure we were awake to watch him step outside the door with some fetishistic objects, which included a lump of coal, and – am I imagining this? – a bag of sugar. And perhaps a bottle. He would solemnly ring the bell, and be let in, and then off we’d go to bed, none the wiser. He was a tall man – over six feet – and one of my abiding images of him is that shadow outside the door. In fact, my father has almost completely passed into shadow now. It may be that New Year’s Eve reminds me a little too much of how little I knew him, which is absurd, because, if he had lived for decades more, I would have known him no better. Unlike my mother, he never adapted to any world other than the one he had constructed around himself. He was immune to small talk. He had passions he didn’t share with children, kind though I suspect he was.

I am beginning to sound like Eeyore, although in the real world, I am more of a Rabbit.

iPods

Now that the Greenwell household (not this branch of it) is in possession of an iPod to the tune of one, I am having to think about the things rather harder. The idea of being able to walk around with – how many? – say, a gazillion of the songs to which I am addicted, appeals. But ther sound quality doesn’t, and nor does the business of having those little white plugs stuck in my ears. I’m not fond of things being stuck in my ears, although I might be persuaded to wear old-fashioned ‘cans’ (radio argot). But how stupid would that look, having a thing the size of a box of Swan Vestas round my neck, and a huge pair of headphones round my head?

It’s interesting how, thirty years ago, the ghetto-blaster (and before that, and I know the principle is slightly different, the transistor radio, which I must have called a ‘trannie’, because everyone else did, even if I have no recollection of the word leaving my lips) was the teenage statement. ‘Here is my music,’ it said, ’share it.’ Then, with the arrival of Walkmen – should that be Walkmans, and should the plural of computer mouse be ‘mouses’ or ‘mice’? – music went private. Everywhere you go, there are private communions with music. It’s odd: probably because I come from the noisy generation of sharing.

All the same, the random shuffle part of it appeals. I like the idea of a song popping up out of nowhere, in the same way that I like making selections of music for myself and significant others, just to tease myself and others with my strange taste. An iPod, if fed sufficient material (and I have just about mastered the process, although it took a phone call to my niece to do it) would eventually be coaxable into producing truly memorably random material, whereas CD-making, like tape-making before it, requires hours of time and thought.

I don’t know if a hand can be said to be clod-hopping, but I suspect myself of having clod-hopping hands, if so. Touch an iPod with even average pressure with the finger, and it sits dumbly in the hand like a dead bird. It has to be caressed into action, given a surreptitious stroke by the finger or thumb, its wheel turned with delicacy. As with texting, I just don’t think I have the fingers for it. You see how seductive it is? A moment ago, the problems was my ears. Now it’s my fingers. I must want an iPod after all. (You can actually buy them pre-loaded, too: what an awful thought. You see adverts for them in the kinds of magazines you read at the doctor’s, adverts which suggest you write in and ask for (say) the big band hits of the 1940s to be loaded on to the iPod. God help us.)

However, I think I will leave this another four or five years, by which time iPods will have become cheaper, smaller, and more reliable (it’s the battery, doc). And by that time, they will have been superseded. And of course, by that time, you will be able to ask for an iPod’s successor to be customised to your taste, which telepathic marketing will be able to deduce from the keystrokes you make while you type. (Doesn’t that bug you about Amazon et al. ‘Hi, we know the kind of thing you like, so here’s a picture of what you ought to be buying.’ Drives me mad.)

Ideally, I would quite like to pluck songs out of the air as I walk along, and yes, I realise that this is called ‘the brain working’. But I would quite like to share them. That would make a change from the inward-turned eyes you don’t meet on the street. There would be music, there would be Something In The Air.

Which incidentally is one of my least favourite songs, and I wish call centres would stop using it.

Traits (continued)

More on the copycat front, but not language this time.

