I've started talking to myself in the car. I think it's time to blog...
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Dark Side
On BBC Radio Three, there is a superb programme called Nightwaves, described as a "flagship arts and ideas programme, featuring in-depth interviews; vociferous debates on key cultural and philosophical questions" (why do things have to be called flagship now? Is main too plain?).
I rarely listen to it, but I do catch up with the podcast which features highlights from the previous week.
Last week's podcast contained highlights from the Free Thinking Festival in Gateshead and included a fascinating talk by Dr Gwen Adshead, a consultant psychotherapist at Broadmoor. The name Broadmoor will probably mean nothing to anyone outside the UK, so I should explain that it is a top security psychiatric hospital and houses many of Britain's most dangerous criminals. If Hannibal Lecter was English, he'd be in Broadmoor.
Dr Adhead's talk was called "A Woman's Right to Be Evil" and was one of the most interesting and humane things I've heard for a long time. Here is a link to the programme, but just in case the BBC are being silly about allowing non-licence payers to have access to their programes, I have embedded a 15-minute extract.
I normally work on the principle that my blog posts shouldn't take more than a minute to read. However, I think you'll regard this extract as 15 minutes well spent:
Isn't there a horrible song that begins with "If a picture paints a thousand words..."? I'm not sure, but I have memories of listening to it on the sorts of radio stations that you only listen to when you have 'flu and feel too ill to read, watch television or concentrate on something worthy.
The song's sentiments seem to be the guiding principle behind a 1950 publication that I found today called, simply, "The Frenchman". The book consists of 48 pages of questions and answers with a French actor called Fernandel - not a fascinating concept in itself, but made more appealing by the fact that Fernandel's answers are limited to body language.
Here are a few examples:
"We Americans are very much against sin. How about you, Monsieur?"
"Does the average Frenchman still pinch pretty girls in a crowd?"
"Do you know that here this kind of conduct will land one in jail?"
"What would you rather give up - women or garlic?"
"As a Frenchman, what do you think of American sweater girls?"
"We hope that you have tasted our California champagne?"
What is it about the French? In any other country, a strange nose, bad teeth and a generally odd face would be considered a handicap. However, in France it's all part of the je ne sais quois, the joi de vivre and the honi soir qui mal y pense. It's one of many things I admire about France.
But before I launch into a homage (or should that be hommage) to the French and their rich artistic and culinary heritage, I'd like to ask Fernandel two questions:
Why is Kevin now one of the most popular baby names in France?
Why are the French taking more antidepressants than any other nation in Europe?
What would Fernandel say?
*Triva fact - Fernandel is mentioned by Camus in L'Etranger, when Meursault and Marie watch him in a film.
This image is doing the rounds in the blogosphere, but in case you haven't seen it, this photo was published in the November issue of the National Geographic. In the foreground is the dead body of a chimpanzee called Dorothy, who died of heart failure.
What makes this picture so remarkable and incredibly moving is the sight of Dorothy's companions watching her from the other side of the fence. One article referred to the "grieving chimps", but instead of the tired cliches of anthropormorphisation, I'd rather celebrate the magic of chimpdom. Almost human is an insult.
It's a little known fact that publishers often appear on the covers of their own books, or at least parts of them do. The shapely legs you see on the front cover of a chick lit novel may belong to Miranda in Editorial, whilst the bloodstained hand of a serial killer is probably Darren from Sales and Marketing.
I've no idea whether these two worked in publishing:
The angry-looking Arab seems particularly suspect - the beard is on a par with Gary Johnston's disguise in Team America:
It might be Darren from Sales, but it could equally be Miranda from Editorial. We will probably never know.
East Anglia is one of those places that people seem to love or hate. I thought I hated it, but that was before I visited Orford, last Thursday:
Once a bustling medieval seaport, now a sleepy coastal village at the end of an empty, 12-mile road, Orford appears to be an unspoilt relic of an England that died long ago.
There are no adverts, chain stores or grafitti and apart from the occasional car, the only noises to be heard are the cries of gulls and curlews. A good place to set a murder mystery.
Overlooking the village is the keep of the 12th century Orford Castle:
I have no idea why some castles seem to attract coachloads of visitors whilst others are virtully empty, but I'm grateful that there are places where it's still possible to be alone.
I don't believe in the supernatural, but I was intrigued by an argument that ancient buildings are like magnetic tape, resonating with echoes of previous inhabitants. It's nonsense, I'm sure, but it feels true.
