Devenish

[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.] Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion) Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry thoug...

In 1982 Joe Jackson released the album Night and Day . Arguably the most mature, and generally engaging, of his early records—and certainly the most popular, reaching the top 5 in both UK and US album charts of that year—it is, as its title suggests, a 1980s-style tribute to the flair and urbanity of Cole Porter, and indirectly, to the sophistication of Manhattan. It includes several of Jackson's best songs of the period: Breaking Us in Two, Stepping Out , and A Slow Song ; really, there isn't a bad tune in the collection. Click to play (Youtube) The principal reason for mentioning it now though is because of how Jackson interpreted the title. Back in the day when records played on both sides—astonishing to consider how often one got up in the course of an evening to 'change the record'—the A and B sides of albums could be alternately themed and textured, an option that was lost in the switch to CDs, and can scarcely be imagined in an era of mp3 single downloads. On...

I've never thought much of William Golding's writing: he may have received a Booker Prize, and a Nobel Prize for Literature to boot, but that doesn't make him an attractive author in my eyes. It's not his bleakness or the Gothic undertones—I can do bleak, or at least E. Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy can, for me—or his apparent misanthropy—Martin Amis plays the misanthrope, but at least he makes you laugh: it's the unmodulated pessimism that's hard to take. Of course, my assessment is hardly helped by the fact that Lord of the Flies was a set book in my prep school, when I was just a little older than Sean: in that school, the critical challenge was not so much to understand the allegory, which was obvious to even the least engaged pupil, but to figure out exactly how William Golding knew so much about my classmates twenty years before they were born, and why he bothered to change their names. (I have the same question about Francesca Simon, who has evidently ...

Abominable is one of those words, like dessicated , that means nothing like it should, its semantic meaning having been overwhelmed and nicely subdued by its associations. According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu abominable is supposed to mean "unequivocally detestable" ( cf . abomination) just as dessicated should denote dried—but for most of us, especially those parents subjected to the n th replay of Monsters Inc, abominable only calls to mind an oversized—do they come undersized?!—and very amiable, irrepressibly cheerful yeti, while dessicated simply means chopped (as in coconut). In that associative sense then, the past 72 hours have indeed been abominable, for it has snowed continually, returning us to the depths of winter that I thought—and Ayumi profoundly hoped—we had finally seen the back of, and mostly it's been fun, as these pictures show. Rokko winter, it seems, is like Canadian winter: thrilling at first, then an alternating mixture of exhilaration and win...

This was not meant to be the next post, but tomorrow is yet another school holiday (see Grouch ), so I had better get on now with some of the work I would have done then.  In the meantime, and to buck the trend of 'miserable men' (which Ayumi maintains defines my musical taste), here is a link to an uplifting and beautiful song Gracias a la vida , sung by the late Mercedes Sosa. I in turn am grateful to Max Reinhardt for playing this on BBC Radio Three this morning/last night. Click to play Tonight, the snow is falling again on Rokko: just when the last patches of ice had lifted from around the gate, and Sean's snowman was little more than an amorphous lump of dirt and bracken, we're expecting another 20cm of the white stuff. I hope that warmth of this woman's voice, and the beauty of her song, will help us through.

The path down from a small shrine on Rokko Mountain In constructing the piece that will follow on the heels of this one—see, dogs already!—I was reminded of this quotation by Bertrand Russell: No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest. Poor, but honest?! Shouldn't that be the other way around? The truth conditions might be the same, but the implicatures are quite different. What was Bertie thinking of?!

—Dad, how do you spell eczema ? —You mean, like skin disease? —No, the one who lives in igloos...  There are some things that are too good to make up. This Mastercard moment came this morning, as Sean was trying to log in to Club Penguin : it's interesting, to see what sorts of lexical misunderstanding can still be entertained by a ten year old, and entertaining, perhaps inevitably calling to mind the Peter Cook and John Cleese Secret Policeman's Ball sketch about ants and Arabs, mosques and mosquitos ( which I've just found! ). Or it could be the situation in Egypt... I'm not sure ( 'I get them muddled up, 'cos they're next door to each other in the dictionary...') The other piece of priceless news came yesterday at Justin's three month checkup at the Children's hospital. He's gained another kilo, is growing stronger, kicking firmly with chubby legs. The doctors were most impressed with his physical progress, including his brain devel...

A couple of days ago, Ayumi asked me if there was anything I missed about England. We're going back for a fortnight at the end of this month, so I suppose it was a timely question. Of course, I miss English friends, and the kindness of strangers, the ease of social relations, the banter, but England itself? I wasn't so sure. We have a 100-year old house that has taken upon itself to fall apart since we left, to our frustration and to the annoyance and increasing disgust of the tenant; it's damp and overcast, and even when it's 10 degrees warmer than Rokko (minus 8 when I started this piece), it feels that much grimmer; food, after Japan, is another source of lamentation, rather than expectation; customer service is at times hand-wringingly awful—let's not even mention call centres; God alone knows how long I'll have to hang on the phone, then wait 8-9 days, for a non-urgent GP appointment, always assuming they haven't delisted me in the meantime. Petrol pric...