I’ve written about this on the family history section of my web-site here - about my great-grandfather, initially. In the mid-1990s, one of my father’s cousins wrote me a very elegant pen-portrait of my great-grandfather, after whom I am named, but who died in 1948, four years before I was born, in which she described, amongst other things, his quirks. One of these, she wrote, was to make a kind of panto sneeze, in which he covered his whole face with his hand and went ‘Ooo-shah!’, presumably to amuse children, and possibly to frighten cats, of which he was allegedly very unfond. When I read this, I was amazed: because my father did exactly the same thing. His grandfather had done it (he admired his grandfather inordinately, but most people seem to have liked him) – so he did it. It was an odd sort of homage, but there it is. I can’t think of many obvious imitations of my father that I perpetuate, although eating toast only when it is cold is one of them. (My father had some odd quirks with food, of which the strangest was, when confronted with a crusty bread roll, to take all of the dough out of its centre, to roll that dough into a small ball, and to put it on the table at the side of his plate – once again, it’s the kind of detail that might just kick a fictional character off, if only I was any use at writing fiction. It’s plotting that foxes me. Or lack of effort. I can teach other people to plot, quite successfully, but I don’t seem to be able to manage to follow my own advice. I need one of my novelist friends to push me.)

Sometimes copying can take the oddest forms. I have a very dear friend who lives near Cambridge, and whom I see from time to time. I was there a couple of years ago, and her husband, quite out of the blue, offered me a pint of cold lime juice. This doesn’t happen a lot. But immediately, it seemed to me much the most sensible thing to drink, whenever possible, and, on my way back to the South-West, I nabbed a couple of bottles of lime juice, and kept up the copying for quite a while after that. They also had one of those rubber squirty things that you attach to taps, for which there must be a word – if there is a word for the part of a shoe above the toe-cap, and there is, and I cannot think of it no matter how long I keep typing this sentence, yes I can, vamp, what a great word, then there must be a word for a rubber squirty thing. Anyway, I bought one of those as well, and took some delight in being able to swish water round the sink.

Perhaps this is a fad, not a trait. Or even a superstition. When my mother was dying, she was agitated because she was sick of the taste of water, which she needed for her pills, and could not think of anything she wanted. Why don’t you drink orange barley water, I suggested. Brilliant, she said. I got her some. And since then, farewell lime juice, I have been drinking the stuff daily in her memory. One of the last things she did was to ask me to get her some money out of a cash machine – why, what was she going to spend it on in a hospice? – and I got some out myself at the same time. So (since I daren’t carry a wallet, I just lose the things) I had a £20 note in my pocket when she died. And now I always have a £20 note in my pocket. For a long time, it was the same one, but I slipped up somewhere.

Have I convinced you I am obsessive yet?

Copycatting

I guess we all do it, although I worry that I may be the only one, of course, and that any half-decent psychiatrist would have me into a secure unit the moment he or she found out.

Copycatting. What I mean is the way we adopt phrases and habits from others and bring them into our daily lives – snaffling a bit from someone else until our behaviour is only 90%, if that, original. Of course, there are the national catchphrases in any case, or even words. One of the odder ones is ‘Naff Off’, which probably existed in some pocket of the country in the sixties, but which had a two-stage journey into the British psyche (or am I the only one still saying ‘Naff Off,’ doctor?) It was popularised by Porridge, the Clement/ La Frenais vehicle for Ronnie Barker’s prodigious acting talents (he was also a great writer, but I never warmed to his fondness for sound-effect parodies like Futtock’s End). The writers correctly spotted that, if a sit-com was set in a prison, it would be a bit strange if there was no swearing, and adopted Naff Off as their substitute. Barker’s character, Fletcher, deployed it to great effect, and, not long into the show’s run, it gained a great deal more publicity when – of all people – Princess Anne was reported to have used it, quite possibly of reporters. At this point, coincidentally, everyone joined in.

Catchphrases outlive their sources, like most sayings (who was it who got up one morning and observed ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’, I wonder? He or she must have been pleased with the coinage). So there are still people around, in their thirties, who say ‘I thangew’ for ‘Thanks’, and cannot possibly remember Arthur Askey, and even some who say ‘Don’t mind if I do’, the Colonel Chinstrap riposte from the wartime radio show ITMA (It’s That Man Again, and no, I haven’t been lying about my age).

But this also happens on a micro basis. For instance, two phrases I know I use are ‘Ariba!’ (roughly, ‘Great’!), and ‘Fuck-me-Reg’ (‘Blow me down’). ‘Ariba!’ opens a track on a very obscure Grace Slick album from the 1970s, called ‘Manhole’. ‘Fuck-me-Reg’ is the lament of (I think) the drummer in The Troggs in a famously recorded session which demonstrated, if proof were needed, that they had a hard job putting together their usual battery of simple-chord-and-drumbeat songs. Reg was (is, honestly) the singer. They were (are, the two survivors) from Andover. The drummer was unable to get the beat straight, and used this particular expletive. And a colleague of mine, and his wife, adopted it. And I ended up adopting it, too.

I had a friend at university (that sounds a bit sad, I had more than one) who said ‘Hilarious’ a lot (and was mocked for it. But that has slipped into my lexicon of phrases. And there was a sketch (Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd, the great comic actor who died earlier this year) used in a regular TV fixture in the 50s and 60s, ‘Christmas Night With The Stars’, to which every BBC sitcom contributed a ten-minute special, and which is still current in my family, even if the users are now down to me and my brother. The show was called ‘Hugh and I’. The sketch made fun of a deaf character (possibly played by Jack Douglas, who died in the last fortnight, but here I could be wrong) – the grandfather of the house. The sketch (which also involved Wendy Richard) was about playing Christmas word games. Each member of the household said a word, clapped thrice, and the next person said an associated word. Say something disconnected, and you were out. The grandfather (whose deafness seems less funny now that I have to turn the TV up to 21 to hear it) couldn’t grasp the principle. Terry Scott illustrated it by saying that, if one person said ‘Wicker’, the next might say ‘Basket’. At the end of the sketch, the local rector arrived (interestingly, this didn’t seem odd at the time), and the old man said ‘Who’s that?’, Terry Scott replied loudly, ‘VICAR’, at which the old man clapped three times and shouted ‘BASKET’. For the next 40+ years, if anyone ever, anywhere, in any context, used the word ‘Vicar’ in the vicinity of the Greenwell family, the Greenwell present replied ‘Basket’.

That was a long nonsense. I was only going to say that fiction writers can get a lot of good characters going by using family slang and transposing it. Now I’ll close. Have to go up to the village shop. Where I may see the Vicar.

Bask-

i.m. Harold Pinter

Strange – no, very strange – to hear of Pinter’s death on Christmas Eve (at first I thought it had been on Christmas Day, which would have struck an odd chord, given that The Hothouse, the play he abandoned in 1960, and revived in 1980, is set on Christmas Day and is in a way one of his best: a Kafkaesque parody of authority, set in an asylum).

Pinter was one of my literary heroes: not that he could do no wrong, but that he wrote so many plays which I could recite almost word for word, and which I loved for the richness of their dialogue. He is also the writer whose work I have used in teaching more frequently than any other, and whose work gave me my earliest and maybe even best ideas for teaching – because his plays dealt so carefully with the inexactitude of memory, and the way people embroider lies into their memory without a second thought. Oddly enough, given his vital and furious stand against insitutions and authority, his work was, when I was still sixteen, about the only work accepted as being brilliant, even though he was (very much) alive. In fact, even in the 1960s, I studied Pinter (The Caretaker) for A level, and practically the first thing I ever had published was about creative ways of teaching his work. And The Birthday Party, even after fifty years, still strikes me as a work of genius. For me, it was the British play of the twentieth century, alongside Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.

Pinter was a good example of a writer who was inaccessible untl you made him accessible. This was how I did it. Without revealing that Pinter was the writer under discussion, I asked students to interview each other (and tape the interviews) about a childhood memory. Half of the interviewees, unknown to the interviewers, were instructed to tell the truth; the other half to lie. I transcribed the resulting monologues, and students would analyse whether what they had was true or not. It was a fantastic way of getting students to look at language, because, although Pinter was partly a parodist of speech, he was also a natural mimic. There were some amazing pieces of writing which resulted – students who had never heard of Pinter began, in effect, to write Pinter plays. After that, they had no trouble with the work itself. They could read (say) The Caretaker and realise that Aston, the sympathetic figure, is not always telling the truth. Borges wrote a short stort in Labyrinths, in which a character called Pierre Menard wrote Don Quixote by living out Cervantes’ life. Any theory I had about teaching came from the Borges story, and using it in relation to Pinter’s early plays, from 1957 through to 1966. I never had so much fun, never enjoyed teaching so much as when I was teaching students to get into Pinter. His work was a kind of clue to the creative process itself.

The Hothouse was important, because it was nakedly political, and written at a time when he absolutely denied – as he did for a quarter of a century – that he was a political writer (this might be hard to grasp for those who knew him only through his determinedly political later plays, like Party Time or One For The Road).