The ticket office was staffed by a man who apeared to have taken his inspiration from Uriah Heep, with a manner that was superficially obsequious, but with an underlying menace. He was quietly insistent that I should take advantage of the free audio tour, but I wanted to enjoy the silence.
At the top of the castle, there is a wonderful panoramic view of Orford and the surrounding area. I felt like Roger Livesey in 'A Matter of Life and Death', looking down at the village in his camera obscura.
Free from the usual roar of traffic, I could hear almost everything, from the footsteps of someone walking through the village square to the slow scraping of a boat being dragged by hand across shingle.
Landscapes may be regarded as a symbol of permanance in an ephemeral world, but the view from the castle would have been completely different when Eleanor of Aquitaine began the voyage to ransom her son, Richard the Lionheart.
It is thought that Orford Ness, a long spit of land that separates the village from the sea, didn't exist in medieval times. Today, the only way of reaching open waters is to turn right, out of the port and sail for several miles.
A few miles north is Aldeburgh (pronounced Awlbruh), where Benjamin Britten established the famous music festival. The concert hall at Snape Maltings attracts world class artists and during the Aldeburgh Festival, it feels as if most of the cognoscenti have decamped to Suffolk.
As journalist Stephen McClarence recently wrote:
A MAN in baggy knee-length shorts and canvas shoes is scolding a small boy in sailor-striped T-shirt. “Toby, do behave,” he snaps, brandishing a baguette. “And where on earth has Bertie got to?” Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, is no place for hoi polloi or honky-tonk. Never has been. Even before it became a “Cultural Village of Europe”, even before its annual festival gave it cultural kudos, there was broad consensus about its upmarket appeal.
A half-timbered kiosk on the seafront serves café latte. The gift shops stock designer bath caps at £15 a throw. And at weekends, metropolitan holiday-homers turn the place into Boden-on-Sea, the social embodiment of smart-casual.
This is Umbria-in-Anglia, with prawn-pink and pale-primrose holiday cottages rented out at up to £1,600 a week. Hollyhocks in the gardens, dried starfish and model lighthouses in the front windows, bicycles with wicker baskets propped up against the fences.
On dull days, when the sea is a melancholy browny-grey, it’s a place to read P. D. James and listen to Test Match Special, and watch Ayckbourn or Wilde at the Jubilee Hall summer theatre.
“They’re all lords and ladies here, all Captains and Sirs,” says a shop assistant. “Don’t get me wrong, they’re lovely people, but they’re the only ones who can afford to live here.”
And there, as they say, is the rub. This entire stretch of coast, with its winning combination of beautiful landscapes, unspoilt, historic villages and a thriving arts scene, has made the local housing unaffordable to the average punter. I suspect that many traditional Orford families now live in the less aesthetically pleasing environs of Ipswich.
There were a few fishermen down by the quay who commented on what a "Boo'ful evenin'" it was, but they seemed like extras in a play that was populated by an almost exclusively middle class cast. If Orford seems frozen in time, that may be because the average age of its citizens is several decades older than the national average. During my visit, two days ago, almost everyone I saw was white, middle class and over 50.
The Jolly Sailor pub seemed traditional enough, but my lunch was served by a slightly scary eastern European girl who barked "Fiss? Fiss? Fiss?" until I nodded my ascent. What had happened to the locals?
I don't blame people for wanting to live in an episode of Midsomer Murders, but I'm glad that Lewes is still a working town with a broad social mix (albeit heavily weighted towards graduates). Orford was beautiful, but it felt like a gated community and given the house prices, it effectively was.
Moby Dick is one of my favourite novels and for a while I became quite obsessed with it, to the point where I made a pilgrimage to New Bedford and visited the Seamen's Bethel church that appears in the first chapter of the book. I expected to find a nice, twee tourist site. Surprisingly, the church had hardly changed at all in 150 years and the entrance was blocked by a gang of menacing-looking sailors. They even had proper beards.
It is a tribute to Melville's genius that he managed to make such a boring book so compelling. In the hands of a lesser author, the seemingly endless digressions and meditations on whaling and life at sea would be intolerable. But Moby Dick is like a long, utterly mad, epic poem, in the tradition of The Wanderer and The Seafarer.
Last week I came across an edition of Moby Dick published in the 1920s, with wonderful illustrations by Rockwell Kent. I looked the book up, hoping that it worth be worthless enough to give me an excuse to keep it for myself, but it was worth £30. It sold three days later.
Here is a brief selection of Kent's brilliant illustrations:
