A provincial hack's commonplace book
From a discussion on Woman's Hour, just now, on life after retirement:
"I loved being a district nurse. I hated the thought of staying at home and listening to the Afternoon Play."
I should stop posting BBC links that expire after a week, but yesterday's Sunday Feature was deeply, deeply, deeply strange: an analysis of the propaganda swing tunes broadcast on Nazi radio to Britain, which involves (i) playing skin-crawlingly anti-semitic rewrites of "Makin' Whoopie" and the like, delivered in an accented song-speak remarkably like the MC's in Cabaret; and (ii) delineating the bonkers musical politics prosecuted by Goebbels. The trumpeters in this repulsive little band were, apparently, the only ones in the Reich permitted to use mutes. You have until Saturday.
...this link should give Alasdair Gray paying tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, who died yesterday. Gray doesn't sound ever so well himself - he may not be a morning person - but he's definitely worth listening to.
There's probably only a couple of days left to download the first episode of the World Service's Eyewitness Iraq (BBC things have a tendency to disappear after seven days, and it's taken me several days to find this one on the website). The programme is a boiling-down of Hugh Sykes's reports from the early days of the conflict, part of the four-year-anniversary ruminations occurring everywhere. What makes it particularly worth listening to, however, is a ten-second edit of 40 minutes of early morning in Baghdad, not long after the Saddam statue came down, with the birdsong and the bangs both intensified to dreamlike levels. It gives an extraordinarily powerful sense of how it might feel to have violence become a constant part of your life's background; one of the most effective pieces of wordless radio I've heard.
In full, the intro of this morning's Press Association Tory conference story:
Pressure was growing on key planks of David Cameron's reform agenda today amid growing evidence of dissent among the Tory grass-roots.
It would be nice to think someone wrote that for a bet.
is a sentence in most of the initial reports of the John Reid picoscandal, which presumably spawned from PA. It concerns Mr Reid's first wife, Cathy:
She died in 1998, and the couple had two sons.
How "and"? I didn't need that mental image. Neither do you.
This phrase just occurred twice in half an hour or so on Radio Four; once in Brian Walden's Cooke substitute thing, and once in Any Questions, both times in relation to the Danish cartoons clusterbuggerup.
It's a nice cliche. I've used it myself. But what I failed to understand until a few years ago, and what I suspect may be more widely forgotten, is the full meaning of a shout of fire in a theatre before building regulations.
We're not talking about severe inconvenience or discomfort that's worse because it arises from malice; nor even about Walden's "behaving in a way that deliberately puts other people at personal risk". A man who falsely shouted fire in a Georgian London theatre could expect a stampede that killed half a dozen people. This happened quite a few times. Indeed, it was a technique for blackmailing producers. The restriction proposed may therefore be less severe than the phrase now suggests.
Unfortunately for this argument, the source of my revelation was a display in the basement gents' toilet of Sadlers' Wells theatre in 2003, which I now only dimly remember. Confirmation is beyond my Googling; corrections would be greatly welcomed.
"Never arrange to mate things within your own family." -- Prince Charles, in that Today programme interview. It was ages ago, but I had to wait until Pick of the Week before I was sure I'd heard right.
To be fair, he's talking about rare pigs; and his concern is prompted by his sister's boar ripping his sows' ears, rather than genetic disorders or hereditary porphyria or anything. Still, how unlike the home life of our own dear etc, etc.
Cover artists who read the book
"I have always had the wrong shape of head. It sticks out in awkward places, bulges whenever I think, is only sparsely covered with tufts of colourless hair, and collapses somewhere around the chin, scurrying for cover towards the collar. The ears reach out like large red satellite dishes, the cheeks are covered with lines and rashes caused by decades of overwork and overindulgence and if I dare to smile widely, it looks less like a friendly act than a record of bomb damage in the Blitz. Timothy Winters, teeth like splinters? The lad has nothing on me." -- Andrew Marr, My Trade.
You may wonder how, after a description like that, Mr Marr ended up here. But look closer: the angle, the crop and the careful focus address everything he dislikes about his face. Well, everything except the resemblence to Vladimir Putin he disavows later in the chapter. But the photographer may not have read that far.
[My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, by Andrew Marr (Macmillan, 2004). Combines the more gossipy and less self-revelatory aspects of a memoir with the less strenuous aspects of popular scholarship. Taken as what it is, rather than what it says it is, great fun. But if you want the pop history of UK hackdom, it's still Matthew Engel's Tickle the Public that you need.]
Parallel world dept.
Every once in a while, something gets pushed at me that I cannot imagine having imagined. The usual portal is BBC Radio Four. On this occasion, that means its In Touch programme, and the issue is the eternal war between guide dogs and escalators.
Guide dogs, you see, are meant to be able to take you everywhere, and escalators are not meant to be walked with paws. In America and, by the looks of it, Australia, they train you to walk the dog up, in the belief that you'll do it anyway. In Britain they tell you to carry the dog, and concentrate on teaching you how to balance while holding something heavy and alive.
It's a Tube thing, apparently. New escalators will be dog-friendly, but given that old ones could hang around for decades -- see this wonderful piece for more on the subject -- that may not be much of a comfort.