Odd things about Pinter I will remember: (a) his first play, The Room, written in four days, was based on meeting Quentin Crisp in the 1950s (Crisp is the basis for Meg, the woman at the heart of it); (b) he wrote the interrogation scene in The Birthday Party in an interval, in either Torquay or Eastbourne, can’t recall which, when on tour as an actor, (c) he foxed commentators with his refusal to explain his plays (memorably, he gave a marvellous non-interview to Melvyn Bragg on an early ‘South Bank Show’, in which he reduced Bragg to the kind of silence he polished in his plays so well) and (d) he delighted in giving mystery answers to critics which they took horribly seriously, as in suggesting that they were about ‘the weasel underneath the cocktail cabinet’, a phrase so intensely meaningless that examiners actually asked students to discuss it.

The key to Pinter was that he was an actor (I can’t think of a single other playwright who actually gave the definitive portrayal of his own characters). He had an instinct for what worked on stage. Recently, they staged some of his early revue sketches from 1960 (some nicked from The Hothouse, then consigned to a drawer), which comedian Bill Bailey tried to make funny. But if you tried to make Pinter funny, the whole thing went flat. Skilful actors, Pinter included, played them straight, and got the dark laughter that way.

Pinter tried to write prose and poetry, but it all came unstuck. His poems were often published, and they were unironic tirades. They failed. But his plays, pretty well all of them – and his wonderful screenplays – were the real thing. He was a devotee of Beckett, but the only one who took Beckett apart and reconstructed his work as something new and troubling. His absolute skill was to write plays which felt realistic, no matter how surreal the premise. He was superficially easy to parody (I am afraid I think I’ve parodied him for money about ten times, including a version of Paddington Bear), but he was perhaps the only writer whose work I have parodied while preserving a complete respect. The BBC reports added the usual snide asides about ‘champagne socialism’. But Pinter was, when all was said and unsaid and done, the defining playwright of my lifetime.

‘My sad captains’ was poet Thom Gunn’s phrase for those who he admired and who had died. Pinter was perhaps the most important ’sad captain’ for me: a total genius.

Boxing Day

My memories of Boxing Day as a child are much as those of any other middle-class boy. A slight sense of anti-climax was soon mitigated by the remembrance that there were toys to play with (toys that had perhaps only been opened during the pomp and ceremony of The Day, what with my grandfather holding up the proceedings to listen, standing up, to the Queen, and stuff like that). My parents, certainly a little the worse for wear (aka gin – although I never saw him even slightly other than sober, he drank gallons of the stuff), were in sleep-in mode, in their giant and rock-hard double-bed (rock-hard because my father had a bit of a masochistic streak when it came to sleeping – it was a bed you tried bouncing on at the risk of breaking every bone in your feet).

In the middle of this hive of inactivity, doing his level best to look nonchalant, and generally ignored for the moment by my sister, by my parents, and by me, wandered my brother, curly-haired, barefoot, waiting for the light-bulb to go on in everyone’s head. Boxing Day was (and is) my brother’s birthday. It must be the worst posssible day to have a birthday (other than on Christmas Day perhaps, or, I suppose, February 29th). You wake up into other people’s exhaustion. However, he seems to have been pretty undamaged by the whole experience, and the doctors say that he won’t need counselling very much longer now he’s 52 (Happy Birthday!).

I have been very lucky in my siblings, and circumstances helped the luck along. When I started doing family history, I was amazed to find how often rivalry persisted, and usually sibling rivalry. Since I wasn’t content to research people on paper, but burst into their lives, their homes and their families as well, I found that – since a fourth cousin is a bit like a stranger on a train in this respect – all sorts of family feuds were confessed to me. Two sisters I met in the 1990s had not commuincated with each other since the end of the war (it was an argument about a stepfather). Now I met them in successive weeks. The secind one knew I had photos of the first, and her children and grandchildren, and eventually gave in and asked to see them. A fortnight later, the sisters met. I had acted as a catalyst, much to my surprise (and also pleasure).

My father didn’t like his sister, nor she him (my father was his mother’s favourite, and my aunt was treated with horrible misogyny by my grandfather). My grandfather did not like his sister, and vice versa. They fell out in 1953, and never saw each other again.  It is a recurring theme in many families – most strikingly in the case of Enid Blyton, whose daughters, when interviewed, appeared to be talking about an entirely different mother. The younger daughter, Imogen, actually remarked that she didn’t know her mother was her mother for most of her childhood, while the elder sister (now dead) could be relied on to sing Blyton’s praises. And the Blyton set-up was a weird one. She expelled the father (who never saw his daughters again) and installed a new ‘father’, who was even shown in promotional newsreels. And do read Hilary Mantel’s ‘Giving Up The Ghost’ for the extraordinary story of her parents.

But what happened to us was that we were sent to boarding schools, and the abiding effect was that, ironically, since I loathed the schools, the second one anyway (another subject), we saw enough of each other to make a feast. We got on very well as adults. (Individually, we didn’t get on with my mother and father, in different ways, or rather, got on with them at different stages of our lives, and that’s partly also because we were dispersed.)

Anyway: happy birthday to my surviving sibling. I’m glad you’re around.

Stable-talk

Let’s face it, if you’re reading this when it pops up on the screen, you should be vandalising the sprouts, ironing the wrapping paper, or lying under the tree with a bauble or three, or whatever it is you do on this festival of Mammon. Someone is going to catch you on the computer and pull the plug. So you’d better be quick.

Perhaps a nativity playlet will pass the time between snacks.

Scene: Bethlehem. BC4. Three shepherds are gossiping over three pints of wassail.

SHEPHERD 1:  Are you going to the count tomorrow?

SHEPHERD 2: After a hard night watching the flock? I haven’t got the time.

SHEPHERD 3: You know what the Romans’ll say: that you’ve taken leave of your census. You heard what that Herod said?

INNKEEPER: Oy! Stop that. Rule of the house: No Rumour At The Inn.

(Knocking.) Who is it? No Rumour At The Inn.

WOMAN AT DOOR: I’m Mary, and this is my husband, Joseph.

INNKEEPER: No Rumour At The Inn. What have we here, a couple of Bedlamites? What do you want – a berth for the night?

MARY: If this is the one-star lodging we’ve been looking for. We’ve come all the way from Nazareth for the countdown.

SHEPHERDS: Nazareth! That’s the one we were told to watch out for.

MARY: Who might you be, sirs?

INNKEEPER: Three wise men, if they know what’s good for them. No Rumour At The Inn!

MARY: Perhaps a manger? A stable? We don’t want anything fancy. No en suite or anything.

INNKEEPER: Just as well. I’ve been booked out since Easter. I’ll get some bedding. (He goes off in search.)

SHEPHERDS: Are you the Mother of God?

MARY: Well…

INNKEEPER (returning): That’s the last straw.

SHEPHERDS: She’s the Mother of God.

INNKEEPER: For Caesar’s sake, there may be Pharisees about. No

SHEPHERDS: … Rumour In The Inn. We’re off to help them make the stable up. Move the sheep.

INNKEEPER: Your husband’s very quiet. What sort of business is he in?

MARY: Wood.

INNKEEPER: Ah, a carpenter. Always the silent types. It’s the buzz-saws, makes them deaf. Still, if the manger gives way, he’s well-placed to fix it. It is a bit wonky.

SHEPHERDS (in a rush): He’s sulking because he thinks the baby isn’t his.

INNKEEPER: I said -

SHEPHERDS (hurrying away): We know, we know.

INNKEEPER: Sorry, love. Shepherds. Bunch of crooks. I hope the nativity goes well.

MARY: Nativity?

INNKEEPER: Local lingo. Herod’s keen on latinate diction. What are you going to call it?

MARY: Jesus.

INNKEEPER: Oh, that’s unusual. South American, isn’t it? (Three wise men arrive, chattering.) Hello, hello, hello, what have we here?

WISE MAN: Chaldeans. We bring gifts. For the baby.

MARY: Oh you shouldn’t have.

INNKEEPER: Keep it down. No Rumour…

WISE MAN: Gold. Frankincense. And here, have a dab of this (he smears unguent on the innkeeper, who begins laughing).

INNKEEPER: Ha ha ha. As the Sunderland manager said, The myrrh the merrier. Get it? Night all! (They leave, as the innkeeper’s wife wanders in. Pause, then, sotto voce:) It’s on, sweetheart. Once in royal David’s city. It’s in Isaiah. Read up on it.

Pause.

INNKEEPER’S WIFE: So we…

INNKEEPER: Ring Herod in the morning. This time next week we’ll be running a motel down Galilee way.

Fade.

                      

Round robins

I don’t mean plump and even morbidly obese red-breasted chirping things (some Christmas cards suggest that robins have been raiding the fridge on a regular basis, and, come to that, what sort of role model is Santa in this cholesterol-terrified age?), but the messages so repeatedly satirised in Simon Hoggart’s columns (and published by him), which are sent at Christmas, detailing the woes and wonders of the sender. They are easy to satirise, what with their digests of operations and SATs results. But actually, I quite like getting them. I sometimes think there should be a moral obligation to send a newsletter round, rather in the manner of a parish magazine, so that you get to hear what has become of your friends. However, I do cop out of the straight genre, looking for vaguely spoof-ish ways of constructing a message to put in the card ( I found a great one in the form of a book cover – I would buy the book for the title, but even with out the jacket, it proves to be a sought-after rarity from the 1930s, so I will never be able to find out what happens):

The perfect book cover

That gives me enough mileage to write about the year in the Devonian village of Morchard Bishop (which is incidentally the pseudonym of another writer, active in the mid-century, and a friend of Jean Rhys, who lived not far from here).

The eymology of ’round robin’ is supposedly to do with sailors signing a complaint in a circle, so that the ringleader could not be identified and (presumably) summarily thrown overboard. But no-one’s really sure what the ‘robin’ is – a ribbon, probably, but hard to connect up with naval mutinies. Eric Partridge’s monumental Dictionary of Historical Slang says that a ’round robin’ is the host (I assume as in party, not as in sacrament), but also that it was slang for a housebreaker’s tool for cutting windows. So we’re no further forward (the great thing about etymological dictionaries is that you can’t avoid browsing adjacent entries, so did you know what your round-mys were until at least 1909? No, thought not. Trousers. It’s rhyming slang for ’round my houses’, or ’round the houses’, as we would now say it).

This is no good, I have been sucked into a vortex of slang (not a phrase you often come across). A Robin was slang for a Bow Street Runner (policeman) in the nineteenth century. And for a penny, in the 1890s. And for a child beggar, of either sex, standing about (same time period). That’s a lot of robins. (A robin’s eye was slang for a scab or sore in the Edwardian era, but you don’t need to know that.)

All I was going to say was: personally, I appreciate the lovingly folded sheets of paper, sometimes with photos scanned in, of the furthest and dearest who send cards. I think they are much maligned. It’s only when they become like a Record of Achievement that they fail.

You don’t know what a Record of Achievement (ROA) was? It will surely rate a footnote in educational history. It was an account, compiled by your school, and by yourself, of all the wonderful things you had apparently succeeded in doing, and it was intended to be carried through life, updated if you thought your first swimming certificate might no longer be pertinent, and it was to be presented to your prospective employers, possibly in lieu of conversation. It looked like a wine menu, and must have cost the same. Nobody ever, ever looked at them, and they consumed frightening amounts of time. It was a bit like Tony Hancock’s view of charity donations, in The Blood Donor, imagining himself being called to account by St. Peter (‘I shall bring out my little book, and say ‘Here you are, mate: add that lot up’).

I see I have strayed just a little from the point.

Communication breakdown

Let’s hope I don’t draw in too many Led Zeppelin fans with this heading, and I don’t mean ‘breakdown’ in the sense of being unable to communicate. I just think it’s interesting how the rules have changed. It’s mainly to do with the instant access we have to one another (I am partly spared this because my mobile phone doesn’t work in my home, so an instant instinct to speak to me, or text me, rarely bears fruit – and the same in reverse: I can’t do it).

The thing I notice about email (where I can almost always be contacted round the clock, since I obviously haven’t slept a single minute for ten years now) is that it is so easily mis-read. It has no timbre, no inflection, so the brain imposes one on it. Or maybe I mean what’s left of my brain. This happens in work emails, especially, where there is an inherent stress in the relationship between the two parties. A stray capital letter can look as if one of the participants has raised his or her voice. A sudden ending can look peremptory. A run of capitals looks like shouting. And so on.

Texting is more interesting, because the physical skill required for texting is so dependent on practice. My fingers are pathetically slow. It could be the same hand-eye problem which makes me so unmusical, but it’s more likely (a) my age, in that I can’t face the absence of punctuation, having said which, I can’t get my phone to use a capital letter at anything other than the start of a text, which probably means I don’t know how to use the phone and/or (b) my fingers are too big. I would quite like a law brought in to make the buttons on a phone bigger (same with all remote controls). Texting is (like messaging) so instant that the content of the text is usually dismissable as anything other than rudimentary communication. It’s because it’s thought of as off-the-cuff (poor use of colloquialism there). Yet increasingly (and always to amazement and outrage as yet), some major decisions are taken by text. Marriages are called off. Roy Keane, Sunderland’s late football manager, resigned by text (good thing, the resignation, if the sudden rush of goals since he went has anything to do with it: what fickle fans we are at Sunderland).

The landline phone (where one can be more leisurely, I guess because the cost is far cheaper) is entering a third phase. The first one must have been excruciating (in Mike Leigh’s film about Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘Topsy-Turvy’, Jim Broadbent, as Gilbert, is shown having to shout down a late nineteenth century line in his home). Until the mobile phone, the second phase was slightly formal at first, but relaxed to a certain extent: only to a certain extent, because phones in houses were in public places, where anyone could listen in. Now landline phones can be picked up and carried about, and are taking on the property of mobile phones. As a means of communication, the phone throws me, because silences are a problem. Successive monologues or constant dialogue are all that are permitted. I think it’s increasingly hard to have a good phone conversation, because the rules of engagement have changed. (Interesting what else has gone, of course: party lines – no party! – and operators who listened in and sometimes chipped in.)

I used to look forward to the videophone. (The TV science show Tomorrow’s World promised it by 1980, but then they also promised free trains.) I know it’s here, either by interactive computer or handheld devices, but it hasn’t quite caught on. The answer, I think, is to start with the landline (as it were) version, and for the TV to be the main point of contact, to show the speakers each other as they talk. The body language is missing. And the more forms of communication there are in print and by voice, the more body language is the one to be devalued.

What I’d really like is a sensurround phone.

Or advanced telepathy, where the speakers inhabited each other. Now we’re talking.

Adrian Mitchell dies

It’s very sad to hear of the death of Adrian Mitchell, who died at the start of the weekend of a heart attack, at the age of 76 – not that he ever looked it. His poems were often filled with anger, but his delivery of them was always gentle, smiling and generous – as he was. He was impossible to categorise as a poet, aligning himself with the experimentalists, but also very firmly associated with popular culture – he was, if you like, the grandad of performance poets (not for nothing was his Bloodaxe collection of his most famous poems called ‘Greatest Hits’). He wrote with irony, but never with ambiguity. He hated any kind of scholarly analysis, to the extent of making clear that he did not wish to be ’set’ for any public examinations, and at one point deliberately sitting – and failing – an exam which asked questions about one of his poems (this sounds completely apocryphal, but even if it was, it was true to the man).

I knew him a little. He was New Statesman’s poetry editor – the last person to hold that post – when Steve Platt was the magazine’s editor in the early nineties, and he pushed for a page of poetry which was designed to draw attention to itself. At the time, I had begun my stint as the NS weekly poet, so we did meet very occasionally, including on one well-fuelled occasion at the New Statesman staff Christmas party, held in an Italian restaurant, when, rather worryingly, Steve whispered in my ear that he wanted me to take part in a poetry duel with Adrian. A poetry duel with the leading poetry performer of the day. Was he kidding? (He wasn’t.)

I am not good – laziness, perhaps – at memorising my own material, and I only had two poems to hand – the ones published that week in the magazine. However, since Adrian had consumed a fair quantity of vodka, there was at least a possibility that he wouldn’t make it to the end of the poem. The whole thing actually went to ‘a second round’, which was generous of Steve. At this point, I sang a song, God help me, and Adrian just stood up and delivered, in his affable manner, the most famous anti-war poem of the 1960s (‘I was run over by the truth one day/ Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way… Tell me lies about Vietnam’). No following that!

He loved poetry, and he loved poets, and he loved audiences, and he hated mobile phones (he heard one go off in a performance I saw, and threatened it with a bucket of water). He also had a really disarming style of delivery. His eyes half-glazed, and he spoke with a smile ghosting his lips, his head shifting a little, his body moving slightly as if the words were coming through from a mysterious inner place.

He had an instinct for what was preposterous, but, in poetic terms, he didn’t go for the victim’s jugular. It was if he neatly undressed the offender, the subject of his distaste, and said ‘This is what you look like underneath: the same as the rest of us. You are a bastard, and you should stop it.’

He was also dedicated to writing poems for children, and many of his numerous collections were for children (he had at one point wanted to be a teacher, but baulked at the size of the classes). And there was an innocence and freshness about his poems – memorable and speakable, though his own voice wasn’t imitable – that made them great. I’m glad to have met him, and to have talked to him, and to have been entertained by his elegant, deceptive anger.

Here he is in his youth: